Summer time” and “DST” redirect here.

For other uses, see Summer time (disambiguation) and DST (disambiguation).
This article is about the concept of daylight saving time. For local implementations, see Daylight saving time around the world.
World map. Europe, Russia, most of North America, parts of southern South America and southern Australia, and a few other places use DST. Most of equatorial Africa and a few other places near the equator have never used DST. The rest of the land mass is marked as formerly using DST.

Although not used by the majority of the world’s countries, daylight saving time is common in the Western world.
DST is used.
DST is no longer used.
DST has never been used.
Daylight saving time (DST) or summer time (see Terminology) is the practice of advancing clocks during the lighter months so that evenings have more daylight and mornings have less. Typically clocks are adjusted forward one hour near the start of spring and are adjusted backward in the autumn.

The modern idea of daylight saving was first proposed in 1895 by George Vernon Hudson, and it was first implemented by Germany and Austria-Hungary starting on 30 April 1916. Many countries have used it at various times since then, most consistently since the energy crises of the 1970s.

The practice has been both advocated and criticized. Adding daylight to evenings benefits retailing, sports, and other activities that exploit sunlight after working hours, but can cause problems for evening entertainment and other activities tied to the sun (such as farming) or to darkness (such as firework shows). Although an early goal of DST was to reduce evening use of incandescent lighting (formerly a primary use of electricity), modern heating and cooling usage patterns differ greatly, and research about how DST currently affects energy use is limited or contradictory.

Other problems sometimes caused by DST clock shifts are: They complicate timekeeping, and can disrupt meetings, travel, billing, record keeping, medical devices, heavy equipment, and sleep patterns. Software can often adjust computer clocks automatically, but this can be limited and error-prone, particularly when DST dates are changed.