Straight answers, including the hard ones.

Because standard time is the only one Washington is allowed to choose on its own.

Under the federal Uniform Time Act (15 U.S.C. § 260a), any state may exempt itself from daylight saving time and stay on standard time year round. Arizona and Hawaii do exactly this. Permanent daylight time is the one option that requires an act of Congress, and Congress has not delivered one in eight years of trying.

So the act does both. It ends the clock change immediately using authority Washington already has, and it contains an automatic bridge: the moment Congress authorizes permanent daylight time, Washington moves to it on the next spring date, at least 60 days after federal authorization. No new bill, no new session, no new ballot measure. The destination is permanent daylight time. The act simply refuses to keep changing clocks twice a year while waiting for the door to open.

The Legislature passed Substitute House Bill 1196, sponsored by then-Rep. Marcus Riccelli of Spokane, in 2019. It passed the House 90 to 6 and the Senate 46 to 2, and Gov. Inslee signed it on May 8, 2019 as Chapter 297, Laws of 2019. It has never taken effect, because the operative sections are conditional on Congress granting permission first.

Seven years later that permission has not come. Oregon and California passed similar conditional laws and are in the same position. Washington did not fail to act in 2019. Washington acted, and then waited on someone else.

Read SHB 1196 on the Legislature's website.

No. Washington stays in the Pacific time zone as designated by the U.S. Department of Transportation. Exempting the state from daylight saving time is a different legal act from moving a state between zones, and it is one a state can do by itself. Moving zones requires a petition to the Secretary of Transportation showing the change would serve the convenience of commerce, which is a much heavier lift and is not what this proposes.

Practically, it means Washington would observe Pacific Standard Time all twelve months instead of eight.

No. Washington law already prohibits counties, cities, and other political subdivisions from adopting any time observance different from the state's, and the Act preserves that. A single statewide clock is the entire point. A patchwork would be worse than what we have now.

Tribal nations are sovereign and set their own time observance. The Navajo Nation, for instance, observes daylight saving time while the state of Arizona around it does not. Washington's tribes would make their own decisions, and the campaign would welcome conversations with any tribal government that wants to discuss coordination.

Eventually yes, but expect a transition period, and this is worth planning for rather than waving away.

Time zone data reaches devices through the IANA time zone database, which ships in operating system updates. Arizona has its own entry because it needed one. No current U.S. entry describes year-round Pacific Standard Time, so one would be created and propagate through OS updates over the following months. Current phones and laptops would handle it without user action. Older unpatched devices, embedded systems, some scheduling software, and anything hard-coded against America/Los_Angeles could need attention.

This is a known, solved category of problem. British Columbia is working through it right now with an eight-month lead time between announcement and effect, and the Act's structure gives Washington a comparable window.

Yes, for about eight months a year, until the bridge provision fires. This is the strongest practical objection to the interim step and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Right now Washington, Oregon, and California all observe daylight saving time, so the West Coast shares one clock year round. Under permanent Pacific Standard Time, Washington would match Oregon and California from early November to mid March and be one hour behind them the rest of the year. For the roughly half a million Washingtonians in Clark County who live in the Portland metro, that is a daily fact of life, not an abstraction. The same is true on the Idaho border: Spokane and Coeur d'Alene share Washington's Pacific time zone today and would not under this Act. Clarkston, Walla Walla, and every other community that functions across a state line face the same math.

Three things are worth weighing against it.

Oregon and California passed conditional permanent daylight time laws just like Washington's, and are stuck for the same reason. All three states want the same destination. When Congress acts, all three arrive there together and the Act moves Washington automatically.

Washington is already about to be out of sync with British Columbia in the other direction, starting November 1, and nobody got a vote on that.

And a state that never moves first guarantees that nothing ever moves. Someone has to go before the others follow, which is precisely what B.C. did.

If the misalignment with Oregon is disqualifying for you, the honest response is to push Oregon to move at the same time, and we would welcome help doing that.

Under permanent Pacific Standard Time, the New York Stock Exchange would open at 5:30 a.m. Pacific during the summer months instead of 6:30. East Coast meetings all shift an hour earlier for eight months of the year.

