Contributed by L. Todd Perry, Chief Executive Officer, PPM Consultants
Twice each year, most Americans change every clock in the house, adjust sleep schedules, arrive at work feeling slightly off, and spend several days trying to remember whether they gained an hour or lost one.
It has become such a familiar routine that we rarely stop to ask whether it still makes sense.
Congress is asking that question again. A proposal to make daylight saving time permanent is expected to receive consideration by the United States House of Representatives. The effort has attracted bipartisan support and reflects growing public frustration with changing the clocks every spring and fall.
The debate is often presented as a choice between more daylight and less daylight. That is not really the issue. Changing the clock does not create another hour of sunshine. It simply moves available daylight from the morning to the evening.
The more important question is where that daylight provides the greatest value and whether Americans should continue disrupting their schedules twice every year.
For many working professionals and families, the answer is becoming clearer. We should stop changing the clocks and make daylight saving time permanent.
How Did We Get Here?
Benjamin Franklin is often credited with inventing daylight-saving time, but that is not quite accurate. In 1784, while serving as an American diplomat in France, Franklin wrote a humorous letter suggesting that Parisians could save money on candles by waking earlier. He did not propose changing the clocks.
The first serious proposals came more than a century later. New Zealand entomologist George Hudson proposed shifting time to create more evening daylight for collecting insects. British builder William Willett later promoted a similar idea through a pamphlet titled The Waste of Daylight.
Daylight saving time became public policy during World War I. Germany and Austria Hungary adopted it in 1916 as a way to conserve coal. The United States followed in 1918, but the policy was unpopular and was repealed after the war.
The United States used year-round daylight-saving time again during World War II under what was called War Time. After the war, states and local governments established their own rules, creating confusion for transportation, broadcasting, and interstate commerce.
Congress addressed that confusion through the Uniform Time Act of 1966. The law standardized the dates for daylight saving time while allowing states to opt out. Hawaii and most of Arizona do not observe it today.
Congress temporarily adopted year-round daylight-saving time during the 1970s energy crisis. The experiment was abandoned after public concern about children traveling to school in dark winter mornings. In 2007, the United States expanded the daylight-saving period to its current schedule, beginning in March and ending in November.
The issue returned to national attention in 2022, when the Senate unanimously passed the Sunshine Protection Act. The House did not take up the bill before that congressional session ended. The proposal has now returned, and the House Energy and Commerce Committee advanced a permanent daylight-saving provision in 2026.
The Best Argument Is Consistency
There are legitimate disagreements about whether permanent daylight-saving time or permanent standard time is better. Sleep experts often prefer standard time because morning light helps regulate the body’s natural sleep and waking rhythm.
That concern deserves serious attention.
But there is broad agreement on one point: changing the clocks twice a year is disruptive.
Research has associated the springtime change with short term increases in sleep loss, traffic crashes, workplace mistakes, and some cardiovascular events. The problem is not simply losing sixty minutes on one Sunday. The sudden shift disrupts routines for workers, students, drivers, families, and businesses.
Professional life already requires people to manage travel, technology, deadlines, school schedules, meetings across time zones, and increasingly flexible work arrangements. There is little benefit in adding a government mandated schedule disruption twice a year.
Whichever permanent time system the country ultimately selects, consistency would be an improvement.
Why Evening Daylight Matters
The argument for permanent daylight-saving time is practical. Most Americans are awake, traveling, shopping, exercising, attending school activities, and spending time with family during the late afternoon and early evening.
Placing more daylight during those active hours provides real value.
For working professionals, an additional hour of evening light can create more time for outdoor exercise, errands, youth sports, community events, and family activities after the workday. That matters in a country where many people spend most daylight hours indoors.
It can also benefit local businesses. Restaurants, retail stores, golf courses, recreational facilities, and tourism businesses often see increased activity when evenings remain lighter. People are more likely to stop for dinner, shop, walk, play sports, or attend an event when there is still daylight after work.
Later daylight may also improve visibility during the evening commute. Older traffic research found fewer fatal crashes during daylight saving time because an hour of light was shifted into the busier evening travel period. The benefits appeared particularly important for pedestrians.
That does not mean every community will experience the same result. Northern states would face very late winter sunrises under permanent daylight-saving time, and school schedules may need to be adjusted to avoid placing children on roads before daylight.
Those are real concerns, but they can be managed locally through school start times, transportation planning, lighting, and seasonal operating schedules. Keeping the entire country on a disruptive clock changing system is a broad solution to problems that may be better addressed at the community level.
Benefits for the Modern Workplace
Permanent daylight-saving time could also simplify business operations.
Clock changes create scheduling confusion for transportation systems, health care facilities, construction crews, technology platforms, payroll systems, and companies operating across multiple states or countries. Most systems handle the adjustment automatically, but not without errors, missed meetings, maintenance, and administrative effort.
The effect may appear small for one employee or one company. Across the national economy, repeated twice every year, it becomes unnecessary friction.
Consistency also helps companies establish safer work routines. Employees in field operations, transportation, manufacturing, environmental consulting, and construction depend on predictable schedules and alert workers. A sudden change in sleep and commuting conditions adds risk without adding productivity.
A stable time system would not solve fatigue, distracted driving, or workplace safety challenges. It would simply remove one avoidable disruption.
The Bottom Line
Daylight saving time began as a response to a different economy, a different energy system, and a different way of life.
Today, Americans work across time zones, communicate instantly, travel frequently, and organize family life around demanding professional schedules. The question is no longer whether we can continue changing the clocks. We certainly can.
The question is whether we should.
Permanent daylight-saving time would provide more usable evening light for work, recreation, commerce, family activities, and much of the daily travel that occurs after work and school. It would also eliminate the twice-yearly disruption that affects sleep, schedules, productivity, and safety.
There are reasonable arguments for permanent standard time, particularly in regions where winter mornings would remain dark for too long. Congress should take those concerns seriously.
But the current system gives us the disadvantages of both options. We disrupt our schedules twice each year while never achieving the stability that either permanent system would provide.
It is time to make a decision, lock the clock, and allow American families and businesses to move forward on a consistent schedule.
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