On the night between Saturday 25 October and Sunday 26 October 2025, solar time returns again in Italy: at 03:00 in the morning the hands will move back 60 minutes, giving us an extra hour of sleep and catching up with the arrival of summer time last March. This alternation will bring forward both sunrise and sunset by an hour, leading us to have more sunlight in the early morning but “shortening” the days.
Like every year, solar time will remain in effect from the last Sunday of October until the last Sunday of March, which next year corresponds to March 29, 2026, when summer time will be restored by moving the hands forward from 2:00 in the morning to 3:00.
When the 2025 standard time changes, the hands go back one hour tonight
Between Saturday 25 and Sunday 26 October 2025 there will therefore be the official transition to solar time: the hands will be moved back by an hour, with 03:00 in the morning becoming 02:00. The change will take place simultaneously throughout the European Union: specifically, solar time is expected to come into force in all EU countries at 1:00 UTC (coordinated universal time, i.e. the Greenwich Mean Time zone), which in Italy corresponds to 3:00 in the morning.
It must be said, however, that analogue clocks will have to be moved manually to align with the new time: all digital clocks, such as those on smartphones, will update automatically, without the need for any intervention.
Because the alternation with summer time is still in force
In Italy the time change has been officially in force since 1966: according to estimates by Terna (the company that owns the national electricity transmission network), in 2025 summer time has allowed a total saving of around 100 million euros, with a lower energy consumption of around 330 million kWh (which is equivalent to the average annual demand of over 125,000 families) and a reduction of around 160 thousand tonnes of dioxide emissions carbon in the atmosphere.
Between 2004 and 2024, among other things, summer time allowed overall savings of over 11.7 billion kWh, equivalent to approximately 2.2 billion euros.
Despite the energy advantages of summer time, alternation with solar time is still at the center of numerous debates today: several studies have in fact highlighted the possible negative impacts on health and sleep. Also for this reason, not all countries provide for the time change: today only 40% of the world’s states adopt summer time, with almost all of Asia, a large part of Africa and South America having opted to abolish it.
Within the European Union the discussion has been open since 2018: in 2019 the European Parliament actually expressed its desire to abolish the seasonal transition, but the directive remained stagnant after the COVID-19 pandemic due to the difficulties in finding an agreement on how to set up a “fixed time” system at a national level. In recent days, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez asked the European Union to speed up the legal process to maintain the same timetable all year round, thus abolishing the alternation.