For most Washingtonians this is invisible. For people in finance, logistics, and any job anchored to Eastern time, it is a real and daily cost, and it falls hardest on exactly the sort of professional who is otherwise sympathetic to ending the clock change.

Two responses. The cost is temporary by design: the bridge provision restores the current alignment permanently once Congress acts. And it should be weighed against the cost that already exists, which is that twice a year every scheduled cross-country meeting, flight connection, and market open shifts anyway, on a fixed date, whether or not anyone is ready.

They get an hour shorter, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. In Seattle, sunset on the longest day of the year would fall around 8:11 p.m. instead of 9:11 p.m., and sunrise would move correspondingly earlier too, to about 4:11 a.m. That early light does less for most people than the evening light it replaces, since almost nobody is awake to use it.

This is the cost of the interim step, and it is why the bridge provision matters. If Congress acts, Washington gets those evenings back permanently and gets the winter evenings too, with sunset at 5:20 p.m. in late December instead of 4:20 p.m. The interim period buys an end to the clock change at the price of one hour of summer evening light, for however long Congress takes.

The most durable myth about daylight saving time is that it exists for farmers. It does not, and never did. Agricultural interests were among the loudest opponents when the United States first adopted it, because cows and crops run on the sun rather than the clock, and shifting the clock only misaligns farm work with the schedules of everyone farmers deal with: markets, hired labor, shipping, and the local elevator.

Year-round standard time tracks solar time more closely than daylight time does, which is the arrangement most agricultural schedules already work around informally.

B.C. announced in March 2026 that its spring forward on March 8 would be the province's final clock change. It now observes permanent daylight time year round, joining Yukon, which stopped in 2020. Announcing it, Premier David Eby said he hoped Washington and its neighbors would follow soon.

On November 1, 2026, Washington falls back and B.C. does not. From that day until March, Vancouver is an hour ahead of Seattle. Cross-border businesses, ferry and transit schedules, families split across the line, and border communities like Blaine, Sumas, and Point Roberts absorb that gap. Point Roberts, a Washington exclave reachable only by driving through B.C., is on a different clock than the country surrounding it.

To be precise about it: permanent standard time does not close that gap on its own. It would put Washington an hour behind B.C. year round rather than only in winter. The gap closes when the bridge provision fires and Washington moves to permanent daylight time. What the Act does immediately is stop Washington from doing the one thing B.C. just stopped doing, which is changing the clocks at all.

Read B.C.'s announcement.

Yes. On July 14, 2026, the House passed the Sunshine Protection Act by 308 to 117. The Senate then left for August recess without taking it up. Its own version, S. 29, has sat in the Commerce Committee since January 2025 without a committee vote.

The pattern is worth noticing: in 2022 the Senate passed the identical idea by unanimous consent, and several senators said afterward that they would have objected had they realized it could pass. Ten federal bills have been introduced on this over the years and none has become law. Washington has now spent seven years waiting for two chambers to agree in the same session.

If Congress does pass it, the Last Fall Back Act is built to welcome that outcome rather than conflict with it. The bridge provision moves Washington to permanent daylight time automatically.

See House roll call #238.

Then the campaign will have been a good use of everyone's time, and the Act still does useful work.

If Congress authorizes permanent daylight time before the measure takes effect, Washington's 2019 law and the Act's bridge provision both point the same direction, and the state moves to permanent daylight time. If Congress acts after enactment, the bridge fires on the next spring date at least 60 days out. There is no scenario in which passing this Act leaves Washington worse positioned than not passing it.

We would happily stand down. That is not the outcome we would bet on after eight years and ten bills.

It is solid, it is peer reviewed, and every study is linked on our science page so you can read the originals rather than take our word for it.

• A 2024 systematic review pooling 12 studies across 10 countries found increased acute myocardial infarction risk in the days after the spring transition, with no matching rise after the fall change.
• Analysis of 22 years of U.S. crash data found fatal motor vehicle accidents rose about 6 percent in the workweek after spring forward, concentrated in the morning and on the western edge of each time zone. Washington sits on the western edge.
• National injury data showed workers slept about 40 minutes less and sustained 5.7 percent more workplace injuries on the Monday after the spring change, with 68 percent more workdays lost.
• A decade of Finnish stroke hospitalizations showed elevated ischemic stroke incidence in the two days following a transition, with older adults most affected.
• More than a million deer-vehicle collisions analyzed across 23 states showed collisions rising about 16 percent in the week after the fall shift to standard time.

