Daylight saving time changes in Washington, United States

Washington uses the IANA time zone identifier America/Los_Angeles. The current local offset is UTC-7 / PDT.

Best Time to Call Washington

Business hours in Washington (9 AM-5 PM local time) fall at these local times elsewhere:

• Sao Paulo: 1:00 PM - 9:00 PM ( Partial overlap)
• Frankfurt: 6:00 PM - 2:00 AM (next day) ( Partial overlap)
• Johannesburg: 6:00 PM - 2:00 AM (next day) ( Partial overlap)
• Singapore: 12:00 AM (next day) - 8:00 AM (next day) ( Outside normal hours)
• Hong Kong: 12:00 AM (next day) - 8:00 AM (next day) ( Outside normal hours)
• Istanbul: 7:00 PM - 3:00 AM (next day) ( Partial overlap)
• Auckland: 4:00 AM (next day) - 12:00 PM (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 Washington, United States

About Time in Washington

A Law That Cannot Decide Which Way to Go

Washington has spent years trying to legislate its way out of the twice yearly clock change, only to keep changing its own mind about which permanent time it actually wants. In April 2019, the state legislature passed House Bill 1196 by overwhelming margins, 89 to 7 in the House and 46 to 2 in the Senate, authorizing permanent daylight saving time across the state on the condition that Congress first amend federal law to allow it. Governor Jay Inslee signed the bill, but the necessary congressional action never came, leaving the law legally inert while Washingtonians kept changing their clocks twice a year exactly as before.

By January 2024, patience had worn thin enough that state Senator Mike Padden introduced a very different bill, Senate Bill 5795, which would have moved Washington to permanent standard time instead, a switch that does not require congressional approval the way permanent daylight time does. Padden noted that the state had endured eight separate clock changes since lawmakers first approved permanent daylight saving time back in 2019 without the policy ever taking effect. That bill also failed to advance out of committee, so as of the most recent legislative sessions, Washington remains on the same seasonal schedule it has followed for decades, holding two separate, mutually exclusive laws in reserve depending on which way federal policy eventually breaks.

The Minute the Mountain Went Sideways

At 8:32 a.m. on May 18, 1980, a magnitude 5.1 earthquake shook the base of Mount St. Helens in southwestern Washington, triggering the largest landslide ever recorded as the volcano's bulging north flank slid away in seconds. Volcanologist David Johnston, stationed at an observation post just a few miles from the summit, radioed his final transmission to the United States Geological Survey base in Vancouver, Washington in five urgent words: Vancouver, Vancouver, this is it. Johnston did not survive the eruption that followed.

With the mountainside gone, the pressure that had been building inside the volcano for months released almost immediately in a sideways blast that tore across the landscape at speeds up to 670 miles per hour, sending an ash column some 60,000 feet into the sky within minutes. The eruption continued for roughly nine hours, ultimately killing 57 people, flattening over 200 square miles of forest, and reducing the mountain's summit elevation by more than 1,300 feet, all traceable back to that single, precisely recorded minute when the earthquake struck.

Fourteen Months to Build the World's First

Deep in the sagebrush of southeastern Washington, the Hanford Site's B Reactor was designed, built, and brought to criticality in barely fourteen months, an almost unimaginable pace for a piece of technology that had never existed before anywhere on Earth. Ground was broken in June 1943 under the wartime urgency of the Manhattan Project, and the DuPont Corporation, working from experimental designs that Enrico Fermi had proven only a year earlier on a converted squash court at the University of Chicago, brought the massive graphite and uranium reactor to criticality on September 26, 1944, under Fermi's own personal supervision.

Within five months, the reactor was producing plutonium in bulk, and the first shipment left Hanford for Los Alamos, New Mexico the following February, plutonium that was ultimately used both in the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert and in the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki. After its wartime mission was complete, the B Reactor briefly shut down before being restarted in 1948 to produce plutonium through the tensest years of the Cold War, finally closing for good on February 12, 1968, nearly a quarter century after a design built almost entirely on unproven theory first went critical in barely more than a year.

The Bridge That Collapsed by the Minute

Few American engineering disasters have been documented with the minute by minute precision of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse of November 7, 1940. The suspension bridge, nicknamed Galloping Gertie for the rolling, wave like motion it had displayed since before it even opened that July, began twisting violently under sustained winds of more than 40 miles per hour that morning. According to the Washington State Department of Transportation's own timeline of the event, the last cars crossed the span just before 10 a.m., after which officials closed the bridge entirely due to the severity of its twisting motion; by shortly after 10, engineers estimated the roadway was tilting up to 28 feet every five seconds at a 45 degree angle.

The bridge was fully cleared of onlookers by 10:15 a.m., and the first piece of structure fell into the water around 10:30. The main span finally gave way completely at 11:02 a.m., and within eight more minutes, by 11:10, the collapse was over, the bulk of the bridge resting on the floor of Puget Sound. No people were killed, though a dog left behind in a car on the span did not survive, and the wreckage and film footage of the collapse went on to reshape how engineers designed every major suspension bridge built afterward.

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