PORTLAND, Ore. — If you're counting down the hours until the election, don't forget to add one more this weekend. Daylight saving time officially ends at 2 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 3, and Oregonians will all need to shift their clocks back one hour when they get up that morning.
For those who despair at the thought of stepping out of the office at the end of the work day only to find that it's already dark out, the change signals the start of the bad time of year. Portland's last sunset after 6 p.m. this year was Tuesday, but Sunday's clock change means the last sunset after 5 p.m. will be less than a week later on Sunday, November 3.
Sunset times in Portland this weekend will be:
- November 1: 5:56 p.m.
- November 2: 5:55 p.m.
- November 3: 4:53 p.m.
Sunsets in Portland will stay in the 4 p.m. hour until Jan. 20, 2025. The shift in time also means the sun will now rise in the 6 a.m. hour.
Sunrise times this weekend:
- November 1: 7:51 a.m.
- November 2: 7:52 a.m.
- November 3: 6:54 a.m.
The days will start getting longer again after the winter solstice on Dec. 21, although the gains might not be very noticeable for the first several weeks. Daylight saving time will begin again when the clocks spring forward one hour on March 9, 2025.
There have been discussions in recent years about doing away with the time change in Oregon, but none of them have panned out. That's in part because one of the solutions requires federal approval, but also because Washington, Oregon and California have struggled to get on the same page about the issue.
Daylight saving time is in the summer; the winter months use standard time. States are allowed to choose to stay on standard time through the summer, but they would need federal permission to keep daylight saving time in place through the winter.
Arizona and Hawaii are the currently only two states that stick with standard time; the others all change the clocks. Many have passed bills or resolutions to keep daylight saving time in place year-round, but they can't take effect without a change in federal law.
The Oregon Senate passed a bill earlier this year that would make Oregon an all-standard state, but it didn't make it out of the state House. Although even if it had, it wouldn't have led to an immediate change; the bill had a trigger clause that would only take effect if Washington and California also decided to switch to year-round standard time.
Oregon and Washington both passed bills in 2019 that would have taken the opposite approach and switched to permanent Daylight saving time, but those bills also hinged on California joining the effort so that the entire west coast could push for the federal law change together — and the movement ultimately stalled in the California legislature.
There have also been attempts to change the federal rules in recent years, with various federal lawmakers from Oregon and other states repeatedly introducing legislation that would either put the whole country on year-round daylight saving time or leave the decision fully up to individual states, but none of those efforts have been successful so far.