What matters as much as the numbers is what kind of finding each one is. That is the next question, and it is the one most coverage of this debate gets wrong.

This distinction is the single most useful thing to understand about the daylight saving debate, and almost nobody draws it clearly.

Transition effects spike and then settle. The cardiac events, the strokes, the workplace injuries, the fatal crashes, and the one-week jump in deer collisions are all disruptions that appear in the days after a clock change and decay back to baseline. They are caused by the change itself, not by any particular time. Every one of these harms disappears entirely if Washington stops switching, regardless of which time the state lands on. This is the category where the evidence points consistently in one direction, even though individual cardiac, stroke, and crash studies vary in size and method and don't all produce identical results.

Level effects rise and stay risen. A separate and smaller body of research asks what happens if a place stays permanently on one time or the other, year after year, findings that don't spike and decay but shift a baseline instead. This literature is thinner than the transition research, since the chronic effects of staying on one time permanently are less studied than the acute effects of switching. Unlike the transition research, it points in both directions, an analytical distinction more than a settled scientific consensus:

• Arguments favoring permanent standard time: earlier winter sunrises, more morning light for circadian entrainment, shorter dark-morning commutes for school children.
• Arguments favoring permanent daylight time: more evening light when most people are awake and outdoors, fewer evening-hour collisions with wildlife and pedestrians, more usable winter afternoons, more evening retail and recreation activity.

That is why the Last Fall Back Act is structured the way it is. Ending the switch captures the entire transition category immediately and uncontroversially. The bridge provision resolves the level question in favor of daylight time as soon as federal law permits it. The interim period carries real level costs, which we describe honestly in Q7, Q9, and Q18 rather than burying. Q16 explains why we think that trade is worth making.

Because the alternative is not "no costs." It is paying the transition costs forever.

There are three options actually on the table, and it helps to lay them side by side.

Permanent daylight time captures everything: the transition harms end, and the evening-light and wildlife-collision benefits arrive. It is the best outcome available and it is the Act's destination. It is also the one option Washington cannot choose for itself. Congress has to act first, and in eight years and ten bills it has not.

The status quo is the only option that captures nothing. Washington keeps paying the full transition cost every March and every November, indefinitely, and never receives the level benefits of either destination. This is what waiting looks like, and Washington has been doing it since 2019.

Permanent standard time under this Act captures the transition benefits immediately and the daylight-time level benefits automatically, the moment they become legally available.

The distinction that matters is not the size of the two categories. It is their shape. Transition costs recur every year, forever, and nothing about them is reversible. Every spring that passes, the heart attacks and the crashes and the lost workdays happen again, and there is no mechanism by which continuing to switch eventually stops costing anything.

The level costs of the interim period are bounded and reversible. They last exactly as long as Congress takes, and the day the bridge provision fires they end completely. Later summer sunsets return. The evening commute moves back out of deer hours. Alignment with Oregon and British Columbia is restored.

We are not going to tell you the interim period is free, or hand you an arithmetic that proves the gains outweigh the costs to the decimal. Honest people can weigh a permanent, recurring harm against a temporary, reversible one differently, and reasonable people do. What we will say is that the status quo is the one choice that is definitely wrong. It is the only option that guarantees Washington pays forever and receives nothing, and it is the only one that requires no decision at all to keep going.

Standing still is also a choice. It is just the one nobody has to defend.

Almost nobody defends the clock change itself. The real disagreement is about where to land, and it splits people who agree with each other about almost everything else.

Permanent daylight time advocates argue that standard time throws away evening light, which is when most people are actually awake and outdoors, and that morning darkness matters less because most people are indoors. Steve Calandrillo of UW Law has made this case for years and testified against Washington's 2024 permanent standard time bill on exactly these grounds. Because permanent daylight time is this Act's destination, we agree with more of this than we disagree with. Our answer is that the Act gets there when it is legally possible to get there, and refuses to keep changing clocks in the meantime.

