Daylight saving time in Arizona, United States

Arizona has 1 listed IANA time zones. None of them observe daylight saving time in 2026. The UTC offset remains stable throughout the year.

Best Time to Call Arizona

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

• Sao Paulo: 1:00 PM - 9:00 PM ( Partial overlap)
• Frankfurt: 6:00 PM - 2:00 AM (next day) ( Partial overlap)
• Johannesburg: 6:00 PM - 2:00 AM (next day) ( Partial overlap)
• Singapore: 12:00 AM (next day) - 8:00 AM (next day) ( Outside normal hours)
• Hong Kong: 12:00 AM (next day) - 8:00 AM (next day) ( Outside normal hours)
• Istanbul: 7:00 PM - 3:00 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 Arizona, United States

About Time in Arizona

The Experiment That Failed in One Summer

Arizona is one of only two states that does not observe daylight saving time, and the reason traces back to a single, short lived experiment. The Uniform Time Act of 1966 standardized the nation's approach to seasonal clock changes but allowed individual states to opt out entirely. Arizona chose not to opt out at first, adopting daylight saving time from April through October of 1967. The result was immediate and unpopular. In most of the country, shifting an hour of daylight into the evening was thought to reduce energy use for heating and lighting, but in Arizona's desert climate the effect ran in the opposite direction: pushing sunset an hour later simply meant air conditioners had to keep running through an additional hour of afternoon heat, and Arizonans paid for it in higher electric bills.

Farmers gained nothing from the extra evening light, parents objected to their children walking home from school in more intense late day sun, and the backlash was strong enough that the state legislature reversed course the following year. Arizona has remained on Mountain Standard Time year round ever since 1968, alongside Hawaii, meaning that for roughly four months of every year, while the rest of the Mountain time zone springs forward, Arizona effectively falls into alignment with Pacific time instead, only to fall back out of step again each autumn when its neighbors return to standard time.

A Patchwork Within a Patchwork

Arizona's decision to skip daylight saving time is not quite absolute, and the exception creates one of the most confusing time boundaries in the country. The Navajo Nation, whose reservation spans parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, made the opposite choice: in 1967, the Navajo Tribal Council passed a resolution to follow the federal government's lead and observe daylight saving time uniformly across all three states, reasoning that a single shared clock would avoid confusion for a nation whose land crosses state lines and whose federal, medical, and school schedules needed to stay coordinated. As a result, the Arizona portion of the Navajo Nation is the only part of the state that changes its clocks each spring and fall, briefly running an hour ahead of every other community in Arizona for about eight months of the year.

The situation grows stranger still around the Hopi Reservation, which sits entirely surrounded by Navajo land yet keeps Arizona's standard, year round time rather than the Navajo Nation's seasonal schedule. A stretch of highway near Tuba City functions as a de facto boundary between two different clocks, and a small Navajo held pocket even sits within the southern end of Hopi land, meaning a traveler covering roughly 160 miles through the region could cross between two time zones several times over the course of a single drive, entirely within one American state.

The Mountaintop With the Most Telescopes on Earth

Rising from the Sonoran Desert southwest of Tucson, Kitt Peak is home to the largest collection of optical telescopes anywhere in the world, a title it has held since shortly after its founding. In October 1958, following a three year survey of more than 150 candidate sites across the American Southwest, the newly formed Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy signed a perpetual lease with the Tohono O'odham Nation, then known as the Papago Tribe, for 200 acres atop the mountain the Tohono O'odham call Iolkam Du'ag, an agreement that remains valid for as long as the land continues to be used for scientific research.

Today more than twenty telescopes, including two radio telescopes, sit across the mountaintop, among them the Nicholas U. Mayall 4 meter telescope, which was the second largest telescope in the world when it was completed in 1973 and was used in 1976 to help confirm the presence of methane ice on Pluto. For decades the mountain also hosted the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope, the largest solar telescope on Earth and the largest unobstructed reflector, meaning light reached its mirror without first passing a secondary mirror in the way, before it was decommissioned in 2017 and later converted into a public astronomy education center. Kitt Peak's skies remain among the clearest and most stable available to American astronomers, a reputation built directly on the desert conditions that once made Arizona's own daylight saving experiment such an uncomfortable one.

Frequently Asked Questions