Daylight saving time changes in Mississippi, United States

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

Best Time to Call Mississippi

Business hours in Mississippi (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: 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 Mississippi, United States

About Time in Mississippi

The State Every Eclipse Keeps Missing

Mississippi has sat surrounded by major solar eclipses for nearly a decade without ever once landing inside the path of totality itself. The 2017 total eclipse crossed Missouri, Tennessee, and Georgia. An annular eclipse swept through in October 2023. The 2024 total eclipse cut through Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, and half a dozen other states. Mississippi touched none of them directly.

Chris Sirola, an astronomy and physics professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, put it plainly ahead of the 2024 event: nobody in Mississippi would see a total solar eclipse that day, no matter where in the state they stood. Residents in the state's northwestern corner got the deepest partial coverage, with central Arkansas being the closest place to actually experience full totality. Sirola noted the irony directly, calling 2024 the third major solar eclipse in under eight years for the region, while Mississippi itself kept landing just outside the line each time.

The wait is a long one. According to Sirola, the next total solar eclipse actually visible from Mississippi will not arrive until 2045, meaning the state will have gone nearly three decades watching its neighbors get eclipsed on both sides without ever getting its own turn.

A Law Passed Almost Unanimously, Waiting on Washington

When Mississippi lawmakers took up permanent Daylight Saving Time in 2021, the vote was about as lopsided as legislation gets. House Bill 1062 passed the Mississippi House 116 to 1 on February 10, cleared the Senate 51 to 0 on March 10, and was signed into law on March 17, 2021.

The law does nothing on its own. It is written to activate only if Congress amends the federal Uniform Time Act to let states adopt Daylight Saving Time permanently, something that still has not happened. Mississippi's own U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith joined Florida Senator Marco Rubio that same month to co-sponsor the federal Sunshine Protection Act, explicitly citing benefits for the state's agricultural sector as a reason to push the change at the national level.

Five years later, lawmakers tried to simply update the law's effective date to July 1, 2026, through a new bill, House Bill 279, using identical language to the original. That update itself died in committee on February 3, 2026. Mississippi's original 2021 law remains on the books exactly as written, still waiting on the same federal action it was waiting on the day it passed.

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