Sleep and circadian scientists argue the reverse, that morning light is what sets the body clock and that permanent daylight time would leave much of the country waking in darkness for months. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine has published a position favoring permanent standard time on these grounds. It has not endorsed the Last Fall Back Act.

Retail, hospitality, and recreation interests generally favor daylight time, on the reasoning that evening light drives spending and outdoor activity.

Wildlife and traffic safety researchers have found evening-hour collision costs under permanent standard time. See Q18.

Notably, when Washington's 2024 permanent standard time bill was heard, the Association of Washington Business testified in favor of it. The coalition here is not the one people usually expect.

This is the most specific empirical argument against permanent standard time, it comes out of the University of Washington, and it contains findings in both of the categories described in Q15. It deserves a direct answer rather than a dodge.

Cunningham, Prugh and colleagues analyzed more than a million deer-vehicle collisions across 23 states. They found two distinct things.

A transition effect: collisions rise roughly 16 percent in the week after the fall shift to standard time, as evening commutes move abruptly into darkness during deer breeding season. This is a spike that settles, and it is an argument for ending the switch. It also means the fall change is not harmless, which is worth stating plainly since the cardiac and workplace literature finds harm concentrated in the spring.

A level effect: modeling the two permanent options nationally, they estimated permanent standard time would add roughly 73,660 collisions, 66 human deaths, 4,140 injuries and $2.39 billion in costs annually, while permanent daylight time would reduce collisions about 2.3 percent across a full year. These are sustained annual figures, not spikes. The mechanism is that sunset an hour earlier puts evening traffic into deer activity hours for more of the autumn, every year, indefinitely. Prugh testified against Washington's 2024 standard time bill on this basis.

We accept both findings. The level finding is a genuine, ongoing cost of the interim step, and it is one of the strongest arguments in the entire debate for permanent daylight time, which is where this Act is headed. It is not an argument for continuing to change the clocks twice a year, and nobody has made that case.

Read the UW summary.

This is a level-effect question, the evidence is genuinely mixed, and that is more than most campaigns on either side will tell you.

The case that permanent standard time helps: morning light exposure is the primary signal that entrains the human circadian clock, and later winter sunrises under permanent daylight time would delay that signal for months. This is the mechanism behind the sleep medicine community's position.

The case that it hurts: for most working people, evening is when they are actually outside and free, and darkness at 4:20 p.m. rather than 5:20 p.m. shortens the usable, social part of a winter day. Reduced outdoor activity and social contact are themselves well-established contributors to low winter mood.

Both are true and they point in opposite directions. What can be said with more confidence is that abrupt one-hour circadian disruptions twice a year are bad for mood and sleep regardless of which side of this you land on. If your priority is winter evening light, permanent daylight time is where this Act goes, and the fastest route to it is a state that has already stopped switching.

Both were historically central arguments for daylight saving time. Both are level-effect claims, and both have weakened considerably.

The energy case dates to an era when lighting dominated household electricity use. Modern analyses find effects that are small, inconsistent in direction, and swamped by heating and cooling. It is not a serious argument in either direction anymore, and we do not make it.

The crime case is stronger. Doleac and Sanders analyzed U.S. crime data around the daylight saving transition and found evening daylight associated with a 7 percent drop in daily robbery rates, rising to a 27 percent drop in the specific hour after sunset that gained an extra hour of light. That is an argument for daylight time rather than standard time. Sen. Honeyford made a version of this argument for his 2019 bill. It is one more level-effect finding pointing at permanent daylight time as the right destination.

Four times, and none has reached a floor vote.

Senate Bill 5511 in 2022, sponsored by Sen. Jim Honeyford, proposed year-round Pacific Standard Time expiring upon federal authorization of permanent daylight time. Senate Bill 5795 in 2024, sponsored by Sen. Mike Padden, proposed the same structure and drew thirteen bipartisan sponsors along with supportive testimony from the Association of Washington Business, UW circadian biologist Horacio de la Iglesia, and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. It was scheduled for a committee vote in Senate State Government & Elections and then pulled before the policy cutoff. Senate Bill 5001 in 2025, sponsored by Sens. Jeff Wilson and Manka Dhingra, amended the 2019 law directly instead of replacing it, with the same federal contingency. House Bill 2119 in 2026, sponsored by Reps. Dufault, Marshall, Dye, Griffey, and Bernbaum, proposed the same structure in the House. Both remain stalled in committee.

