KY officials introduce bill to end daylight saving time change — which happens soon
If you’re looking forward to more daylight in the evenings in Kentucky, you’re in luck. Daylight saving time is just around the corner.
Kentucky residents will “spring forward” and move their clocks ahead by one hour for the beginning of daylight saving time at 2 a.m. Sunday, March 8.
Meteorological spring began March 1, but the “official” beginning of the new season, or astronomical spring, begins Friday, March 20 with the spring equinox. Lexington has moved into a springlike weather pattern for early March, with a few days of rain showers and temperatures as high as 76 degrees in the forecast.
Central Kentucky residents have seen the days grow a bit longer since December, with sunsets as late as 7:59 p.m. by the end of March, and reaching 8:27 p.m. by late April.
But will Kentucky lawmakers put an end to the practice of changing clocks twice a year? A new bill was recently introduced in hopes of doing just that.
Daylight saving legislation in Kentucky, across US
Kentucky lawmakers have introduced several pieces of legislation over the years attempting to end clock-changing in the commonwealth, and a new one was recently introduced in the House.
House Bill 368 was introduced Jan. 14, and would exempt Kentucky from daylight saving time and introduce year-round standard time in the commonwealth effective Oct. 31, if passed.
A very similar bill, House Bill 308, was introduced in February 2025 and also aimed to exempt the state from daylight saving time, but did not advance out of committee. In a previous attempt, Kentucky lawmakers introduced a bill in the statehouse in early 2024, but it never moved past the Committee on Committees.
Some efforts against clock-changing have taken a different approach, such as House Bill 77, which would have established year-round daylight saving time if authorized by Congress. This bill was introduced in early 2023 and died after being assigned to the agriculture committee.
These bills are far from the only effort to end clock-changing, and the U.S. Senate signed off on similar legislation for the nation in 2022. So far, Hawaii and Arizona are the only states that don’t observe daylight saving time, and the Navajo Nation portion of Arizona does practice it.
Lawmakers aren’t the only ones angling to stop the clock change, either. Stanford Medicine reported in September that changing our clocks is “acutely bad for our health.” Conversely, supporters of the practice note some parts of the U.S. would see sunrises as late as 9 a.m. in the winter or as early as 4:11 a.m. in the summer if year-round daylight saving time or year-round standard time were established.
The history of daylight saving
Daylight saving time was made a legal requirement by the Uniform Time Act of 1966, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics reports.
State governments cannot independently change time zones or the length of daylight saving time, but they can exempt their states from the practice.
“States do not have the authority to choose to be on permanent Daylight Saving Time,” the U.S. Department of Transportation website reads.
This year’s daylight saving time will end Sunday, Nov. 1.
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