The Atlas of American Sunlight: Where the Sun Rises First, Sets Last, and Why

On the evening of the June solstice, at 7:47 PM, the sun goes down over Panama City, Florida. At that exact moment, 1,300 miles to the northwest in Williston, North Dakota, the sun is still two hours and twelve minutes from setting — it won’t touch the horizon until 9:59 PM. Both cities are on Central Time. Their clocks agree to the second, all year long.

That single pair of numbers contains most of what this article is about. Sunlight in America is governed by a handful of forces — latitude, longitude, time zone borders, daylight saving time, and (more than most people realize) the shape of the land itself — and they combine differently in every city.

To map how, we computed sunrise, sunset, day length, and solar noon for two 2026 reference dates — June 21 and December 21 — for every one of the 1,847 supported U.S. places with an estimated urban population of 25,000 or more that this site tracks, across all 50 states, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico, using the same validated engine that powers every city page here (accuracy details below). The counts below were recomputed on October 1, 2026, using unrounded event times. Counts refer to supported places, not population shares: estimated urban areas can overlap. Our downloadable study data makes the seasonal comparisons checkable.

The rules of the game: what “sunrise” actually means

Before the rankings, one definition, because every number below depends on it.

Official sunrise is the moment the upper edge of the sun’s disk appears at an ideal, flat, sea-level horizon — and official sunset is when that upper edge disappears below it. Because Earth’s atmosphere bends light around the horizon (refraction), you see the sun before it’s geometrically there. The standard convention, used by the U.S. Naval Observatory and NOAA and by this site, places sunrise and sunset at the moment the sun’s center sits 0.833° below the horizon: about 0.57° for average refraction plus 0.27° for the sun’s radius.

Two consequences worth keeping in mind:

• Day length is always slightly longer than pure geometry would give — even on an equinox, everywhere in the U.S. gets a few minutes more than 12 hours of official daylight. (More in our guide to solstices and equinoxes.)
• The convention assumes a flat horizon. Real mountains break it, sometimes spectacularly — we’ll get there at the end.

If you’ve ever wondered how precise these published times can honestly claim to be, we wrote a separate deep dive on how accurate sunrise and sunset times really are.

The latitude dial: how much summer and winter you get

Latitude is the master control. It doesn’t decide when your clock says the sun rises — that’s longitude’s job, as we’ll see — but it decides how much daylight you get, and how violently that amount swings across the year.

On the June solstice (June 21 in 2026), day length across American cities looks like this:

City	Summer solstice day	Winter solstice day	Annual swing
Fairbanks, AK	21h 50m	3h 42m	18h 08m
Anchorage, AK	19h 21m	5h 29m	13h 52m
Juneau, AK	18h 20m	6h 20m	12h 00m
Bellingham, WA	16h 10m	8h 16m	7h 54m
Minot, ND	16h 05m	8h 20m	7h 45m
Boston, MA	15h 17m	9h 05m	6h 12m
New York, NY	15h 06m	9h 15m	5h 50m
Los Angeles, CA	14h 26m	9h 53m	4h 33m
Miami, FL	13h 45m	10h 32m	3h 13m
Honolulu, HI	13h 26m	10h 50m	2h 36m
Ponce, PR	13h 13m	11h 03m	2h 10m

A few records fall out of the full ranking:

• The longest day in the Lower 48 belongs to Bellingham, Washington — at 48.75°N, the northernmost sizable city in the contiguous U.S. — with 16 hours 10 minutes of solstice daylight. The northern rim of Washington, Montana, and North Dakota all crowd within minutes of it.
• The most extreme city in America is Fairbanks, and it isn’t close. Its 21h 50m solstice “day” ends at 12:47 AM the following morning — the sun rises at 2:57 AM, works a full lap around the sky, and sets after midnight. Six months later Fairbanks gets 3h 42m of sun, rising at 10:58 AM and setting at 2:40 PM. Its year-round swing of 18 hours dwarfs anything in the Lower 48.
• The steadiest sunlight in America is in Puerto Rico. Ponce varies by just 2h 10m across the entire year — its shortest day (11h 03m) is longer than the longest day some Alaskans get in November. San Juan (2h 13m) and Honolulu (2h 36m) are close behind.

