Australia Daylight Saving 2026: Which States Change, and Fixing Your Windows Clock

Daylight saving in Australia starts at 2:00 am on the first Sunday in October, when clocks move forward to 3:00 am, and ends at 3:00 am on the first Sunday in April, when clocks go back to 2:00 am. It applies in New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and the ACT. Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory do not have daylight saving. If your computer clock is wrong after daylight saving, the cause on Windows is almost always the time zone: Windows needs (UTC+10:00) Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney for the daylight saving states, but (UTC+10:00) Brisbane for Queensland. Both say UTC+10:00, which is exactly why people pick the wrong one. Check the zone, turn on Adjust for daylight saving time automatically, and press Sync now; the full checklist is below.

Ethan's cousin Mia lives in Coolangatta, on the Queensland side of the Gold Coast, and works for a company headquartered in Sydney. Every October she has the same morning: her laptop says 8:55, her phone says 8:55, and her team's 9:00 stand-up has already been running for an hour. Queensland did not move its clocks; Sydney did. Her laptop was right, and her calendar was right, but the meeting had been booked in Sydney time, so it now started at 8:00 in Queensland. Two streets away, across the border in Tweed Heads, the clocks had jumped forward, and her friend there was early for everything instead. Jake, who works from Perth with colleagues in Melbourne, has the opposite problem: for half the year he is two hours behind his team, and for the other half three. This page explains exactly how Australian daylight saving works, which states change and which do not, and how to make Windows, Outlook, Teams and your phone get it right every year, plus the fixes for a computer clock that is an hour out, or worse.

How daylight saving works in Australia

Daylight saving time moves the clock forward by one hour in spring, so that sunset, and the daylight after work, comes an hour later. In Australia the rule has been the same since 2008:

• Starts: 2:00 am standard time on the first Sunday in October. The clock jumps from 1:59:59 am straight to 3:00 am, so that night is one hour shorter.
• Ends: 3:00 am daylight time on the first Sunday in April. The clock goes from 2:59:59 am back to 2:00 am, so the hour from 2:00 to 3:00 happens twice, and that night is one hour longer.

The easy way to remember the direction is the old phrase spring forward, fall back. In October you lose an hour of sleep; in April you get it back.

Each state and territory decides for itself whether to observe daylight saving, under its own law. That is why Australia has a patchwork: half the country changes and half does not, and the borders between them become one-hour (or half-hour) time steps for six months of the year. Before 2008 the states that observed it did not even agree on dates; aligning them on the first Sunday in October and the first Sunday in April is why the rule above is now simple and predictable.

Daylight saving dates in Australia, year by year

Because the rule is fixed, the dates are easy to work out. Here are the next few seasons for the states that observe daylight saving:

Season	Clocks go forward (2:00 am → 3:00 am)	Clocks go back (3:00 am → 2:00 am)
2026–27	Sunday October 4, 2026	Sunday April 4, 2027
2027–28	Sunday October 3, 2027	Sunday April 2, 2028
2028–29	Sunday October 1, 2028	Sunday April 1, 2029
2029–30	Sunday October 7, 2029	Sunday April 7, 2030

The change happens at the same local time everywhere it applies, so South Australia changes half an hour after New South Wales by the clock on the wall in Sydney. Phones, computers and smart devices change on their own; ovens, car clocks, older microwaves and some wall clocks need a manual turn. If a state ever changes its law, that would apply from a future season with plenty of notice, and we will add a dated note here when it happens.

Which states have daylight saving?

State or territory	Daylight saving?	Standard time	During daylight saving
New South Wales (most of it)	Yes	AEST, UTC+10	AEDT, UTC+11
Victoria	Yes	AEST, UTC+10	AEDT, UTC+11
Australian Capital Territory	Yes	AEST, UTC+10	AEDT, UTC+11
Tasmania	Yes	AEST, UTC+10	AEDT, UTC+11
South Australia	Yes	ACST, UTC+9:30	ACDT, UTC+10:30
Queensland	No	AEST, UTC+10	Stays UTC+10
Northern Territory	No	ACST, UTC+9:30	Stays UTC+9:30
Western Australia	No	AWST, UTC+8	Stays UTC+8

The exceptions people forget

• Broken Hill and the far west of New South Wales keep South Australian time (UTC+9:30, and UTC+10:30 in summer), not Sydney time.
• Lord Howe Island (part of NSW) is on UTC+10:30 and moves forward by only 30 minutes in summer, to UTC+11. For the summer months it shares Sydney's time.
• Norfolk Island is on UTC+11 and also observes daylight saving, moving to UTC+12.
• Eucla and a few places on the Eyre Highway near the WA–SA border unofficially use UTC+8:45, with no daylight saving.

