Spring forward, fall back: what it means for global teams

"Spring forward, fall back" is one of the most useful phrases in timekeeping. It packs the whole rule into six words: which season, and which direction. The part nobody mentions is what happens when your colleague is in a country that springs and falls on a different date.

What does the phrase actually mean?

In spring, clocks jump forward one hour. The night the change happens is an hour shorter, so you lose an hour of sleep, and in return the evenings stay lighter for longer. In autumn, clocks fall back one hour. That night is an hour longer, you gain an hour of sleep, and daylight saving ends until the following spring. Spring forward, fall back: the verb is the direction.

When do the clocks change in 2026?

Here is the catch that trips up global teams. The mnemonic is the same everywhere, but the dates are not. The United States and Europe shift their clocks several weeks apart, which means there is a window each spring and autumn where the usual gap between two cities is wrong by an hour.

Look at the spring dates. The US springs forward on 8 March, but the UK and EU wait until 29 March. For those three weeks, London is only four hours ahead of New York instead of the usual five. In autumn the gap flips: the EU and UK fall back on 25 October, a week before the US on 1 November, so the offset shifts again until both sides have changed.

Why does this matter for global teams?

Recurring meetings are the weak point. Most calendars pin a meeting to a wall-clock time in one time zone, then translate it for everyone else. When one country changes its clocks and another has not yet, that translation shifts by an hour. A call that always felt comfortably mid-morning can suddenly land before someone's workday starts, or after it ends, for a fortnight at a time.

It is rarely a disaster, but it is reliably annoying. Twice a year, for a few weeks, the overlap you carefully found drifts out from under you. We go into this in more detail in does daylight saving affect meetings.

How do you stay ahead of it?

The reliable habit is to stop doing the arithmetic in your head and read each person's actual local time instead. If you can see that it is already 9:00 AM for your New York colleague while it is 1:00 PM for you in London, you do not need to remember who has changed their clocks and who has not. Atlas shows everyone's real local time on a world map and flags when a slot falls outside someone's working hours, so the spring and autumn gap weeks never catch you out.