Earliest sunset of the year 2026, and why it comes before the shortest day

In 2026 New York's earliest sunset comes on 7 and 8 December, at 4:28 PM, two weeks before the shortest day. London's comes on 12 December at 3:51 PM. Most of the US, Europe, Japan and Korea follow the same pattern. The evenings bottom out in early to mid December, and the darkest mornings hold off until around New Year. It happens because around the December solstice the Sun's own day, from one noon to the next, runs about 30 seconds longer than the 24 hours on our clocks.

Closer to the equator it comes sooner. In Bengaluru, where I live, it's 19 and 20 November. The sunrise and sunset times in the tables below come from Orbit's engine, the astronomy code inside my Mac sky app, for the cities in its menu plus Edinburgh and six more in India.

When is the earliest sunset of the year?

Orbit's engine computed these on 20 October 2026 for each city centre at sea level. At New York's latitude every 21 km west makes sunset about a minute later, and a hill on your horizon takes the Sun early.

City	Earliest sunset	Sunset on 21 Dec	Day length on 21 Dec	Latest sunrise
Los Angeles	4 Dec, 4:43 PM	4:48 PM	9 h 53 min	7 Jan, 6:59 AM
San Diego	3 Dec, 4:42 PM	4:47 PM	10 h 00 min	8 Jan, 6:52 AM
San Francisco	6 Dec, 4:51 PM	4:54 PM	9 h 33 min	5 Jan, 7:25 AM
Denver	7 Dec, 4:35 PM	4:39 PM	9 h 21 min	4 Jan, 7:21 AM
Chicago	8 Dec, 4:19 PM	4:23 PM	9 h 08 min	3 Jan, 7:18 AM
New York	7 Dec, 4:28 PM	4:32 PM	9 h 15 min	4 Jan, 7:20 AM
London	12 Dec, 3:51 PM	3:53 PM	7 h 50 min	30 Dec, 8:06 AM
Berlin	13 Dec, 3:52 PM	3:54 PM	7 h 39 min	30 Dec, 8:17 AM
Reykjavík	18 Dec, 3:29 PM	3:29 PM	4 h 07 min	25 Dec, 11:23 AM
Bengaluru	19 Nov, 5:50 PM	5:59 PM	11 h 22 min	24 Jan, 6:46 AM
Seoul	6 Dec, 5:14 PM	5:17 PM	9 h 34 min	6 Jan, 7:47 AM
Tokyo	5 Dec, 4:28 PM	4:32 PM	9 h 45 min	7 Jan, 6:52 AM

As an outside check, NASA JPL's Horizons has New York's 7 December sunset at 4:29 PM and London's 12 December at 3:52 PM, both within a minute. For your own town, timeanddate's sun tables list sunrise and sunset day by day.

The bottom of the curve is flat. New York's sunset stays within a minute of 4:28 PM from 1 to 14 December, and the engine can't split 7 and 8 December at all: both set at 4:28:26 PM. The further north you go, the closer the earliest sunset sits to the solstice. In Reykjavík it comes on 18 December and rounds to the same minute as the solstice's, 3:29 PM.

Earliest sunset in the UK

London's earliest sunset is 3:51 PM on 12 December, nine days before the solstice, and it stays within a minute of that from 7 to 18 December. Edinburgh bottoms out two days later and 13 minutes earlier on the clock, at 3:38 PM on 14 December. On the shortest day it gets 6 h 58 min of daylight to London's 7 h 50 min, and its latest sunrise is 8:44 AM on 29 December. (Edinburgh isn't in Orbit's city menu; its times come from the same engine run at its coordinates.)

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Orbit for Mac's desktop sky over London at dusk, facing south: a blue twilight sky with a thin crescent Moon labelled Moon 11% low between the S and SW marks, Saturn labelled up on the left above the SE mark, and a pink glow at the right edge past the SW mark, over dark hills.

Earliest sunset in India

India's earliest sunsets come in late November, and the northeast gets them first. The whole country shares one clock, so on each city's earliest evening Guwahati's Sun sets at 4:31 PM while Mumbai's waits until 5:59 PM, 88 minutes later on the same watch. Itanagar, in Arunachal Pradesh, the most easterly state, is down to 4:21 PM on 30 November.

The date depends on how far north you are. Further south the day length changes less through the year, so the noon slide (more on that below) wins sooner: Chennai and Bengaluru bottom out on 19 November, Delhi not until 1 December.

City	Earliest sunset	Day length on 21 Dec
Itanagar	30 Nov, 4:21 PM	10 h 26 min
Guwahati	30 Nov, 4:31 PM	10 h 30 min
Kolkata	28 Nov, 4:51 PM	10 h 45 min
Delhi	1 Dec, 5:24 PM	10 h 19 min
Chennai	19 Nov, 5:39 PM	11 h 21 min
Bengaluru	19 to 20 Nov, 5:50 PM	11 h 22 min
Mumbai	24 Nov, 5:59 PM	10 h 59 min

Bengaluru gets off lightly. Our earliest sunset is 5:50 PM, and on the shortest day we still get 11 h 22 min of daylight, three and a half hours more than London. By the solstice sunset is back to 5:59 PM, and the latest sunrise is 6:46 AM on 24 and 25 January.

Why is the earliest sunset before the winter solstice?

