When does daylight saving time end in Illinois? – NBC Chicago

There are still several weeks left in summer, but fall isn’t too far away.

The Chicago area is poised to get a taste of cooler temperatures this weekend, and before you know it, the fall season and shorter days will be here.

Along with that, it will soon be time to “fall back.”

Like clockwork, we’ll lose an hour of sunshine, though we’ll gain an extra hour of rest. Under federal law, daylight saving time runs through the first Sunday of November and typically begins on the second Sunday in March in most of the United States.

This year, daylight saving time will end on Sunday, Nov. 2. It began on Sunday, March 9, when clocks “sprung forward” an hour.

However, things weren’t always this way.

Here’s a breakdown of what daylight saving time is, why it was created, what states observe it and more.

Why was daylight saving time created?

Clocks used to spring ahead on the first Sunday in April and remained that way until the final Sunday in October, but a change was put in place in part to allow children to trick-or-treat in more daylight.

In the United States, daylight saving time lasts for a total of 34 weeks, running from early-to-mid March to the beginning of November in states that observe it.

Some people like to credit Benjamin Franklin as the inventor of daylight saving time when he wrote in a 1784 essay about saving candles and saying, “Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” But that was meant more as satire than a serious consideration.

Germany was the first to adopt daylight saving time on May 1, 1916, during World War I as a way to conserve fuel. The rest of Europe followed soon after.

The United States didn’t adopt daylight saving time until March 19, 1918, with the intention of adding additional daylight hours also as a way to help save energy costs during World War I, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. However, it was unpopular and abolished after World War I.

On Feb. 9, 1942, Franklin Roosevelt instituted a year-round daylight saving time, which he called “wartime.” The law, was again meant to instate daylight saving time to “help conserve fuel and promote national security defense,” the department said. This lasted until Sept. 30, 1945.

Daylight saving time didn’t become standard in the US until the passage of the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which mandated standard time across the country within established time zones. It stated that clocks would advance one hour at 2 a.m. on the last Sunday in April and turn back one hour at 2 a.m. on the last Sunday in October.

States could still exempt themselves from daylight saving time, as long as the entire state did so. In the 1970s, due to the 1973 oil embargo, Congress enacted a trial period of year-round daylight saving time from January 1974 to April 1975 in order to conserve energy.

But portions of the law have been changed a few times since, the department said. The policy as it stands today, implemented by former President George W. Bush in 2005, extended daylight saving time by a few weeks, starting on the second Sunday in March, and ending on the first Sunday in November.

Which states don’t observe daylight saving time?

Nearly every U.S. state observes daylight saving time, with the exceptions of Arizona (although some Native American tribes do observe DST in their territories) and Hawaii. U.S. territories, including Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands, do not observe daylight saving time.

Could President Trump end daylight saving time?

In a December 2024 post on TruthSocial, Trump, who was President-elect at the time, wrote, “The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t! Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.”

While Trump’s position seemed to garner an endorsement from advisers Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the president-elect’s son, Donald Trump Jr., appeared to back the opposite position.

The younger Trump’s position is consistent with a bill the Senate passed in 2022 that would have made daylight savings time permanent beginning the following year.

The Trump campaign has not responded to questions from NBC News clarifying whether Trump seeks to eliminate daylight savings time or make it permanent.