Why Queensland, WA and the NT stay put

Each has made its own choice. Queensland held a referendum in 1992 and voted against daylight saving; Western Australia trialled it several times and rejected it at referenda, most recently in 2009; the Northern Territory, close to the equator, sees little change in daylight across the year, so it has never adopted it. The debates come back from time to time, especially in south-east Queensland, but none of the three observes daylight saving today.

Windows clock wrong after daylight saving: the fix

Windows handles daylight saving on its own, using rules built into its time zone list. When the clock is wrong after the change, one of five settings is responsible. Check them in this order.

1. Open Date & time settings. Right-click the clock in the taskbar and choose Adjust date and time, or open Settings > Time & language > Date & time.
2. Check the time zone. It must match where the PC is, by name, not just by UTC offset (the next section lists every Australian zone).
3. Turn on Adjust for daylight saving time automatically. If this switch is off, Windows ignores daylight saving entirely. It only appears for zones that have daylight saving.
4. Turn on Set time automatically, then select Sync now under Additional settings.
5. Restart the PC if the clock still shows the old time, and check again after sign-in.

In Windows 10, the same page is Settings > Time & Language > Date & time, with the same switches. Our general guide to changing the date, time and time zone in Windows covers the older Control Panel route too.

"Set time zone automatically" picked the wrong one

Windows can choose the time zone for you, using location services. That is handy for laptops that travel, but it is a common cause of a Sydney PC showing Brisbane time, or a Gold Coast laptop showing Sydney time, because location near a border, or through a VPN, can be ambiguous. If the zone keeps changing back to the wrong one, turn Set time zone automatically off and choose the zone yourself. If you want the automatic option, make sure Location is turned on in Settings > Privacy & security > Location, since the feature cannot work without it.

Every Australian time zone in Windows (and which to pick)

This is where most problems start. Windows lists several Australian zones, and pairs of them share the same UTC offset in winter. The name matters, because only some of them include daylight saving rules.

Where you are	Choose in Windows	Time zone ID (for commands)	Daylight saving
Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, regional NSW and VIC	(UTC+10:00) Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney	AUS Eastern Standard Time	Yes
Hobart and all of Tasmania	(UTC+10:00) Hobart	Tasmania Standard Time	Yes
Brisbane, Gold Coast, all of Queensland	(UTC+10:00) Brisbane	E. Australia Standard Time	No
Adelaide, all of SA, Broken Hill	(UTC+09:30) Adelaide	Cen. Australia Standard Time	Yes
Darwin, all of the NT	(UTC+09:30) Darwin	AUS Central Standard Time	No
Perth, all of WA	(UTC+08:00) Perth	W. Australia Standard Time	No
Lord Howe Island	(UTC+10:30) Lord Howe Island	Lord Howe Standard Time	Yes, 30 minutes
Norfolk Island	(UTC+11:00) Norfolk Island	Norfolk Standard Time	Yes
Eucla	(UTC+08:45) Eucla	Aus Central W. Standard Time	No

The two traps are in the top half of the table. Sydney and Brisbane both read UTC+10:00, and Adelaide and Darwin both read UTC+09:30. Pick the wrong one of a pair and your clock is perfect all winter, then an hour out from the first Sunday in October. Tasmania has its own entry, Hobart, which follows the same daylight saving dates as Sydney; picking the Sydney zone in Tasmania gives the right time today, but Hobart is the correct choice.

Check and set the time zone from the command line

For one PC, Settings is quickest. For several, or for remote support, the command line is faster and exact. You can check the current zone in Command Prompt or PowerShell without administrator rights:

tzutil /g
Get-TimeZone

tzutil /g prints the zone ID, such as AUS Eastern Standard Time. Get-TimeZone in PowerShell shows the ID, the display name and, usefully, SupportsDaylightSavingTime, which tells you at a glance whether the chosen zone will change in October.

