Time in Iceland

The clock says one thing, the sun says another

This is the part the world-clock sites leave out, and it is the only part of the question that is actually about Iceland. Greenwich time is built around the Greenwich meridian, 0°. Reykjavík sits at about 22° west. Every 15° of longitude is an hour of solar time, so Iceland’s natural clock would be roughly UTC−01:00 — and the far Westfjords are further west still, in the geographical UTC−02:00 band.

Iceland keeps GMT anyway. The practical effect is that the country runs permanently ahead of its own sun: solar noon in Reykjavík falls around half past one rather than twelve, and both sunrise and sunset land later on the clock than the latitude alone would put them. It is the reason a summer evening here stretches so far past dinner, and the reason a January morning is still black at nine.

The number above is Reykjavík’s. Solar noon is computed as the midpoint of today’s sunrise and sunset at 64.15° N, 21.94° W — which is what solar noon means, not an approximation of it. Go west and it gets later: in the Westfjords the sun runs closer to two hours behind the clock. One number does not cover the country and we are not going to pretend it does.

Why there is no clock change

Iceland was not always like this. A law of 16 November 1907 put the country on UTC−01:00, which is roughly where the sun actually puts it, and for decades it shifted the clocks seasonally like everyone else.

That ended in 1968. The Althing passed Lög um tímareikning á Íslandi — the Act on time calculation in Iceland — on 5 April 1968, effective 7 April. It moved the country to GMT and abolished the changeover in one go. The reasoning was partly practical alignment with European business hours and partly a straightforward dislike of the twice-yearly disruption.

The result is a country that is, in effect, on permanent summer time and has been for over half a century. Every few years someone proposes moving back an hour so that winter mornings arrive in daylight. It has never carried.

• Your offset moves; Iceland does not. If you are in the UK or mainland Europe, the gap changes twice a year purely because you changed and Iceland did not. Zero hours from the UK in winter, one in summer.
• Flights are the usual casualty. A departure board time is local at each end, and the arithmetic is different in March from the same route in December. Check the date, not your memory of the last trip.
• Nothing about the light is negotiable. In late June the sun barely sets — see the midnight sun. In December Reykjavík gets about four hours of it. The clock is the same on both days.