Notice something curious in the table: the tropics lose the summer contest. Ponce’s solstice day of 13h 13m is the among the shortest summer days in our dataset — almost three hours shorter than Bellingham’s. High latitude means feast and famine; low latitude means neither. We explore the mechanism — and why darkness also falls faster in the South after sunset — in why it gets dark faster in the South and daylight hours across the United States.

The longitude dial: where noon is a lie

Here is the fact from our dataset that surprises almost everyone: on the winter solstice, with every clock in the country on plain standard time, the sun reaches its highest point over Bangor, Maine at 11:33 AM — and over Williston, North Dakota at 12:53 PM. “Noon,” as the sun defines it, spans a full 80 minutes across the contiguous United States.

Nothing astronomical is happening here. Earth turns 15° of longitude per hour, so solar events sweep westward across the country at about 4 minutes per degree — but clocks change in one-hour blocks at time zone borders. Whether your city sits on the eastern or western edge of its block decides whether your clock runs ahead of the sun or behind it:

• Clock furthest behind the sun (early solar noon): Bangor, ME (11:33 AM), then the eastern-edge-of-Pacific-Time cluster around Las Vegas (11:38–11:39 AM) and Phenix City, Alabama, pressed against the Eastern/Central border (11:38 AM).
• Clock furthest ahead of the sun (late solar noon), Lower 48: Williston, ND (12:53 PM), then the west Texas oil patch — Odessa and Midland at 12:47–12:48 PM — and Terre Haute, Indiana (12:48 PM), deep in the western reaches of Eastern Time. In Alaska, Anchorage tops the nation at 12:55 PM.

Because sunrise and sunset ride along with solar noon, position-in-zone produces enormous same-clock differences:

Time zone	Earliest solstice sunset	Latest solstice sunset	Gap
Central	Panama City, FL 7:47 PM	Williston, ND 9:59 PM	2h 12m
Mountain	Hobbs, NM 8:04 PM	Kalispell, MT 9:42 PM	1h 38m
Pacific	Brawley, CA 7:54 PM	Bellingham, WA 9:17 PM	1h 23m
Eastern	Aventura, FL 8:15 PM	Muskegon, MI 9:29 PM	1h 14m

(Latitude helps stretch these summer gaps — northern cities get later sunsets on top of their westward clock shift — but the clock-versus-sun offset is the engine. The full mechanism is in why sunset times differ across a time zone and solar noon vs. clock noon.)

This is also how you get genuinely strange pairs. Indianapolis sees its solstice sun set at 9:16 PM — five minutes later than Seattle at 9:11 PM — despite Seattle sitting nearly eight degrees of latitude farther north. Indiana’s position at the far western edge of Eastern Time buys it evening daylight that its latitude never earned, which is precisely why Indiana’s time zone assignment has been argued about for a century.

The 9 PM sunset club

Put latitude and longitude together and you can draw a map of America’s summer-evening privilege. On the June solstice:

• In 330 of the 1,847 supported places, the sun sets at 9:00 PM or later, including sunsets after midnight that close the preceding daylight interval.
• The 9:30 PM club is far more exclusive: 14 supported places, found only in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota. Caldwell, on Boise’s western outskirts, makes 9:32 PM. Boise rounds to 9:30 PM on the display but falls a few seconds before the strict cutoff, so it is not included in that count.
• The latest sunset in our Lower 48 sample is Williston, ND, at 9:59 PM — one rounded minute short of a 10 PM sunset in the Lower 48. Anchorage sets at 11:39 PM, and Fairbanks, as noted, simply skips into tomorrow at 12:47 AM.
• The earliest risers in the Lower 48 are a three-way tie at 4:49 AM: Coeur d’Alene and Post Falls, Idaho, and — 2,300 miles away — Bangor, Maine. Two opposite corners of the country, one shared fate, for opposite reasons: the Idaho cities are far north near a zone’s eastern edge; Bangor is the easternmost outpost of its entire zone.