To set it, open Command Prompt or PowerShell as administrator (our guide to running Command Prompt as administrator shows six ways) and use the ID from the table:

tzutil /s "AUS Eastern Standard Time"
Set-TimeZone -Id "E. Australia Standard Time"

The first line sets Sydney time; the second, in PowerShell, sets Brisbane time. Use one or the other, with the right ID for the place. To list every zone Windows knows, run tzutil /l, or Get-TimeZone -ListAvailable in PowerShell.

Force a time sync

If the zone is right but the minutes are off, the PC has drifted from internet time. In an administrator Command Prompt:

net start w32time
w32tm /resync
w32tm /query /status

The first line starts the Windows Time service if it was stopped (it is fine if it says the service is already running). w32tm /resync asks for the correct time now, and the status command shows which time server answered and when. On a work PC joined to a domain, the time comes from the company's domain controllers instead, so a wrong time there is something for IT to fix.

Clock exactly one hour out: what each pattern means

What you see	Most likely cause	Fix
An hour behind in NSW, VIC, ACT, TAS or SA, starting in October	Brisbane or Darwin zone selected, or daylight saving switch off	Pick Sydney, Hobart or Adelaide; turn the switch on
An hour ahead in Queensland, starting in October	Sydney zone selected, often by automatic time zone	Pick Brisbane; turn automatic time zone off
An hour ahead in the NT	Adelaide zone selected	Pick Darwin
Right on the PC, an hour off in meetings	Meeting booked in another state's time, or mailbox time zone wrong	See the meetings section below
10 or 11 hours out after starting Windows	Dual boot with Linux, which treats the hardware clock as UTC	See the dual boot section
Wrong date and time every time the PC starts	Flat motherboard (CMOS) battery	Replace the coin battery
Minutes off and drifting	Time sync not running	Set time automatically, w32tm /resync

Outlook and Teams meetings an hour off

Mia's problem in the story is the most common one of all, and the computer is not wrong. A meeting has a time and a time zone. When a Sydney colleague books a recurring 9:00 am meeting in Sydney time, it stays at 9:00 in Sydney all year. In Queensland, that is 9:00 from April to October, and 8:00 from October to April. Outlook and Teams are doing the right thing: they show the organizer's fixed time converted to yours.

Four checks sort it out:

1. Check your Windows time zone first, with the steps above, because Outlook and Teams on the desktop follow it.
2. Check your mailbox time zone in Outlook on the web: Settings (the gear) > General > Language and time, and set the same zone as your PC. A mailbox set to the wrong zone shifts meetings in the web and mobile apps even when the desktop is right.
3. Open the meeting and look at its time zone. Outlook shows the zone when you select Time zones on the meeting's ribbon. If a team spans Queensland and New South Wales, agree on which state's time the recurring meetings use.
4. For mixed teams, show a second time zone in the Outlook calendar (File > Options > Calendar > Time zones) so both times are visible side by side. It ends most of the confusion.

Google Calendar works the same way: each event has a time zone, and Settings > Time zone lets you show a secondary zone. For anyone on the Queensland–NSW border, a second clock in the taskbar is also worth adding; our guide to extra clocks in Windows shows how.

Time differences between Australian states, through the year

The patchwork means the gaps between capitals change twice a year. Here they are, measured from Sydney:

City	April to October	October to April (daylight saving)
Melbourne, Canberra, Hobart	Same as Sydney	Same as Sydney
Brisbane	Same as Sydney	1 hour behind
Adelaide	30 minutes behind	30 minutes behind
Darwin	30 minutes behind	1 hour 30 minutes behind
Perth	2 hours behind	3 hours behind

That is Jake's pattern in Perth: two hours behind Melbourne in winter, three in summer. If you schedule across states, booking in the time of the person running the meeting, and showing a second time zone in the calendar, avoids nearly every mistake.

