Daylight saving time changes in Virginia, United States

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

Best Time to Call Virginia

Business hours in Virginia (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: 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 Virginia, United States

About Time in Virginia

The Clock Jefferson Designed Around a Cannonball

In the entrance hall of Monticello hangs a clock that Thomas Jefferson designed himself, one that tells not just the hour but the day of the week, using a mechanism so large it eventually outgrew its own room. Jefferson began planning the piece in 1792 while serving as secretary of state in Philadelphia, commissioning a craftsman named Peter Spruck, an apprentice to clockmaker Robert Leslie, to build a dual faced, seven day timepiece with a striking mechanism loud enough to be heard by field workers three miles away through an attached Chinese gong. The clock has two separate faces, an interior dial in the entrance hall with hour, minute, and sweep second hands, and a simpler exterior face on the east portico with only a single hour hand, which Jefferson judged accurate enough for outdoor laborers.

The clock's power comes from two sets of eighteen pound, cannonball shaped weights that descend gradually along ropes strung through the corners of the entrance hall, passing markers on the wall that indicate the day of the week as they fall, with the whole mechanism rewound by hand each Sunday using a custom folding ladder. When the clock was finally installed at Monticello, Jefferson discovered that his entrance hall, despite standing more than eighteen feet tall, was still not tall enough for a full week's worth of falling weights; his solution was to have holes cut into the floor so the weights could continue their descent into the cellar below, which is why the marker for Saturday sits not in the entrance hall at all, but on the basement level of the house.

A Legislature Confused About Its Own Clocks

Virginia lawmakers have tried repeatedly in recent years to end the twice yearly clock change, and the debate inside the General Assembly has occasionally revealed just how confusing the underlying terminology remains even to the people voting on it. During a 2024 hearing on a bill to move Virginia toward permanent daylight saving time, the bill's own sponsor, state Senator Richard Stuart, told the committee he had no real preference between daylight time and standard time and simply wanted the twice yearly switching to stop, while a colleague on the same committee, Senator Jill Vogel, initially backed switching the bill to permanent standard time before publicly correcting herself moments later after realizing she actually preferred the later sunsets that daylight saving time provides. The committee advanced the daylight saving version of the bill on a bipartisan 10 to 4 vote.

More recent proposals have shifted toward permanent standard time instead, since federal law currently allows states to adopt standard time year round on their own but does not permit any state to adopt daylight saving time permanently without an act of Congress. A Virginia bill considered in the mid 2020s to lock in permanent Eastern Standard Time included an unusual condition of its own: it would only take effect if Maryland and Washington, D.C. adopted the same change alongside Virginia, tying the Commonwealth's clock to decisions made well outside its own borders. That measure, like earlier versions, was pushed off for further study, leaving Virginia's legislature still debating in principle what to do about a change that, in practice, requires the cooperation of neighbors and Congress alike before anything can actually happen.

Ten Days That Depend on the Calendar You Use

Ask when Jamestown was founded and the honest answer depends entirely on which calendar system is doing the counting. English colonists began building James Fort using the Julian calendar still in official use in England at the time, recording the founding date as May 4, 1607. Convert that same moment into the Gregorian calendar, the system most of Catholic Europe had already adopted and the one the English speaking world would not formally switch to until 1752, and the founding date shifts forward exactly ten days, landing on May 14, 1607, the date most commonly cited today for Jamestown's establishment.

That ten day gap exists because the Gregorian calendar, introduced in 1582 to correct a slow drift in the Julian system's approximation of the solar year, was rejected by Protestant England for a century and a half on religious and political grounds even as Catholic countries across the continent adopted it immediately. The result is that a single historical event as foundational as the first permanent English settlement in North America can be dated correctly to two different days depending on which calendar convention a historian chooses to use, a reminder that even something as basic as a fixed calendar date is itself the product of a specific, contested decision about how to measure time.

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