Sunset is solar noon, the moment the Sun stands highest, plus half the day's length. Through December both of those move, and they pull opposite ways.

Date	Sunrise	Solar noon	Sunset	Day shorter by
1 Dec	7:01 AM	11:45 AM	4:29 PM	78 s
7 Dec	7:07 AM	11:47 AM	4:28 PM	58 s
14 Dec	7:12 AM	11:51 AM	4:29 PM	31 s
21 Dec	7:17 AM	11:54 AM	4:32 PM	2 s

The day keeps shrinking until the 21st, but more slowly each day, while solar noon slides later on the clock by about half a minute a day. Around 7 December the two nearly cancel on the evening side. Half of that day's 58-second loss comes off the evening (29 seconds), noon's slide puts 26 back, and sunset moves by 3 seconds. After that the slide wins and the evenings start to stretch. The mornings get the loss and the slide together, so New York's sunrise comes 55 seconds later that same day.

Noon slides because our clocks pretend every day, noon to noon, is exactly 24 hours, and in December the Sun's day runs about 30 seconds over. EarthSky puts that down to the Sun sitting far south of the equator around the solstice, with the effect made stronger by perihelion, Earth's closest approach to the Sun, which falls on 3 January 2027 by Horizons.

I think of it like this. Earth spins and circles the Sun at the same time, so each day the Sun creeps a little east against the stars, and Earth has to turn a bit more than once to bring it back to due south. Near perihelion Earth moves fastest, so the creep is bigger. And at the solstice the Sun creeps due east a long way from the sky's equator, where a step east eats more of Earth's turn, the same way a step east near the North Pole crosses more lines of longitude than a step at the equator.

Astronomers call the running gap between Sun time and clock time the equation of time. Royal Museums Greenwich puts the spread between the longest and shortest of these natural days at about 51 seconds over the year, and notes that the latest sunrise lands some days after the shortest day.

When does sunset start getting later?

Straight after the earliest one: from 9 December in New York (7 and 8 December tie to the second), 13 December in London and 21 November in Bengaluru. The days themselves keep shrinking until the solstice, at 20:50 UTC on 21 December by Horizons. That's 3:50 PM in New York, 8:50 PM in London and 2:20 AM on 22 December in India.

So 21 December is the shortest day in the American and European cities in the table. In Seoul and Tokyo, where the solstice falls at 5:50 AM on the 22nd, the 22nd is shorter by a second, and in Bengaluru the two days tie to the second. Reykjavík gets 4 h 07 min of daylight, from 11:22 AM to 3:29 PM.

Meanwhile the mornings keep getting darker until early January. So if someone tells you in mid-December that the days are drawing out, they're right at teatime and wrong at breakfast.

The long nights come with two good reasons to stay out in them. The Geminid meteor shower peaks on 14 December; the best night is 13 to 14 December in the Americas and Europe, and the night of the 14th in India. And 2026's closest full Moon, the Cold Moon supermoon, comes on the night of 23 to 24 December.

When is the latest sunrise of the year?

On standard time it comes around the turn of the year: 30 December in London (8:06 AM), 3 January in Chicago (7:18 AM), 4 January in New York (7:20 AM) and 7 January in Los Angeles (6:59 AM). That end is flat too. New York's sunrise stays within a minute of 7:20 AM from 28 December to 11 January, the same dark mornings as the Quadrantid meteor shower.

In the US the clocks add a twist. The latest sunrise of the 2026 autumn and winter falls on 31 October, the last morning of daylight saving time: 7:25 AM EDT in New York, five minutes later than on 4 January. The next morning the clocks go back (NIST has the rule) and sunrise jumps to 6:26 AM. All six US cities in the table do this.

The UK misses out. Its clocks go back a week earlier, on 25 October, and London's last summer-time sunrise, 7:40 AM on the 24th, is earlier than 30 December's 8:06 AM.

Shortest day of the year in Australia

Australia's shortest day comes in June, so 2026's has been and gone. In Sydney, December's solstice (7:50 AM AEDT on the 22nd) brings the longest day instead, 14 h 25 min. The clock drift plays out in mirror image: the earliest sunrise is 5:37 AM on 5 and 6 December, and the latest sunset 8:10 PM on 7 January 2027.

Sydney's earliest sunset belongs to its winter: 12 June 2027 at 4:53 PM AEST. The next shortest day is 21 to 22 June 2027 (the solstice is at 12:10 AM AEST on the 22nd), with 9 h 54 min of daylight, and the latest sunrise is on 30 June, at 7:01 AM.

Tonight's sunset on your Mac

Orbit puts the real sky over your city behind your desktop icons, and the stars come in as the Sun sinks, down to the faintest of its 2,874 catalogue stars once the Sun is 18 degrees down. Click the Moon in the menu bar and the card's Sun tile gives the next sunset over a curve of the Sun's height through the day, plus "Dark by", when the Sun is 12 degrees down and the sky is dark enough for stars; after sundown it switches to the next sunrise. That's as far ahead as it looks: there's no calendar, no sunset alert, and it knows nothing about clouds. It's $6.99 once on the Mac App Store (₹699 in India), no subscription, for macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon and Intel, and the Mac page has screenshots.

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The Sunset tile from Orbit's menu bar card for New York: 4:28 PM in large type over a curve of the Sun's height through the day, and Dark by 5:33 PM underneath.