Australia to the US, UK, NZ and India: the gap changes four times a year

Overseas meetings are trickier, because the Northern Hemisphere changes its clocks on different dates, in the opposite direction. Between late March and early November, the gap between Sydney and London or New York shifts several times:

• First Sunday in October: eastern Australia moves forward. The gap to the UK and US shrinks by an hour overnight.
• Last Sunday in October: the UK leaves summer time. The gap to London grows back by an hour.
• First Sunday in November: the US leaves daylight time. The gap to New York and Los Angeles grows by an hour.
• Second Sunday in March: the US starts daylight time again, and the gap shrinks.
• Last Sunday in March: the UK starts summer time, and the gap shrinks again.
• First Sunday in April: eastern Australia ends daylight saving, and the gap grows.

Sydney is ahead of…	Early to late October	Late Oct to early Nov	Early Nov to mid March
London	10 hours	11 hours	11 hours
New York	15 hours	15 hours	16 hours
Los Angeles	18 hours	18 hours	19 hours
India	5 hours 30 minutes	5 hours 30 minutes	5 hours 30 minutes

India does not use daylight saving, so the gap to Sydney is 4 hours 30 minutes in winter and 5 hours 30 minutes in summer. New Zealand starts its daylight saving a week earlier, on the last Sunday in September, and ends on the first Sunday in April, so for that first week Auckland is three hours ahead of Sydney instead of two. Brisbane and Perth, which do not change, still see their gap to London and New York move when those cities change.

The safest habit for overseas meetings is the same as for interstate ones: book in one named time zone, let the calendar convert it, and double-check any recurring meeting in the weeks around these dates.

Australia and New Zealand: daylight saving side by side

New Zealand also has daylight saving, but on slightly different dates, which matters for anyone working across the Tasman.

	Australia (NSW, VIC, TAS, SA, ACT)	New Zealand
Starts	First Sunday in October, 2:00 am	Last Sunday in September, 2:00 am
Ends	First Sunday in April, 3:00 am	First Sunday in April, 3:00 am
Offset in summer	UTC+11 (Sydney)	UTC+13 (Auckland)
Windows zone	AUS Eastern Standard Time	New Zealand Standard Time

Auckland is normally two hours ahead of Sydney. For the one week between New Zealand's change and Australia's, it is three hours ahead, and both countries end daylight saving on the same April morning. New Zealand's Chatham Islands keep their own zone, 45 minutes ahead of the mainland, with its own entry in Windows (Chatham Islands Standard Time).

Traveling between states with a laptop

A laptop that flies from Sydney to Brisbane in summer arrives an hour "early". Windows can follow you or stay put, and either is fine as long as you know which:

• Let it follow you: turn on Set time zone automatically and make sure Location is on. The clock changes when the laptop works out its new location, usually within minutes of connecting to Wi-Fi.
• Keep home time: leave the zone on your home state and add a second clock for where you are, so your calendar stays in the time you work in. Many people who fly interstate for a day or two prefer this.
• Watch VPNs: a company VPN that exits in another state can make automatic time zone choose that state. If the zone jumps when you connect, set it manually.

Phones change on their own when they reach the new network, which is why the phone and laptop can disagree for a few minutes after landing.

"Your clock is ahead" or "behind": certificate errors from a wrong clock

A clock that is badly wrong breaks secure websites. Browsers check every site's security certificate against the current date and time; if your PC thinks it is days or years away from the real date, Chrome and Edge show errors such as "Your clock is ahead", "Your clock is behind" or NET::ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID, and sites like banks and email refuse to load.

An hour out from daylight saving will not cause this; certificates have far more slack than that. These errors mean the date itself is wrong, which almost always points to a flat motherboard battery or time sync that has stopped. Fix the date and time with the steps above, sync, and the warnings disappear without touching the browser.

Mac and Linux: the same rules

The same problem, the wrong city behind the right offset, catches Macs and Linux machines too.

• Mac: Apple menu > System Settings > General > Date & Time. Turn on Set time zone automatically using your current location, or turn it off and choose the closest city: Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide, Brisbane, Darwin or Perth. Picking Brisbane in Sydney gives exactly the same one-hour error as on Windows.
• Linux: run timedatectl to see the current zone, and sudo timedatectl set-timezone Australia/Sydney to set it. Linux uses the standard place-based names below, which servers, programming languages and cloud services use too.

