Daylight saving time changes in New Hampshire, United States

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

Best Time to Call New Hampshire

Business hours in New Hampshire (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 New Hampshire, United States

About Time in New Hampshire

A Century of Refusing to Follow the Railroad

New Hampshire's fight over Daylight Saving Time is genuinely old, predating almost every modern debate on the subject. In the early 20th century, the Boston and Maine Railroad, a company with real weight behind its opinion since railroads had essentially invented standard time zones to begin with, supported adopting Daylight Saving Time regionally. New Hampshire's legislature refused to go along, and the mismatch between the railroad's practice and the state's official policy produced genuine cross border confusion for travelers and businesses alike.

That same argument, joining a neighboring time zone only if Massachusetts moves first, has repeated itself for decades since. Former Representative Josh Yokela proposed a permanent shift to Atlantic Standard Time, which would in effect make Daylight Saving Time permanent, in four separate legislative sessions: 2017, 2019, 2021, and 2024. Every single version was ultimately defeated or shelved for further study. The closest any version came to real momentum was in 2021, when a related bill, HB85, passed the New Hampshire House by a lopsided 250 to 117 vote, comfortably above the two thirds threshold needed to override a veto. It still went nowhere, because the underlying condition never changed: Massachusetts, whose economy is tightly bound to staying synchronized with New York City, has never taken the matching action New Hampshire's bills all depend on.

The Lawmaker Whose Birth Certificate Disagrees With His Mother

For Representative Timothy Horrigan, a Durham Democrat who has repeatedly sponsored bills to end Daylight Saving Time in New Hampshire, the issue is not merely political, it is personal, dating back to the exact moment of his own birth.

Horrigan was born in South Bend, Indiana, on either October 3 or October 4, 1956, depending on who is asked. At that time, Indiana had no consistent statewide policy on Daylight Saving Time, and different communities and institutions in South Bend disagreed about whether to observe it. Most people on the ground were informally keeping Daylight Time, but official state policy still recognized Standard Time. Horrigan's mother always recalled the delivery room clock reading 12:30 in the morning, which under the officially recognized Standard Time made his birthday October 3, but under the unofficial local Daylight Time everyone around her was actually using, it would have been closer to 1:30 a.m. on October 4 instead.

Horrigan has carried that inherited confusion into his legislative career. His most recent effort, House Bill 1149, proposed adopting Standard Time year round for New Hampshire and was co-sponsored by Representative Joe Alexander of Goffstown, but the House Committee on Executive Departments and Administration recommended against it by a 13 to 2 vote, and it never advanced past that stage.

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