An extra hour in bed in the morning as the clocks go back to mark the end of British Summer Time

Remember that the clocks go back by one hour at 2am this Sunday 27th October to mark the end of British Summertime. So the minute after 1.59am will be 1am again.

The clocks are put back every year heading into winter as part of Daylight Savings Time (DST) to allow people to start and finish their working day an hour earlier and give them an extra hour of daylight after work. The clocks will go forward again on Sunday 30th March 2025, as part of British Summer Time (BST), when there is more daylght in the evenings and less in the mornings. Although it happens twice a year, having the clocks go forwards and backwards can get very confusing.

Thankfully, most tech such as phones and laptops automatically change to the correct time, but you will have to manually adjust the clocks on the car and the oven (or leave it, they’ll be correct again in six months.) The clocks go backwards in Autumn, giving us a much-needed extra hour in bed. But when will the clocks go back? Here’s all you need to know.

Do the clocks go back this weekend? 

YES The clocks go back by one hour on Sunday, October 27th at 2am. The time change always happens on a weekend, in the middle of the night, so less people are disrupted. The change always falls on the last Sunday of October, so this year that is the 27th October. The period when the clocks are one hour ahead is called British Summer Time (BST). When the clocks go back, we call it Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).

When do the clocks go forward again? The clocks always go forward on the last Sunday of March. In 2024, this falls on March 30th 2025 at 1am. Switching to BST means we get more daylight in the evening – but one less hour in bed.

Why do we put the clocks back and forward in the UK? 

The idea was first thought up by Benjamin Franklin in 1784, when he suggested that if there was more daylight in the mornings people would get up earlier, thus saving on candles. However it was builder William Willett – the great-great grandfather of Coldplay’s Chris Martin – who brought the practice to the UK in 1907 after he wrote about it in a pamphlet entitled The Waste Of Daylight, suggesting changing the clocks would encourage people to get up earlier.

The practice was later adopted by the Government in 1916 – a year after Willett’s death – during World War I, following Germany who also started putting their clocks forward in April of that year.