Daylight saving time changes in Indiana, United States

Indiana has 4 listed IANA time zones. 4 observe daylight saving time changes in 2026.

Best Time to Call Indiana

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

• Sao Paulo: 10:00 AM - 6:00 PM ( Convenient)
• Frankfurt: 3:00 PM - 11:00 PM ( Partial overlap)
• Johannesburg: 3:00 PM - 11:00 PM ( Partial overlap)
• Singapore: 9:00 PM - 5:00 AM (next day) ( Partial overlap)
• Hong Kong: 9:00 PM - 5:00 AM (next day) ( Partial overlap)
• Istanbul: 4:00 PM - 12:00 AM (next day) ( Partial overlap)
• Auckland: 2:00 AM (next day) - 10:00 AM (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 Indiana, United States

About Time in Indiana

The Bill That Passed by One Vote

For decades, Indiana had one of the most chaotic timekeeping records in the country, not because of which time zone it was in, but because most of the state simply refused to observe Daylight Saving Time at all while its neighbors did. Border counties like Floyd, Clark, and Harrison near Louisville quietly ignored state policy and shifted their clocks anyway, unofficially, just to stay in sync with Kentucky employers and television schedules across the Ohio River.

Ending the ambiguity required real political drama. In 2005, Indiana lawmakers voted to require the entire state to observe Daylight Saving Time starting in 2006, but the bill passed the state House by exactly one vote. One representative was widely believed to have lost his seat in the next election after switching his vote from no to yes at the decisive moment.

Even after that vote, the state kept adjusting the map for years. In January 2006, the federal Department of Transportation approved moving eight counties, Starke, Pulaski, Daviess, Dubois, Knox, Martin, Perry, and Pike, from Eastern into Central Time effective that April. Pulaski County reversed course and moved back to Eastern just eleven months later, in March 2007. Five more of the original eight, Daviess, Dubois, Knox, Martin, and Pike, followed Pulaski back to Eastern that November, leaving the state's Central Time footprint settled into the two regional clusters it still has today, one anchored toward Chicago in the northwest, the other toward Evansville and St. Louis in the southwest.

The Gymnasium Where a Free Throw Could Take an Hour

Few places in America illustrate the absurdity of mismatched time zones better than the town of College Corner, split directly down the middle by the Indiana-Ohio state line. The local elementary school, jointly operated by both states, sits with one entrance marked Indiana and the other marked Ohio, and the building's gymnasium is itself bisected by the invisible state boundary running through the middle of the basketball court.

Before Indiana adopted statewide Daylight Saving Time in 2006, that boundary had real consequences. School principal Dan Shepherd described it to CBS News Sunday Morning: a player could launch a shot from the Indiana side of the court at three in the afternoon, and by the time it dropped through the net on the Ohio side, an hour had technically passed. Longtime residents got used to specifying which clock they meant whenever making plans, tacking on "Ohio Time" or "Slow Time," the local nickname for Indiana's unchanging clock, to avoid missed appointments and dinners.

The oddity extended well beyond the school. Locals still tell stories of a tavern that once straddled the same state line, which meant it operated under two different legal drinking ages depending on which end of the bar a patron was standing at. The joint school district still shares the same overlapping building today, water, police, and fire services pooled between the two tiny municipalities even now, long after the time difference itself was resolved.

The Clock That Still Does Not Apply to Everyone

Even Indiana's 2006 fix did not bring every resident onto the same schedule. The state is home to an estimated 63,000 Amish residents, one of the largest Amish populations of any U.S. state, and many Amish communities simply do not follow Daylight Saving Time regardless of what state law says.

For these communities, the clock change remains a matter of local custom rather than legal obligation, meaning daily routines, farm schedules, and community gatherings often continue running on what outsiders would call the "old" time long after the rest of Indiana springs forward each March, a quiet continuation of exactly the kind of local time variation the rest of the state spent decades trying to eliminate.

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