That history is why this campaign exists in the form it does. The problem in Olympia has not been that this idea loses votes. It is that it never gets one. A citizens' initiative standing behind the bill changes what it costs to let it sit.

Read the SB 5795 bill report and hearing testimony.

Not yet, and no. Nothing on this website is an official petition and signing up here is not signing a petition.

The fastest path is the Legislature. We are asking members to introduce and pass the Last Fall Back Act in the 2027 session, which runs from mid January to late April. If the session stalls, we file an Initiative to the Legislature with the Secretary of State in March 2027 and begin collecting signatures. That measure goes to the 2028 Legislature, and if they decline to act it reaches the November 2028 general election ballot.

Adding your name now tells us you are willing to sign when the petition is real, and lets us reach you the moment it is.

Because the calendar does not allow sooner, and because we would rather the Legislature make it unnecessary.

Washington sets the windows, and they are narrow. An Initiative to the Legislature can be filed starting about ten months before the next legislative session, with signatures due ten days before that session opens. For us that means filing around March 2027 and submitting signatures by late December 2027, which puts the measure before the 2028 Legislature and, if they decline to act, on the November 2028 ballot.

The signature requirement is more than 308,000 valid signatures from registered Washington voters. Because some are always invalidated, the Secretary of State recommends a 20 to 25 percent cushion, so the real target is around 386,000. Gathering that properly takes most of a year, and rushing it is how initiatives fail verification.

The 2027 legislative session comes first for a reason. If Olympia passes the Act, Washington stops changing its clocks years earlier than any ballot measure could deliver, and nobody has to gather a single signature.

No, and you should know that before you sign anything.

Under Washington's Public Records Act, signatures on initiative and referendum petitions are public records. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld this 8 to 1 in Doe v. Reed in 2010, holding that disclosing the names and addresses of petition signers does not generally violate the First Amendment. In practice this means a signed petition sheet, including your name and address, can be requested and published by anyone.

Two things worth separating. Signing a petition is not voting. It asks that voters get to decide the question; it does not commit you to vote yes, and it does not register you with any party, organization, or campaign.

And the email signup on this website is a different thing entirely. That list is ours, it is not a public record, and we do not sell or share it. See our privacy page.

Read background on Doe v. Reed from the Washington Attorney General.

Filing an initiative with the Secretary of State costs almost nothing. Gathering three hundred thousand valid signatures is the expensive part. Campaigns that pay professional signature gatherers typically spend well into seven figures; volunteer-driven campaigns spend a fraction of that and take considerably more work. Which of those this becomes depends on how many people volunteer.

Either way the cost is borne by the campaign and its supporters, not by taxpayers. A qualified measure is added to a general election that is being held regardless, and appears in the voters' pamphlet alongside everything else on the ballot.

Email your own state legislators and ask them to introduce the Last Fall Back Act in the 2027 session. Legislators count messages from constituents in their own district, and this issue has almost no organized opposition, which means a small number of letters carries unusual weight. Given that the last four bills stalled from lack of scheduling rather than lack of support, "please make sure this gets a vote" is a more useful sentence than "please support this."

Find yours through the Washington State District Finder, or use our contact tools, which include a message you can send in about two minutes.

We would rather the Legislature do this in 2027. If they don't, we file in March and the voters decide in 2028. That is why a message this session carries weight now instead of in some later one.

This is a volunteer effort, organized as Last Fall Back Washington, a Washington nonprofit corporation. There is no paid staff, no corporate funding, and no candidate or party attached to it.

Questions, offers to help, and press inquiries all go to info @ lastfallback . org. If you want to help organize, gather signatures when the time comes, or connect us with an organization that might endorse, we would like to hear from you. A one-page brief (PDF) is also available if you want something to forward.