Daylight saving time changes in Alaska, United States

Alaska has 2 listed IANA time zones. 2 observe daylight saving time changes in 2026.

Best Time to Call Alaska

Business hours in Alaska (9 AM-5 PM local time) fall at these local times elsewhere:

• Sao Paulo: 2:00 PM - 10:00 PM ( Partial overlap)
• Frankfurt: 7:00 PM - 3:00 AM (next day) ( Partial overlap)
• Johannesburg: 7:00 PM - 3:00 AM (next day) ( Partial overlap)
• Singapore: 1:00 AM (next day) - 9:00 AM (next day) ( Outside normal hours)
• Hong Kong: 1:00 AM (next day) - 9:00 AM (next day) ( Outside normal hours)
• Istanbul: 8:00 PM - 4:00 AM (next day) ( Partial overlap)
• Auckland: 5:00 AM (next day) - 1:00 PM (next day) ( Outside normal hours)

Times shown reflect current UTC offsets and may shift by up to an hour around daylight saving transitions.

Current Time in Cities of Alaska, United States

About Time in Alaska

Four Clocks Become Two

For most of the twentieth century, Alaska was split across four separate time zones, a patchwork that reflected the state's enormous east to west span, roughly equal to the distance between Florida and California. A traveler flying from the southeastern panhandle to the far western Aleutian Islands would have reset a wristwatch three separate times, moving through Pacific, Yukon, Alaska-Hawaii, and Bering time along the way, a genuine headache for banks, broadcasters, and state government trying to coordinate business across the distances involved.

The four zones collapsed into two on October 30, 1983, when officials moved roughly 90 percent of the state onto a single Alaska Standard Time, absorbing the old Yukon and Alaska-Hawaii zones together while far western communities such as Nome set their clocks forward to join them, and most of the Aleutian Islands settled into what is now called Hawaii-Aleutian time. Governor Bill Sheffield's administration pushed the change partly as a practical matter of commerce, but also, by local accounts, as a way to ease the case for relocating the state capital away from Juneau, since unifying the clocks made the existing seat of government feel less remote from Anchorage and the interior. The consolidation left a lasting quirk: because the new zone runs on the seasonal clock that once suited communities near Anchorage, solar noon in far western towns like Nome now falls in the mid-afternoon during daylight saving time, a mismatch between the sun and the clock that Alaskans sometimes only half-jokingly call double daylight saving time.

Four Minutes and Thirty-Eight Seconds

At 5:36 p.m. local time on Good Friday, March 27, 1964, the ground beneath south-central Alaska began to shake in what remains the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in North American history. The magnitude 9.2 megathrust event, centered in Prince William Sound, lasted four minutes and thirty-eight seconds, an extraordinary duration for an earthquake that gave the ground time to liquefy, buildings time to collapse, and tsunamis time to begin forming before the shaking had even stopped. It remains the second most powerful earthquake ever measured anywhere on Earth by modern seismograph, behind only a 1960 event in South America.

The earthquake and the tsunamis it triggered killed roughly 131 to 139 people, including 23 of the 68 residents of the small village of Chenega, which was struck by a wave estimated at 27 feet. Waves generated by the quake caused additional deaths and damage as far away as Oregon and California, and were recorded as far as Hawaii and Japan. Fifty years later, the United States Senate marked the anniversary with a formal resolution honoring the victims and noting the precise time the earthquake struck, a small but telling sign of how firmly that single moment, 5:36 on a holiday evening, has lodged itself into Alaska's collective memory.

Sixty-Five Days Without a Sunrise

Utqiagvik, the northernmost city in the United States, sits far enough above the Arctic Circle that its relationship with the sun bears little resemblance to anywhere else in the country. Each November, typically around the 18th or 19th, the sun sets over the town and does not rise again for roughly 65 days, a stretch of continuous darkness known as polar night that lasts until late January. During that period, full darkness is not constant; the sky can still show hints of blue or violet twilight around midday, but true daylight never fully returns until the sun finally climbs back above the horizon.

The pattern reverses dramatically each summer. When the sun rises again in mid-May, it stays above the horizon continuously for roughly 80 days, not setting again until early August, a period residents call the midnight sun. Because Utqiagvik sits more than 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle itself, both extremes last considerably longer there than in towns closer to the circle's edge, and the same long winter darkness that defines the town's cold, dry climate also creates especially favorable conditions for viewing the aurora borealis on the clear nights in between.

Frequently Asked Questions