Bangor’s position cuts both ways, and six months later it collects the harshest record in the Lower 48: the earliest winter sunset in the contiguous United States, 3:57 PM — the only such city to lose the sun before 4 PM. The broader winter picture:

• 1,087 places — about 59% of the supported places — see the December reference sunset before 5:00 PM.
• 289 places, across 19 states, lose it before 4:30 PM (Boston: 4:15 PM; Seattle: 4:20 PM).
• Only five cities wait past 8:30 AM for winter sunrise: three in Alaska, plus Williston (8:42 AM) and Minot (8:33 AM) in North Dakota.

If those winter numbers make you slightly miserable to read, you’re not imagining the effect — see short winter days, light, and mood.

What permanent daylight saving time would actually do

This section became current events while we were writing it. On July 14, 2026, the U.S. House passed H.R. 139, the Sunshine Protection Act, by a 308–117 vote, a bill that would make daylight saving time permanent nationwide. The official House roll-call page is the source for the vote and bill number.

America has run this experiment once before. Congress enacted year-round DST in the winter of 1973–74 during the energy crisis; after one season of 8:30 AM-and-later sunrises and children commuting in darkness, public support collapsed and Congress repealed it within the year. So rather than argue, we did what a dataset lets you do: we modeled a simple scenario: add one hour to December clock times in places whose timezones currently observe daylight saving. Places without seasonal clock changes, including Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and most of Arizona, keep their existing times. This illustrates a clock shift rather than predicting future legislation or local choices.

The evening side of the trade is spectacular:

• Cities with a winter sunset at or after 5:00 PM jump from 760 under current clock rules to 1,840 in this scenario — about 41% to 99.6% of supported places. New York would close the solstice at 5:32 PM instead of 4:32 PM; Detroit at 6:03 PM; Atlanta at 6:33 PM.

The morning side is the part the 1974 experiment is remembered for:

• Cities where the winter sun rises at 8:30 AM or later would explode from 5 to 515 — about 28% of the supported places.
• 76 supported places would not see the sun before 9:00 AM on the solstice. Indianapolis would wait until 9:02 AM, Boise until 9:15 AM, and Williston, ND until 9:42 AM — with first light around the end of the first school period. Today, exactly two American cities (Fairbanks and Anchorage) experience a post-9 AM sunrise.
• Seattle (8:55 AM), Detroit (8:58 AM), and Minneapolis (8:48 AM) would all join the dark-morning club that currently has almost no members outside Alaska.

Neither side of that trade is wrong — it’s a genuine preference about where to put the darkness, and our data just prices it. The history of how we got here (railroads inventing zones in 1883, the Standard Time Act of 1918, the Uniform Time Act of 1966, the 2007 extension) is in how daylight saving time changes sunrise and sunset, and the sleep-science angle in morning light and your body clock.

The outliers: Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico

The three non-contiguous corners of America each break the mainland’s rules in a different direction, and they bracket every ranking above:

Alaska is the amplitude outlier. Fairbanks alone holds the national records for earliest summer sunrise (2:57 AM), latest sunset (12:47 AM), longest day (21h 50m), shortest day (3h 42m), earliest winter sunset (2:40 PM), latest winter sunrise (10:58 AM), and largest annual swing (18h 08m). And Fairbanks is not even an extreme place by Alaska’s standards — it merely happens to be the state’s northernmost city large enough for our 25,000-population cutoff. North of it, Utqiaġvik doesn’t see the sun at all for two months.

