Daylight saving time is thought to promote more outdoor activity by giving people an extra hour of sunshine in the evening prior to dusk.
TUESDAY, April 28, 2026 — Daylight saving time is thought to promote more outdoor activity by giving people an extra hour of sunshine in the evening prior to dusk.
There's no appreciable difference in people's number of daily steps before and after a time change, according to Fitbit data drawn from 1,157 people in four U.S. states.
“Overall, changing times does not seem to be the public health benefit that some think that it is, at least in terms of activity levels,” senior researcher Jessilyn Dunn said in a news release. She's an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. For the study, researchers drew on data from the All of Us Research Program, a federally funded initiative that gathers Fitbit data from more than 50,000 people across the country every year.
The team decided to focus their analysis on the four corner states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, because most of Arizona does not change its clocks along with other states. The states are large but not wildly different from one another in ways that could affect people's daily steps, researchers said. The team could compare Arizona against the other three.
“Picking these states allowed us to put together more of a natural experiment design,” lead researcher Hayoung Jeong, a doctoral student in Dunn's laboratory, said in a news release. “Rather than randomly assigning people into the study, we were able to frame this question in a more statistically sound method. ” The researchers homed in on a week before and a week after the time changes that took place in the fall of 2021 through the spring of 2023.
The result — people tended to get about the same number of steps every day, regardless of whether daylight time or standard time was in effect. In the spring, people walk more in the evening but less earlier in the day, and vice versa when fall rolls around, results showed.
For example, morning activity in the fall went up by about 202 steps —about one and a half city blocks — but evening activity decreased by 180 steps at the same time. Researchers found that people who were morning walkers actively capitalized on the switch to standard time, significantly increasing their morning activity.
But evening walkers were different — the spring forward switch to daylight saving time did not produce a significant increase in their evening steps, even though the change aligned with their typical active times. Neutral walkers — those without a clear preference for morning or evening activity — simply changed their activity based on daylight. They walked more in the morning during the fall, and more in the evening during the winter.
The results seem to indicate that if the U.S. stopped its regular time changes, choosing either daylight or standard time wouldn't have a meaningful effect on people's activity levels.schedules because they're on a fixed work schedule or have safety concerns.
“We should probably be looking more closely at whether these time changes are inconveniencing some groups but not others,” Dunn said. SOURCES: Duke University, news release, April 23, 2026;
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