Daylight saving time changes in Iowa, United States

Iowa uses the IANA time zone identifier America/Chicago. The current local offset is UTC-5 / CDT.

Best Time to Call Iowa

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

• Sao Paulo: 11:00 AM - 7:00 PM ( Convenient)
• Frankfurt: 4:00 PM - 12:00 AM (next day) ( Partial overlap)
• Johannesburg: 4:00 PM - 12:00 AM (next day) ( Partial overlap)
• Singapore: 10:00 PM - 6:00 AM (next day) ( Outside normal hours)
• Hong Kong: 10:00 PM - 6:00 AM (next day) ( Outside normal hours)
• Istanbul: 5:00 PM - 1:00 AM (next day) ( Partial overlap)
• Auckland: 3:00 AM (next day) - 11:00 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 Iowa, United States

About Time in Iowa

The Town Where City Hall and the School Ran on Different Clocks

Before the federal government finally imposed order in 1966, Iowa's relationship with Daylight Saving Time descended into genuine chaos. By 1962, the state's own communities had settled on 23 different combinations of start and end dates for the seasonal clock change, each town effectively free to pick its own version of when summer time began and ended.

Springville, in Linn County, offers the starkest example of just how far this went. The town's city government switched to Central Standard Time while the local schools and merchants stayed on Daylight Saving Time, meaning residents in the same small town were, quite literally, living under two different official clocks depending on whether they walked into the municipal building or the schoolhouse next door. A Des Moines Register headline on September 6, 1964 summed up the general mood bluntly: "Daylight time spreads nightmare of chaos across Iowa."

The confusion only ended when Congress passed the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which finally imposed a single standardized schedule nationwide, while still allowing any state, as a whole, to opt out entirely if it chose, an option only Arizona and Hawaii would eventually take.

Farmers Against the Clock

Iowa's agricultural community fought hardest against the earlier version of forced permanent Daylight Saving Time, the World War II era policy known as War Time, which locked the entire country onto summer clocks continuously from February 1942 until September 1945.

The Cedar County Farm Bureau did not mince words about the policy's effect on farm work, telling The Gazette in 1943 that War Time was "a hindrance rather than a benefit" to meeting wartime production goals, since farm schedules were built around the sun and livestock rather than an artificially shifted clock. The Iowa Legislature took the farmers' side twice, passing resolutions asking Congress to abandon the wartime clock policy altogether. Both resolutions were ignored, and War Time continued on schedule until the war itself ended.

The debate has never fully gone away. In 2022, the Iowa House passed House File 2331 by a strong 82 to 13 vote, aiming once again to establish year round Daylight Saving Time contingent on congressional approval, following a similar 2020 attempt that never made it out of committee. Like every comparable law in other states, it remains unable to take effect until Congress itself changes the underlying federal rule Iowa's own farmers once tried to overturn eighty years earlier.

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