Hawaii and Puerto Rico are the stability outliers — tropical latitude plus no DST means the sun does nearly the same thing every single day. Honolulu’s sunrise stays within a window of about an hour and a quarter all year. It’s no accident that neither Hawaii nor most of Arizona bothers changing clocks: when your daylight barely moves, there’s nothing to “save.”

Puerto Rico deserves a special mention for winter: on the December solstice, when about 59% of our supported places have sunset before 5 PM, every Puerto Rican city we track keeps its sun past 5:45 PM and enjoys more than 11 hours of daylight — the longest winter days under the U.S. flag.

You can put any two of these against each other — or against your own city — with our city comparison tool, and browse the live national rankings on the extremes page.

The horizon is not actually flat

Everything above — every table on this site and every other sunrise site, every weather app, every almanac — shares one quiet assumption: that your horizon is an ideal flat line at your own elevation, like an ocean horizon. For most American cities that’s nearly true. For cities against real mountains, it is very much not, and the error is not measured in seconds.

The physics is simple: if a ridge stands, say, 10° above the geometric horizon along the sun’s path, the sun disappears when it drops behind the ridge, not the sea-level line — often an hour or more before the published time. The method for computing terrain-corrected rise and set times is well established in the scientific literature (it’s the same calculation used in mountain hydrology and solar-energy siting, following Dozier & Frew’s horizon algorithms and a U.S. Forest Service method for computing sunrise and sunset in mountainous terrain) — it just requires marrying an elevation model of the surrounding landscape to the solar calculation, which is why consumer sun-time sites don’t do it.

The calculators on this site do not apply a terrain model. Entering exact coordinates improves the location match, but it does not account for the height of a ridge, a building, or a tree along the Sun’s path. A future terrain comparison would need to publish its elevation data, observer locations, horizon profiles, and validation before its numerical results could be used for planning.

For now, compare the calculated direction of sunrise or sunset with your actual skyline. The background physics is in how elevation and horizon change sunrise and sunset, and the golden hour guide explains how to plan around the light window.

For a comparison with downloadable inputs and results, see our winter daylight after 5 PM study. It distinguishes counts of places from population shares and compares fixed June and December reference dates.

How we computed all of this

The seasonal comparisons use the same solar engine as the city planners. The daylight-after-work study publishes the location inputs, UTC event instants, durations, and calculation source. Historical and legislative claims use the linked external sources.

• Cities: the 1,847 supported places meeting the SimpleMaps estimated urban-population threshold of 25,000 (50 states + D.C. + Puerto Rico). This is not a census city-proper population ranking, and overlapping urban populations are not summed.
• Dates: the 2026 solstices — June 21 and December 21, 2026 — computed at each city’s own local calendar date, in its own time zone, DST rules included.
• Solar model: the standard −0.833° rise/set convention (upper limb + average refraction) over a level horizon, matching USNO and NOAA practice. Times are rounded to the minute the way the almanacs do it.
• Validation: our engine is checked by a repeatable regression test against the high-precision astronomy-engine ephemeris across latitudes from Honolulu to Anchorage in all four seasons; the current 24-event comparison averages about 1.8 seconds of absolute error, with a worst case of seven seconds. The full error analysis — including the embarrassing bugs we found in our own earlier version — is public in how accurate are sunrise and sunset times and our post-mortem on a one-minute error.
• Live pages: each linked city page updates to the local current date in your browser and lets you select another date. Without JavaScript, it shows an explicitly dated build snapshot.

One honest caveat: rankings say “of the cities we track.” Bellingham has the longest day in our supported Lower 48 sample; there are smaller towns farther north (and an entire non-urban Alaska) beyond every record listed here.

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Originally published July 27, 2026; counts and methods revised October 1, 2026. Legislative source: official House Clerk roll call for H.R. 139. Sunrise/sunset definitions: U.S. Naval Observatory. Terrain method: Dozier & Frew (1990), “Rapid calculation of terrain parameters for radiation modeling from digital elevation data,” IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, and USDA Forest Service research on sunrise/sunset computation in mountainous terrain.