Greetings from South Africa! In South Africa, we have not observed DST in my lifetime, nor are there any plans to implement DST that have been publicised.
The current legal definition is "South African Standard Time (SAST) is defined as Coordinated Universal Time plus two (2) hours (or UTC +02:00)", as defined in South African National Government Gazette No. 40125 of 8 July 2016. [https://web.archive.org/web/20200128084045/https://www.gov.za/sites/default/files/gcis_document/201607/40125gon814.pdf] Cheers, Michael On Tue, 30 Sept 2025 at 04:02, Tim Parenti via tz <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Mon, 29 Sept 2025 at 21:44, Saras Sing <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Yeah so I feel that South Africa has Daylight Saving Time every year from >> September to March/April etc which feels South African time now is wrong for >> now > > > Currently, our data shows South Africa observing year-round UTC+2 since 1944. > The output from the following commands I just ran demonstrates our current > understanding as reflected in our data: > > $ export LC_ALL=C ; TZ=Etc/UTC date ; TZ=Africa/Johannesburg date > Tue Sep 30 02:00:39 UTC 2025 > Tue Sep 30 04:00:39 SAST 2025 > > It sounds like you're saying that clocks were instead moved forward in South > Africa sometime a few weeks ago. That would mean that, at the time I'm > sending this message (~02:00 UTC), it should presently be ~05:00 in South > Africa instead of the ~04:00 our data currently calculates as above. > > If that is what you mean, is this a newly-adopted practice? I'm afraid I'm > not finding any information supporting this claim from a cursory news search. > Without solid evidence of folks in South Africa actually observing such a > time change en masse, we won't be able to help. > > -- > Tim Parenti
