Daylight saving time changes in Wisconsin, United States

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

Best Time to Call Wisconsin

Business hours in Wisconsin (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 Wisconsin, United States

About Time in Wisconsin

Direct Democracy and the Clock

Wisconsin is one of the few states where daylight saving time was not simply legislated into existence but decided directly by voters at the ballot box, and it took two tries. The state legislature had already passed a daylight saving law in 1923, but opposition proved durable: for decades, lawmakers and rural interests fought to repeal it and its successors, including a 1931 measure that threatened violators operating outside Central Standard Time with fines and up to 30 days in jail. A newspaper in Hurley, Wisconsin remarked in the 1920s that "tampering with clocks has ceased to be a municipal pastime," reflecting how contentious the issue had become between urban business interests in Madison and Milwaukee, who wanted the extra evening daylight, and rural areas that did not.

The dispute was finally put to Wisconsin voters directly. A statewide referendum in April 1947 asked whether the state should adopt daylight saving time, and it failed, with roughly 379,740 votes against and 313,091 in favor. Ten years later, the state legislature tried again, passing a 1957 act that created section 175.095 of the Wisconsin statutes and put the question back on the spring election ballot: "Shall section 175.095 (2) of the statutes, which proposes a statewide daylight saving time of one hour per day from the last Sunday in April to the last Sunday in September in each year, be law." This time it passed, with 54.63 percent of voters in favor, formally establishing daylight saving time as state law beginning in April 1957. The practice has continued in Wisconsin ever since, though not without periodic challenges. Two lawmakers made an unsuccessful attempt to eliminate it in 2017, and in 2025 a bipartisan bill to end daylight saving time in Wisconsin, introduced by Representative Nate Gustafson, was referred to committee without advancing, the first attempt to eliminate the practice at the state level in decades.

Yerkes Observatory and the Birthplace of Modern Astrophysics

Williams Bay, Wisconsin, a small community on the shore of Geneva Lake, is home to the Yerkes Observatory, which still houses the largest refracting telescope ever built for astronomical research. Constructed for the University of Chicago and dedicated in 1897, the telescope uses two 40-inch lenses, ground from crown and flint glass manufactured in Paris, mounted at the end of a 60-foot tube. The lenses alone weigh roughly 500 pounds and give the instrument a 62-foot focal length. The observatory was funded by Chicago streetcar magnate Charles Yerkes and its construction was directed by astrophysicist George Ellery Hale, and it was completed at a moment when refracting telescopes, which use lenses rather than mirrors to gather light, were reaching the practical limits of the technology; within a decade, the Yerkes instrument had already been surpassed in raw light-gathering power by newer reflecting telescopes elsewhere, making it effectively the last and largest refractor ever built for serious research use.

Despite being surpassed in scale almost immediately, Yerkes became one of the most scientifically productive observatories of the twentieth century and is often called the birthplace of modern astrophysics. Edwin Hubble, who later established that the universe is expanding, did his graduate work there, and Albert Einstein was known to have specifically sought it out as one of only two American sites he insisted on visiting. Astronomer Frank Schlesinger developed techniques there for measuring stellar distances by photographing the same stars at six-month intervals, work that later informed large-scale sky-mapping projects. The observatory's dome floor is itself an engineering curiosity connected to timekeeping instruments of a different sort: at 75 feet across, it is one of the largest elevators in the world, rising 23 feet so that astronomers can reach the eyepiece of the massive telescope as it is manually swung toward whatever point of light they are tracking. The University of Chicago closed the observatory to the public in 2018, but ownership was transferred to the nonprofit Yerkes Future Foundation, which has since worked to restore and reopen the 19th-century structure.

The World's Tallest Grandfather Clock

The small Lake Michigan port town of Kewaunee, Wisconsin is home to the World's Tallest Grandfather Clock, a fully functional, nearly 36-foot Colonial-style redwood timepiece built in 1976 by Svoboda Industries, a local custom woodworking company, as a gift to the city for the U.S. Bicentennial. Constructed by Jake Schlies and his son Rodney, the clock has three separate faces representing morning, noon, and night, along with genuine clockwork mechanisms, a motor, and working chimes that sound on the quarter, half, and full hour. At just under 36 feet, it stands roughly six times the height of a typical longcase clock, which are traditionally only six to eight feet tall.

The clock has had a mobile existence for a roadside monument of its size. After its initial installation, it was moved in 1984 to a shop north of town called Top of the Hill Shops, where it stood for three decades. When that business closed, the property was sold and repurposed as an evidence storage facility for the local police department, who, understandably, did not want sightseers gathering outside a secure facility to photograph a giant clock, and the timepiece's power was shut off. In July 2013, the city disassembled the clock entirely and moved it to a more visible spot in downtown Kewaunee, near the trailhead of the Ahnapee State Trail. Restoring its delicate mechanisms took nearly a year, and the clock resumed keeping time on July 30, 2015, with a formal dedication ceremony held that summer. It remains a functioning public timepiece today, chiming for both residents and visitors passing through Kewaunee County.

Frequently Asked Questions