Linux / server name	Windows zone ID	Daylight saving
Australia/Sydney, Australia/Melbourne	AUS Eastern Standard Time	Yes
Australia/Hobart	Tasmania Standard Time	Yes
Australia/Brisbane	E. Australia Standard Time	No
Australia/Adelaide, Australia/Broken_Hill	Cen. Australia Standard Time	Yes
Australia/Darwin	AUS Central Standard Time	No
Australia/Perth	W. Australia Standard Time	No
Australia/Lord_Howe	Lord Howe Standard Time	Yes, 30 minutes
Pacific/Norfolk	Norfolk Standard Time	Yes

A tip for anyone writing software or spreadsheets: store times in UTC and convert to a named zone only when you display them. A time stored as "Sydney local" is ambiguous for one hour every April, when 2:30 am happens twice.

Why Australia's map is split: a short history

Australia first tried daylight saving during the two World Wars, nationally in 1917 and again from 1942 to 1944, to save fuel and power. It returned in peacetime state by state: Tasmania adopted it in 1967, and New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, the ACT and Queensland followed in 1971. Queensland dropped it after one summer, tried it again from 1989 to 1992, then voted against it in a 1992 referendum, and has stayed on standard time since. Western Australia trialled daylight saving several times over the decades and voted against it at referenda, most recently in 2009. Because each state decides for itself, the result is today's patchwork, and the 2008 agreement on common dates for the states that do observe it is what made the rule as simple as it now is.

Work out the time in another state on your PC

For a quick look, add extra clocks to the taskbar flyout (Settings > Time & language > Date & time > Additional clocks) for the states you deal with; hovering over the clock or opening the calendar shows them all. For exact conversions, PowerShell knows every zone and every daylight saving rule:

[System.TimeZoneInfo]::ConvertTimeBySystemTimeZoneId((Get-Date), 'W. Australia Standard Time')
[System.TimeZoneInfo]::ConvertTimeBySystemTimeZoneId([datetime]'2027-04-04 09:00', 'AUS Eastern Standard Time', 'E. Australia Standard Time')

The first line shows the current time in Perth. The second converts 9:00 am Sydney time on a given date into Brisbane time, applying daylight saving for that date automatically, which is handy for checking a meeting before you send it. Our PowerShell guide for beginners explains how to open PowerShell and run commands like these safely.

In Excel and Google Sheets there is no built-in time zone function, so the simplest reliable method is a fixed offset you choose for the period: add =A2+TIME(1,0,0) to turn a Brisbane time into Sydney time during daylight saving, and remember to change the offset in April. For anything recurring across the change dates, convert in PowerShell or a calendar instead of a spreadsheet.

Night shifts, rosters and payroll on change night

For people working overnight, daylight saving is not just a clock: it changes the length of the shift. On the October night, a shift from 10:00 pm to 6:00 am lasts seven hours of real time; on the April night, the same shift lasts nine. Rostering and payroll systems record this correctly when they are set to the right zone, but hand-written timesheets and simple spreadsheets often do not.

• Check the system's time zone the same way as a PC: the named zone, not just the offset.
• Record shifts in real elapsed hours on change nights, and check pay for those nights against your award or agreement.
• Clock-in terminals and time clocks sometimes need a manual change; check them on the Monday after.

Shift workers in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory who report to head offices in the daylight saving states are the most likely to see a roster published in the wrong time, so double-check start times in the first week after each change.

Getting through the change night

The hour is small, but losing it in October affects many people for a day or two. Simple habits help: go to bed a little earlier on the Saturday night, get morning light on the Sunday, and avoid scheduling anything important first thing that Monday. In April the extra hour is easier, though young children and pets still wake at their usual body-clock time, an hour "early" by the new clock, for a few days. Most adjust within a week either way.

Dual boot with Linux: clock 10 or 11 hours out

If you start Windows after using Linux on the same PC and the clock is off by your whole UTC offset, the two systems disagree about the hardware clock. Windows assumes the motherboard clock holds local time; Linux usually assumes it holds UTC. Each corrects the clock in its own way, and the other then reads it wrong. Daylight saving makes it worse, because the offset changes twice a year.

