Daylight saving time changes in Maryland, United States

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

Best Time to Call Maryland

Business hours in Maryland (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 Maryland, United States

About Time in Maryland

Where America's Official Time Actually Lived

For roughly three and a half decades, the United States' official time signal was not broadcast from Washington or from any famous observatory, but from a series of quiet sites across suburban Maryland. Radio station WWV, the government's time and frequency broadcast, moved from Washington to College Park, Maryland in January 1931, then to a Department of Agriculture site near Beltsville in December 1932, and finally to Greenbelt in January 1943, where it stayed until relocating to Fort Collins, Colorado in December 1966.

Maryland's stretch as home to WWV was not a quiet one. Between 1955 and 1958, the Greenbelt station played a direct role in helping define the atomic second itself, working jointly with the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington and the National Physical Laboratory in the United Kingdom on the research that eventually redefined how a second is measured.

The transmitter left for Colorado in 1966, but Maryland never fully lost its claim to the country's timekeeping. The National Institute of Standards and Technology still bases its Time and Frequency Division, the group responsible for maintaining and disseminating the nation's official civilian time standard, at its Physical Measurement Laboratory in Gaithersburg today.

A State That Keeps Trying, and a Delegation Divided

Maryland has attempted its own permanent Daylight Saving Time law more than once without ever quite finishing the job. In 2020, Delegate Brian Crosby of St. Mary's County sponsored House Bill 1610, which passed the Maryland House ahead of that year's spring clock change, but the effort did not become law that session. Further attempts stalled again in 2021, leaving Maryland, unlike neighboring Delaware, without its own trigger law on the books even as the idea kept resurfacing in Annapolis.

The debate moved to Washington on July 14, 2026, when the U.S. House passed the federal Sunshine Protection Act by a bipartisan 308 to 117 vote. Maryland's own eight member congressional delegation split exactly down the middle, four in favor and four opposed, and the divide cut across party lines in both directions rather than following a clean partisan pattern. Representatives Sarah Elfreth, April McClain Delaney, Kweisi Mfume, and Johnny Olszewski Jr. voted for the bill, while Andy Harris, Steny Hoyer, Glenn Ivey, and Jamie Raskin voted against it, leaving Maryland's own delegation as evenly divided as the debate itself has been across the state for years.

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