Alberta, BC Time Change Ends Nov 1, 2026: Windows Clock Fix

Alberta and most of British Columbia will not turn their clocks back on November 1, 2026. Alberta stays on UTC-6 all year and calls it Alberta Time; BC stays on UTC-7 and calls it Pacific Time. Windows handles this with two brand-new time zones, (UTC-06:00) Mountain Time (Alberta) and (UTC-07:00) Pacific Time (British Columbia), and a PC that has them will simply not fall back. A PC that does not have them will fall back an hour at 2 a.m. and stay wrong until you fix it. Here is the part that trips people up: the zones shipped on September 22 in the Windows 11 preview update KB5124010, yet that update's release notes never mention Alberta, British Columbia or time zones at all. People search the notes, find nothing, and assume the fix has not arrived. It has. Everything else in Windows gets it on October 13.

Jake found out the hard way last spring, in reverse. His parts distributor sits in Calgary. When BC made its last clock change in March and Alberta kept changing, the Tuesday stock call landed in his calendar an hour off for two weeks, he dialed in after the order window had closed, and a batch of replacement screens shipped two days late. That was one lost Saturday of repair bookings, which for a two-person phone shop is real money. He wants November to go differently. "Ethan, how does a computer even know a province changed its mind?"

Ethan's answer to Jake was the one that makes the rest of this page make sense. "It doesn't know. A computer has no idea what a legislature voted for. It has a table of rules, one row per time zone, and it follows the row you picked. Microsoft rewrote the table, and your PC gets the new table through Windows Update like any other fix. Until it does, your PC is running last year's rules, and last year's rules say fall back on the first Sunday in November."

So the whole job comes down to two questions: has your PC received the new table, and have you told it which row to use? Both take about a minute to check, and both are worth checking before November, because a wrong clock is loudest on Monday morning when every meeting, alarm and backup window is quietly one hour off.

What actually changes on November 1, 2026

Three provinces and one territory stop changing clocks this fall, and they do not all land on the same hour. That matters because "Mountain Time" will mean two different things depending on which side of a provincial line you stand on.

• Alberta stays on UTC-6, the offset it has every summer as Mountain Daylight Time. The province now calls it Alberta Time, abbreviated ABT. The clocks do not go back on November 1, and they never change again. Yellowknife and Inuvik in the Northwest Territories follow Alberta.
• British Columbia stays on UTC-7, its summer offset. The province calls it Pacific Time, abbreviated PCT. BC already made its last change on March 8, 2026; November 1 is simply the first fall when nothing happens.
• Manitoba announced on September 17, 2026 that it will stay on daylight time, UTC-5, permanently. Six weeks of notice is very little for software vendors, and there is no Windows time zone for it yet. More on that below.

BC has exceptions, and they are the reason the "BC time change map" search exists. Northeastern BC, the Peace River and Northern Rockies area (Dawson Creek, Fort St. John, Fort Nelson, Chetwynd, Hudson's Hope, Taylor, Tumbler Ridge), has been on UTC-7 year-round for decades and changes nothing. The East Kootenay towns that have always run on Alberta's clock (Cranbrook, Fernie, Sparwood, Invermere, Kimberley, Radium Hot Springs, Elkford) go with Alberta onto UTC-6 year-round. Golden is the odd one out: it makes one last change on November 1 and then stays on UTC-7 with the rest of BC.

Why Windows needed two new zones instead of editing the old ones

Jake's first instinct was the obvious one. "Alberta is on Mountain Time. Why not just tell the Mountain Time zone to stop changing?"

Ethan: "Because Mountain Time is not Alberta's. It's Denver's, and Boise's, and Calgary's, and a corner of Kansas. If Microsoft switched daylight time off for that one row, every PC in Colorado would be an hour wrong. When one province inside a shared zone goes its own way, Microsoft adds a new row instead of editing the shared one. That is the rule it applies everywhere in the world, and it is why the list in Settings keeps getting longer."

The two new rows carry a display name, which is what you see in Settings, and a registry ID, which is what scripts and policies use. They are not the same string, and the ID is the one that catches people out because it says "Standard" even though there is no standard-versus-daylight pair anymore:

• Display name (UTC-06:00) Mountain Time (Alberta), registry ID Alberta Standard Time
• Display name (UTC-07:00) Pacific Time (British Columbia), registry ID British Columbia Standard Time

Both are stored, like every other zone, under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Time Zones. If a key with one of those names exists on your PC, the update is in. If not, it is not, and no amount of clicking in Settings will produce the option.

