The common version of this story isn’t quite right. Iceland didn’t reject daylight saving time from the start and stick to its guns for a century. It adopted the practice in 1917, kept switching its clocks twice a year for the next fifty years, and then, in 1968, made a much stranger decision than simply abolishing it: Iceland kept the summer setting permanently and threw out winter time altogether. Clocks there haven’t moved since, and the argument over whether that was the right call has never fully gone away.
Fifty Years of Changing the Clocks
Iceland standardized its national time in 1908, fixing Reykjavik to Greenwich Mean Time after decades of running on a local solar time roughly an hour and a half behind it. Daylight saving time itself began as a wartime fuel-saving measure in 1916, first adopted in Germany, and the idea reached Iceland the following year. From 1917 to 1967, the country ran a genuine seasonal system: winter clocks were set to Icelandic Standard Time, one hour behind GMT, and each summer the country advanced its clocks forward to match GMT exactly. Fifty years of switching, twice a year, every year, before anyone seriously questioned whether it was worth continuing.
The 1968 Law That Kept Summer Forever
What ended in 1968 wasn’t daylight saving time itself so much as the switching. University of Iceland astronomer Þorsteinn Sæmundsson brought a proposal to the Althing, the national parliament, arguing that the twice-yearly change confused international flight schedules, forced every clock in the country to be reset twice a year for no real benefit, and disrupted sleep patterns, especially in infants. Crucially, Sæmundsson wasn’t arguing against the advanced summer time itself, only against switching back to the darker winter setting. The Althing agreed, and on April 5, 1968, passed a law fixing the country on GMT year-round, taking effect two days later. Winter time was retired for good. For roughly a quarter century afterward, almost nobody in Iceland seriously argued for bringing it back.
Iceland didn’t abolish daylight saving time. It just decided summer had won, and stopped pretending winter ever needed a rematch. worldtimedata
Why the Extra Hour Barely Matters at This Latitude
The deeper argument against switching has always been about scale. Iceland sits between roughly 63 and 66 degrees north, brushing the Arctic Circle, where the seasonal swing in daylight dwarfs anything a one-hour clock change could meaningfully offset. Around the summer solstice, Reykjavik gets close to 21 hours of daylight, with the sky never fully darkening and the sun dipping only briefly below the horizon before rising again. Sunrise and sunset shift dramatically through the year at any latitude, but in Iceland the swing is extreme enough that winter days shrink to roughly four or five usable hours, with the sun not clearing the horizon until around 11:20 in the morning and setting again by mid-afternoon. Against a seasonal swing of that size, moving the clock by a single hour changes almost nothing about how dark or light a given season actually feels.
A Clock Already Running Ahead of the Sun
Iceland’s choice of GMT was never really about matching the sun in the first place. Reykjavik sits at roughly 21 to 22 degrees west longitude, a position that corresponds, by pure solar geography, to somewhere close to UTC−1:24. Solar noon rarely lines up exactly with clock noon anywhere, and in Iceland’s case the mismatch is unusually large: the sun reaches its highest point in Reykjavik close to 1:30 in the afternoon rather than 12:00, because the country’s clocks run roughly ninety minutes ahead of where the sun actually says it should be. That tradeoff was deliberate. Aligning with GMT kept Iceland synchronized with the trading, telegraph, and eventually telephone schedules of the UK and continental Europe, its primary economic partners through most of the twentieth century, at the cost of a clock that was never going to track the sun very closely to begin with.
The Debate Iceland Almost Reopened
The 1968 law didn’t settle the question as firmly as it looked. Since 1994, members of the Althing have repeatedly proposed reintroducing a seasonal change, and for two and a half decades, every one of those proposals quietly failed. Then, in January 2018, a workgroup assembled under Iceland’s Ministry of Health concluded that staying on GMT year-round was genuinely affecting public health, contributing to insufficient sleep and a biological clock knocked out of step with solar time, and recommended shifting permanently to UTC−1, effectively reinstating the old winter time as the new year-round standard.
Public opinion leaned the same way. A government consultation gathered roughly 1,600 responses, and a December 2019 poll by the national broadcaster RÚV found 56 percent in favor of setting the clocks back permanently. It wasn’t enough. In September 2020, after more than two years of review, the government formally announced it would keep GMT exactly as it was. The deciding argument came down to simple daylight accounting: officials calculated that shifting the clocks back would cut usable daylight hours between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m. by roughly 13 percent over the course of a year, likely reducing outdoor activity and exercise enough to outweigh the sleep benefits the original report had flagged. Support for the change has cooled since; a 2025 poll found only 41 percent still in favor, with support and opposition now separated by single digits.
The Odd Company Iceland Keeps
Most of Europe still runs the twice-yearly switch Iceland walked away from, including countries at comparably high latitudes. Norway and Finland, both far enough north to share Iceland’s extreme seasonal daylight swings, still shift their clocks every spring and autumn rather than settling on one fixed offset the way Iceland has. The United Kingdom moves off GMT every summer too, despite sitting at a broadly comparable latitude to Iceland, which leaves the two countries on the same clock for exactly half the year and an hour apart for the other half, an odd rhythm given that the UK’s trading relationship was part of the reason Iceland chose GMT in the first place. Iceland remains one of the only countries in Europe to sit permanently on a fixed offset with no seasonal adjustment at all, not because the underlying question was ever fully resolved, but because a two-year government review in 2020 looked at it seriously, found majority public support for changing it, and still chose to leave 1968’s decision standing.
