An After Pickup guide
Daylight after school
How much daylight is left after the school bell in your city, any day of the year.
Updated
If school ends at in , this is how much daylight is left today.
How much daylight is left after school?
In Redmond, WA on October 27, with school out at 3:00 PM, there are about 2 h 58 min of daylight left. In most cities that drops by about an hour when clocks fall back in November, and by late June it is several hours longer.
We built this after noticing the week every fall when pickup suddenly feels like dusk. For the weather side, see how many outdoor hours you really get, and for the whole afternoon, how much free time kids have after school.
The daylight river
The same afternoon for every day of the year in . The two cliffs are the clock changes, and the glowing dot is the day shown above. Drag along the river to pick a day.
Drag along the river, or tap it, to pick a day. With a keyboard, focus the chart and use the arrow keys.
How the cities compare
Same bell, same date, fifty one cities. Latitude matters, and so does where a city sits inside its time zone.
| Rank | City | Sunset | That day | Year average | School year hours |
|---|
Sources and method
Sunset comes from the NOAA solar position equations, the same ones behind the NOAA Solar Calculator. For each date we find the sun's declination and the equation of time, then solve for the moment the center of the sun sits 0.833 degrees below the horizon, which allows for the bending of light near the horizon and the size of the sun's disk. Usable light ends at civil dusk, when the sun is 6 degrees below the horizon. We checked our results against the open-source astral library, which implements the same NOAA equations, and they agreed to within a minute on every date we tried.
Daylight after school is sunset minus the end time you picked, and it never goes below zero. We assume school ends at that same time every day. The year average counts every day of the calendar year. School year hours add up the daylight after the bell on every Monday through Friday from September 1 to June 15, without taking out holidays or breaks.
The city list is 50 of the largest US cities plus Redmond, each with approximate city-center coordinates and its IANA time zone. Clock times are worked out in each city's own time zone by your browser, so daylight saving time starts and ends on the right dates, and places that skip it, like Phoenix, stay put. If you use your location, the coordinates never leave your browser and the time zone is your device's. Everything is calculated on this page, with no outside services.
FAQ
When is the darkest pickup of the year?
Usually the first school days after clocks fall back in early November, and again in mid December around the earliest sunset. The river chart above shows both drops.
How much daylight do we lose when clocks fall back?
Exactly one hour of clock time after school, overnight. Sunset moves from around 6 PM to around 5 PM in most US cities.
Which US city has the most daylight after school?
It depends on the date. In late October southern cities on the western edge of their time zone, such as San Antonio and Atlanta, lead with close to 4 hours after a 3:00 PM bell.
How accurate are the sunset times?
Within about a minute. They come from NOAA's solar position equations and were checked against the open-source astral library.
Cite: After Pickup, "Daylight after school," updated Oct 27, 2026.
Last updated October 27, 2026.