Which Windows update carries the new zones

This is where the confusion comes from. Microsoft ships time zone changes inside the normal monthly updates; standalone time zone patches stopped years ago. The Alberta and BC zones rode in the September 22, 2026 non-security preview update for Windows 11, and they reach every other supported version of Windows in the October 13, 2026 security update.

Now the odd part. Open the KB5124010 release notes and search the page for "Alberta". Nothing. Search for "time zone". The only hit is a sentence about Windows 11 24H2 Home and Pro losing time zone updates after October 13. The new zones are in the update all the same; Microsoft documents them on its Daylight Saving Time and Time Zone blog and in the Windows message center rather than in the KB article. If you have been told "the fix isn't out yet because the KB doesn't list it", that is why. The fastest proof is on your own machine:

tzutil /l | findstr /i "Alberta Columbia"

Two lines back means both zones are installed. Silence means your PC is still on the old table.

That sentence about 24H2 deserves its own warning. Windows 11 24H2 Home and Pro reach end of updates on October 13, 2026, the same day the zones ship for everyone else. A 24H2 Home or Pro PC that takes the October update gets the zones as its final patch, and then it stops getting anything, including future time zone changes such as Manitoba's. Move those PCs to 25H2. Enterprise and Education editions of 24H2 continue to be serviced.

Fix the clock on Windows 11

Assume nothing has been done yet. The order matters: update first, then pick the zone, because the zone will not appear in the list until the update is in.

1. Open Settings → Windows Update and select Check for updates. Before October 13, the September preview shows under optional updates as 2026-09 Cumulative Update Preview (KB5124010 on 24H2/25H2); select Download & install. From October 13 the regular monthly update carries the zones and installs on its own.
2. Restart when asked. Then confirm the build: press Win + R, type winver, and check for 26200.9550, 26100.9550 or higher (28000.3086 on 26H1).
3. Open Settings → Time & language → Date & time.
4. If Set time zone automatically is on and Windows location services are on, an updated PC in Alberta or BC moves itself to the new zone. Give it a restart and check the Time zone box shows the new name.
5. If you prefer to set it by hand, turn Set time zone automatically off, open the Time zone list, and choose (UTC-06:00) Mountain Time (Alberta) or (UTC-07:00) Pacific Time (British Columbia).
6. Leave Adjust for daylight saving time automatically alone. The new zones have no daylight rule, so the toggle has nothing to do; turning it off does not hurt and does not help.
7. Scroll to Additional settings and select Sync now so the actual time is pulled fresh from the time server.

The Control Panel route still exists on every current build if you prefer it: press Win + R, run timedate.cpl, select Change time zone, and pick the same entry.

"Set time zone automatically" is grayed out

The toggle grays out when Windows is not allowed to know where you are. Go to Settings → Privacy & security → Location, turn on Location services, and come back. On a work PC it can also be locked by policy, in which case the whole Date & time page carries a "some of these settings are managed by your organization" line and the zone is your IT department's decision, not yours. The same lock is behind most "this setting is managed by your administrator" messages elsewhere in Settings.

The command-line way, and a check that takes five seconds

On a PC with the update installed, a command prompt or PowerShell window run as administrator does the whole job:

tzutil /g
tzutil /s "Alberta Standard Time"
tzutil /s "British Columbia Standard Time"
w32tm /resync

The first line prints the zone you are on now. The second or third sets the new one, using the registry ID, quotes included. The last forces a time sync. PowerShell users can do the same with Get-TimeZone -ListAvailable to see the list and Set-TimeZone -Id "Alberta Standard Time" to set it. If PowerShell refuses to run a script you saved, that is the execution policy, and "running scripts is disabled on this system" has the fix.

Jake tried tzutil /s "Mountain Time (Alberta)" first, because that was the name he could see, and got "Invalid time zone specified". Ethan: "That's the display name. Scripts want the ID. Every zone has both, and the ID for these two ends in 'Standard Time' even though standard-versus-daylight no longer applies. It's a naming convention, not a description."

