Europe reinstates daylight‑saving time shift through 2031

The European Commission intends to publish a report on the matter this year.

Daylight‑saving time will begin in the Canary Islands in the early hours of Saturday‑to‑Sunday, when clocks jump from 01:00 to 02:00. The shift, questioned for years, has now been automatically renewed by the European Commission until 2031.

This renewal does not prevent a community agreement from altering the schedule, but while awaiting further decisions, the Official Journal of the European Union (OJ EU) published a communication on 18 March fixing the summer‑time dates for the next five years, always using the last Sunday of March as the reference point.

“2026 was just the right moment (to review it) because the current five‑year period ends then. Still, this automatic renewal does not mean that, if a European decision to end the time change is taken, it could later be revoked,” explained Ariadna Güell, deputy director of the Time Use Initiative (TUI), to EFE.

Daylight‑saving time is a practice inherited from the 1970s oil crisis, originally aimed at saving energy by aligning working hours with daylight.

TUI and the International Alliance for Natural Time (IANT) keep a European citizen initiative open to end the clock change, proclaiming: “Enough! We want to recover our natural schedule, based on our geographic time zone!”

The Spanish government supports ending the seasonal clock change. President Pedro Sánchez said in October, when the switch to winter time occurred, that he saw no sense in it and that science indicates “it no longer yields energy savings and disrupts biological rhythms.”