Daylight saving time changes in Maine, United States

Maine uses the IANA time zone identifier America/New_York. The current local offset is UTC-4 / EDT.

Best Time to Call Maine

Business hours in Maine (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: 1:00 AM (next day) - 9:00 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 Maine, United States

About Time in Maine

The Mayor Who Fought the Clock and Lost

When the rest of the country adopted Standard Time on November 18, 1883, the city of Bangor simply refused. Mayor Frederick A. Cummings, a Democrat who believed clock time should bow to solar time rather than the other way around, vetoed the city council resolution that would have brought Bangor into line with its neighbors.

Cummings did not stop there. When the council tried again on January 1, 1884, he vetoed it a second time, writing that "it is one of the immutable laws of God that the hours of noon, sunrise and sunset should occur at different periods of the day at different localities on the Earth's surface," and that no municipal regulation or railroad law had the power to change it. He reportedly threatened to have anyone who altered Bangor's four public clocks arrested, though two of those clocks, both in churches, were quietly switched to Eastern Standard Time anyway in defiance of the mayor. For more than a year, Bangor ran roughly 25 minutes ahead of the rest of Maine, and a Rockland newspaper mocked Cummings' stubborn stand with a jab about his party's drinking habits.

Bangor residents were asked to weigh in directly, and a March 1884 referendum favored keeping local solar time by a lopsided 6 to 1 margin. Cummings himself was up for reelection that same month, and lost to Republican challenger Samuel Humphrey, with the New York Times noting at the time that his time zone stance had become genuinely controversial. Bangor kept its dual public clocks, one on railroad time and one on municipal time, for years afterward, until the Maine Legislature finally forced the entire state onto uniform Eastern Standard Time in 1887.

The State Where Solar Noon Comes Before Noon

Maine sits at the extreme eastern edge of the Eastern Time Zone, and the consequences are measurable down to the minute. At West Quoddy Head Light, the easternmost point in the entire contiguous United States, solar noon at the March equinox falls at roughly 11:35 in the morning, nearly 25 minutes ahead of the clock. Even in the state's southwestern corner near Kittery, solar noon still arrives around 11:50, always a bit early relative to the official time everyone actually uses.

The practical effect shows up most sharply in December. In far northeastern Maine, sunset can arrive as early as 3:42 in the afternoon during the darkest weeks of the year, a consequence not of latitude but of simply sitting so far east within a time zone anchored to a meridian much further west.

A Century Later, the Same Argument Returns

Bangor's 19th century fight over the clock never really ended, it just changed shape. In 2005, the Maine Legislature considered switching the entire state permanently to Atlantic Standard Time, the same zone used across the border in New Brunswick, specifically to escape the same early darkness that had bothered Mayor Cummings's constituents over a century earlier. That bill did not pass.

The idea kept resurfacing. In 2017, Representative Donna Bailey sponsored a new version, and it passed the Maine House by an 85 to 59 vote, though it still needed Senate approval and, crucially, matching action in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts before it could take effect. Subsequent sessions saw the same proposal reintroduced repeatedly under different bill numbers. A 2024 survey of 220 Maine business and community leaders, commissioned by the state legislature through the University of Maine, found 72 percent wanted to end the twice yearly clock change entirely, with three out of every four of those respondents favoring permanent Daylight Saving Time over permanent Standard Time, almost the exact opposite of the position Mayor Cummings had once fought so hard, and so unsuccessfully, to defend.

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