If you cannot update before November 1: the two stopgap zones

Some PCs will not be patched in time. A shop laptop that lives offline, a point-of-sale terminal the vendor controls, a machine stuck on a failed update. For those, Microsoft's interim guidance is to borrow an existing zone that already has the right offset and no daylight rule:

• Alberta, Yellowknife, Inuvik and East Kootenay: (UTC-06:00) Saskatchewan, registry ID Canada Central Standard Time. Saskatchewan has been on UTC-6 without clock changes for decades, so after November 1 it is the same clock as Alberta.
• British Columbia: (UTC-07:00) Yukon, registry ID Yukon Standard Time. Yukon stopped changing clocks in 2020 and sits on UTC-7 year-round, exactly where BC now lives.

Two cautions. First, do not switch early. Until 2 a.m. on November 1 the old seasonal zones still show the correct time, and moving to Saskatchewan in October puts you an hour off for the rest of the month. Make the change on November 1, or the first time you notice the clock is wrong that morning. Second, these are borrowed zones. They have different names, different map regions, and a different history before 2026, which matters for any software that back-calculates old timestamps. Once the update arrives, go back into Settings and choose the real Alberta or British Columbia zone.

Ethan's version: "Saskatchewan's clock is Alberta's clock now. You are not lying to the computer, you are pointing it at a neighbor who already keeps the hours you want. Just move back home when the update shows up."

Windows 10: what changes and when

Windows 10 22H2 gets the two zones in the October 13, 2026 security update. There is no September preview path on Windows 10, so before that date the only options are the stopgap zones above. After the update, the steps are the ones you already know: Settings → Time & language → Date & time, turn off automatic time zone if you want to choose by hand, and pick the new entry. The tzutil commands are identical.

The honest line about support: Windows 10 reached end of support on October 14, 2025, and the only way a Windows 10 PC still receives that October update is through the Extended Security Updates program, which for home users now runs to October 12, 2027. ESU delivers the monthly cumulative update, and time zone data ships inside that same update, so an enrolled PC gets the new zones on schedule. An unenrolled Windows 10 PC gets nothing and will fall back on November 1 every year until it is retired; the stopgap zone is its permanent answer. If that describes a machine you rely on, the current Windows 11 update cycle is worth reading before you decide whether to upgrade it or replace it.

Meetings showing an hour off: Outlook, Teams and Google Calendar

This is the symptom most people actually notice, and it is worth understanding, because the natural fix makes things worse.

A calendar entry is not stored as "10 a.m. on Tuesday". It is stored as a precise instant in universal time, plus the time zone it was created in. Your PC translates that instant into wall-clock time using its own zone table. If your PC has the new rules and your colleague's does not, the same meeting displays at two different hours after November 1, while every October meeting still lines up. Nothing is corrupt; two machines disagree about what UTC-6 means in November.

Jake: "So I just drag the meeting back an hour?" Ethan: "No. That rewrites the stored instant for every attendee, including the ones whose calendars were right. Then, when the other person patches their PC, the meeting jumps again, and now it really is wrong for everyone. Fix the clock table, not the meeting. If a meeting looks off, ask the organizer what time they see; if you disagree by exactly one hour, one of you needs the update."

The quick diagnosis: compare a recurring meeting in late October with the same meeting in mid-November. If October is right and November is an hour off, your PC is missing the zone. If both are off, the time zone in your Outlook or Google account settings is wrong, which is a separate setting from Windows and worth checking once, under account settings in each app.

Cross-province clock math after November 1

The differences everyone has memorized stop being true. Alberta and BC stay one hour apart all year, as they always were. Alberta shares a clock with Saskatchewan and with Chicago for the whole year; it used to match Chicago only in winter. BC sits one hour ahead of Seattle from November to March, then matches it again from March to November when Washington goes back on daylight time. Alberta to Ontario becomes a one-hour gap in winter instead of two. Manitoba, once its change takes effect, matches Toronto and New York in winter and stays an hour ahead of Saskatchewan all year. None of that is a Windows problem, but it is the reason a correctly set PC can still look "wrong" to someone comparing it with last year's habits.

