When does Daylight Savings Time happen in Austria? ie: when are clocks turned forward?

Photo by PIRO4D  via Pixabay

At the moment, while the European Union (EU) keeps threatening to end Daylight Savings Time, all of the EU still advances their clocks every year so that it goes dark later during the warmer months.

All EU countries than turn their clocks back towards the end of the year.

That includes Austria.

When is the Daylight Savings Time change in Austria every year then, and on what day/date is the clock turned back in the fall?

Daylight Savings Time in Austria

In Austria, the standard time is Central European Time (CET; UTC+01:00).

That means Daylight Savings Time occurs every year in Austria on the last Sunday in March at 2 AM (CET) with the clock then being moved forward an hour.

The time then remains the same until early morning on the last Sunday in October (3 AM CET), when the clock is turned back an hour.

Of course the dates of those changes differ every year depending on what date the last Sunday in March and the last Sunday in October occur.

In October, 2023 then clocks in Austria will be moved back an hour on Sunday, 29th October at 3 AM.

They will then be moved forward an hour on Sunday, March 31st, 2024 at 2 AM for the next Daylight Savings Time.

Will Daylight Savings Time in Austria continue?

While the EU did vote to scrap Daylight Savings Time throughout the EU back in 2018 after much of the public supported it, that has not yet happened and it likely may never happen.

That is because, when the change was passed on to the European Council to be implemented, the Commission decided it couldn’t happen without an impact assessment being carried out first.

(The EU is all about red-tape, carrying out “studies” and massive amounts of wasted money before most things are implemented, so this was not a surprise to many Europeans).

Then Brexit happened, followed by the world going insane over a virus with a 99.7 percent survival rate (COVID-19), and consequently the idea of the EU dumping Daylight Savings Time seems to have been forgotten.

So yes, Daylight Savings Time in Austria will also take place in 2024, and likely many years into the future as well.

About Michelle Topham

I'm a journalist, and the founder of Oh My Vienna. I have been living in Vienna since 2016 as an immigrant, because 'expat' is just a fancy word that means exactly that.