Daylight saving time changes in Minnesota, United States

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

Best Time to Call Minnesota

Business hours in Minnesota (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 Minnesota, United States

About Time in Minnesota

When the Twin Cities Stopped Being Twins

For two weeks in May 1965, Minneapolis and St. Paul, cities separated by little more than the Mississippi River, ran on different clocks. St. Paul broke away from Minnesota's official statewide Daylight Saving Time schedule, and the resulting mismatch produced a level of everyday confusion that became a genuine local legend.

The details bordered on absurd. St. Paul's fire department observed the new time, but its police department did not, because doing so would have technically violated state law. The Ramsey County Board scheduled its meetings using Standard Time, even though the very council chambers where it met had clocks set to Daylight Saving Time. At the Minneapolis Saint Paul International Airport, Northwest Airlines kept two separate clocks mounted at its front desk, one reading Minneapolis time and the other reading St. Paul time, just so staff and travelers could tell which city's schedule applied to them.

The chaos reached Washington. Congressman Don Fraser, who represented Minnesota's 5th district and later became mayor of Minneapolis himself, used the Twin Cities' embarrassing split as direct evidence in pushing federal legislation to bring uniformity to Daylight Saving Time nationwide. That effort became the Uniform Time Act of 1966, the same law that still governs how nearly every American sets their clocks today, born in part out of two neighboring Minnesota cities being unable to agree on the time for a fortnight.

How Farmers Built the Compromise That Broke

The 1965 crisis did not come out of nowhere. Minnesota's legislature in the 1950s was dominated by rural, agricultural districts that had gone unredistricted since the early 1920s, giving farming interests outsized power relative to the state's growing urban population, and farmers were fiercely opposed to Daylight Saving Time on principle.

The compromise that finally passed in 1957 tried to satisfy both sides at once. It created the shortest Daylight Saving Time season in the entire country, running only from Memorial Day to Labor Day rather than the longer stretch used elsewhere, and it let individual counties opt in or out on their own if they chose. That local discretion clause, aimed at appeasing rural lawmakers while giving urban counties like Hennepin, Ramsey, and St. Louis room to maneuver, was exactly the loophole that let St. Paul break away from Minneapolis eight years later.

Minnesota has not fully settled the question even now. A 2021 state law already on the books would move Minnesota to permanent Daylight Saving Time the moment Congress allows it, while a separate bill introduced in March 2026, House File 1944, would instead prohibit the state from observing Daylight Saving Time at all, defaulting to permanent Standard Time, unless Congress specifically authorizes states to choose advanced time year round, in which case the earlier 2021 law would simply override it. Minnesota, in other words, currently has two contradictory laws on its books, each waiting to activate depending on which direction Congress eventually moves.

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