On Sunday 25 October, you get an extra hour in bed. Then Monday arrives, you finish work and it’s already dark, and the oven clock stays wrong until spring (every year we say we’ll fix it, and every year we forget).

The switch happens during the night between Saturday 24 and Sunday 25 October 2026: at 3am the hands go back to 2am. Phones and computers do the fiddly bits themselves—alarms, the oven, and the car all need adjusting manually.

Standard time stays in place until Sunday 28 March 2027, when daylight saving time kicks back in.

We make the change to save energy by making better use of summer daylight. In Italy, daylight saving time has been in place since 1916; it’s been stable since 1966, and since 1996 all of Europe has been switching on the same days, as set out by Directive 2000/84/EC. According to Terna, in 2026 the change saved around 302 million kWh—the annual consumption of 115,000 households.

Doing away with the switch has been talked about for years. In 2018, 84% of the Europeans consulted said “enough”, but the Union’s governments have never managed to agree. In Italy, a petition with 352,000 signatures took the issue to the Chamber of Deputies, but as of today there’s still no law.

In the meantime, we’ll enjoy that extra hour on Sunday morning—and a wrong oven until March.