There are two fixes; choose one.

• Tell Linux to use local time: run timedatectl set-local-rtc 1 --adjust-system-clock in Linux. This is the simpler option for most home users.
• Tell Windows to use UTC: in an administrator Command Prompt, run reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation" /v RealTimeIsUniversal /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f, then restart. This is the cleaner option technically, but test it, since a few older programs expect the default.

After either change, sync the time once in each system and the clocks will agree through every daylight saving change.

Wrong time every time the PC starts: the CMOS battery

If the date resets to a year in the past, or the time is wrong at every start-up even after you fix it, the coin battery on the motherboard (usually a CR2032) is flat. It keeps the hardware clock running while the PC is off. Windows corrects the time once it reaches the internet, but anything that runs before that, and the BIOS itself, sees the wrong time. Replacing the battery is cheap and simple on most desktops; on laptops it can mean opening the case, which is a job for a repairer if you are not comfortable doing it. While you are in there, it is a good moment to check your BIOS version; our guide to finding and updating the BIOS walks through it.

Keep Windows updated so the rules stay right

Windows knows when daylight saving starts and ends because Microsoft ships the rules in its time zone data, and updates them through Windows Update when a country changes its law. Australia's rule has been stable since 2008, but other countries change theirs every year or two, and those updates arrive in the same way. A PC that has not been updated for a long time can have outdated rules for other countries, which shows up as meetings with overseas colleagues an hour off around their change dates. Keeping Windows current avoids it; our guide to keeping Windows properly up to date covers the layers that the green tick misses. The same thing happened in Canada this year, when Alberta and British Columbia changed their rules and Windows needed new zones, as our Alberta and BC time change guide explains.

Phones, smart devices and the clocks that do not change

• iPhone: Settings > General > Date & Time > Set Automatically. With it on, the phone follows the network and changes on time.
• Android: Settings > System > Date & time > Set time automatically and Set time zone automatically (wording varies by brand).
• Near a border: a phone on the Gold Coast can briefly pick up a New South Wales network and show Sydney time. If that happens, turn off automatic time zone on the phone and choose Brisbane manually.
• Smart speakers, TVs and watches usually follow the time zone set in their app; check it once if they show the wrong time.
• Manual clocks: car dashboards, ovens, microwaves, older alarm clocks and some CCTV recorders need changing by hand. The October change is a good reminder to check smoke alarm batteries too.

For IT admins: get the whole fleet right

• Audit: Get-TimeZone in a remote PowerShell session or your management tool shows each PC's zone ID. Look for Brisbane or Darwin zones on machines in daylight saving states, and the reverse.
• Set by policy: Intune's settings catalog and Group Policy Preferences can set a time zone; deploying Set-TimeZone through a script is the simplest cross-tool option.
• Stop automatic zone changes on desktops that never move: the automatic time zone feature runs as the tzautoupdate service, which can be disabled by policy or in the registry (HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\tzautoupdate, Start = 4).
• Mailbox time zones: in Exchange Online, Get-MailboxRegionalConfiguration and Set-MailboxRegionalConfiguration check and set each mailbox's zone, which fixes web and mobile calendar shifts in bulk.
• Servers and logs: many teams run servers on UTC year-round, so logs never jump or repeat an hour in April. It is worth considering for anything that timestamps transactions.
• The missing and repeated hour: depending on the scheduler, jobs set between 2:00 and 3:00 am can be skipped or shifted on the October night and can run twice on the April night. Schedule critical jobs outside that hour, or run them on UTC.

Australian daylight saving and Windows: frequently asked questions

Australian daylight saving follows one simple rule, first Sunday in October to first Sunday in April, in five of the eight states and territories. Windows handles it on its own once the time zone is right, and the right zone is the one with the right name, not just the right offset: Sydney, Hobart or Adelaide for the states that change, Brisbane, Darwin or Perth for those that do not. Mia now keeps a second clock for Sydney on her taskbar, her team books meetings in one agreed time zone, and the October stand-up no longer starts without her.

Revision note. Written October 4, 2026, as a guide to Australian daylight saving and Windows clocks for every year. May your meetings always start when you do.