Manitoba: no Windows time zone yet

Manitoba's decision arrived on September 17, 2026, about six weeks before the November change. Microsoft asks governments for a year or more of notice to build, test and ship a zone, and when the notice is shorter it publishes interim guidance on its Daylight Saving Time and Time Zone blog until an update is ready. As of September 29 there is no Manitoba zone in any Windows update and no interim guidance posted. When it comes, it will take one of the two shapes on this page: a new zone in a later update, or a borrowed existing zone with the right offset. Do not guess at a substitute before Microsoft publishes one; run tzutil /l | findstr Manitoba after each monthly update, and check the blog if November arrives first.

For IT admins: the fleet checklist

On a fleet, the consumer steps above become three jobs: get the update on every device before November 1, set the zone centrally, and prove both happened. In that order.

Get the update out

The September 22 preview is optional and will not deploy on its own; if you rely on the October 13 security update instead, that gives you 18 days before the change, which is enough for a normal ring rollout but not for a slow one. Servers, RDS and Azure Virtual Desktop hosts, and Windows 10 ESU devices all wait for October 13; put them in the first ring. A domain controller with the wrong zone does no harm to Kerberos, which runs on UTC, but every event log and every scheduled task on it drifts by an hour.

Set the zone centrally

Intune: the Settings Catalog or a custom profile with OMA-URI ./Device/Vendor/MSFT/Policy/Config/TimeLanguageSettings/ConfigureTimeZone, string value Alberta Standard Time or British Columbia Standard Time. It applies to Pro, Enterprise and Education on Windows 10 1903 and later, and it silently does nothing on a device that has not received the update yet, so sequence it after the patch ring. Group Policy has no native time zone setting; the usual route is a startup script or scheduled task that runs tzutil /s "Alberta Standard Time", which is also the right approach for kiosks and point-of-sale images. Do not push the stopgap zones by policy to devices that will be patched; you will only have to push again.

Prove it

A one-line inventory from your RMM or from PowerShell remoting: Get-TimeZone | Select-Object Id, DisplayName per device, plus the OS build from [System.Environment]::OSVersion.Version. Anything still reporting Mountain Standard Time or Pacific Standard Time on November 2 is wrong. Then walk the things that are not Windows PCs but take their time from one: phone system business hours, door access schedules, HVAC programs, backup windows on the NAS, camera NVRs, and the payroll time clock. Each has its own zone table, and each will fall back on its own unless someone tells it not to.

If the time is still wrong after all of this

A PC with the right zone and the wrong time has a different problem. Work down this list.

1. Time sync failed. Settings → Time & language → Date & time → Sync now. If it errors, open Services, make sure Windows Time is running, then run w32tm /resync as administrator.
2. The zone was set by policy and reverts. Your organization manages it; see the admin section above. On a personal PC that was once joined to a work account, removing the leftover management profile stops the revert; "managed by your organization" without a real organization covers that.
3. Dual boot with Linux. Linux keeps the hardware clock in UTC by default and Windows keeps it in local time, so each boot into the other system shifts the clock by your offset. Either set Linux to local time with timedatectl set-local-rtc 1, or tell Windows to use UTC with the RealTimeIsUniversal registry value. Pick one; doing both cancels out.
4. The clock drifts after every shutdown. That is the CMOS battery on the motherboard, a coin cell that costs a few dollars. No time zone setting fixes a dead battery.
5. The date is right but hours are off after the update installed. The zone did not change with the update; updates never change the selected zone. Go back to Date & time and pick the new entry by hand.

Alberta and BC time change: your questions answered

If you run a small shop the way Jake does, the cheapest thing you can do this month is a five-second check on every machine that matters: tzutil /l | findstr Alberta. Do it now, do it again after October 13, and set a reminder for the morning of November 1 to glance at the clock on the till before the first customer walks in. If something on this page does not match what you see on your screen, please tell us; posts like this stay right because readers write in. And if you do wake up on November 1 to a clock that is an hour off, nothing is broken and nothing is lost: it is one setting, and this page shows you where it lives.

Revision note. Written September 29, 2026; zone names, registry IDs, update numbers and dates current as of that day. Next check: October 13, 2026, when the security update ships the zones to Windows 10, Server and LTSC, and again whenever Microsoft publishes Manitoba guidance. Good luck with the changeover, and enjoy the extra hour of evening light.