Equinox and Solstice Dates – Exact Times for Any Year

Equinox and solstice dates for any year, to the minute

This tool gives the equinox and solstice dates and exact times for any year from 1583 to 3000. Times are shown in your own time zone, in Indian Standard Time or in UTC. Each card adds the day length, sunrise and sunset at your location and how fast the days are changing.

The equinoxes and solstices are single moments that happen at the same instant everywhere on Earth. The local date can differ, though. The June 2026 solstice falls at about 08:24:30 UTC, which is 13:54–13:55 in India and 04:24–04:25 in New York, and the September 2026 equinox is on 23 September in London but 22 September in California. Everything is calculated in your browser.

How to use the Equinox & Solstice Dates

1. Type a Year or step through years with the arrow buttons. It starts on the current year.
2. Choose Show times in: My zone, IST or UTC. Any other zone can be picked from the Time zone list.
3. Pick a City or enter a latitude and longitude, or press Use my location, to get the day lengths where you live.
4. Read the four cards and the tables below them.
5. Press Copy dates for a text summary, or Download 10 years (CSV) for a spreadsheet in UTC.

Equinox & Solstice Dates features

Equinox and solstice dates 2025–2028 (UTC and IST)

Calculated by this tool and rounded to the minute. They agree with the US Naval Observatory’s published 2026 times (14:46, 08:24, 00:05 and 20:50 UTC) to within one minute; the June instant is 08:24:30 here, so it rounds to 08:25 while some almanacs truncate it to 08:24. India uses one time zone, so IST is UTC + 5 h 30 min all year.

What the equinox and solstice actually are

An equinox is the moment the Sun’s centre crosses the celestial equator. The Sun’s apparent ecliptic longitude is then exactly 0° (the March equinox) or 180° (the September equinox). A solstice is the moment that longitude reaches 90° (June) or 270° (December). The Sun is then farthest north or south, overhead at the Tropic of Cancer or of Capricorn. In the northern hemisphere these mark the astronomical start of spring, summer, autumn and winter. In the southern hemisphere it is the other way round. Weather services use meteorological seasons starting on 1 March, 1 June, 1 September and 1 December.

Day and night are not exactly equal on the equinox. Sunrise and sunset are counted from the upper edge of the Sun’s disc, and the atmosphere lifts the Sun by about half a degree near the horizon. So the equinox day lasts about 12 h 7 min at the equator, and truly equal day and night (the “equilux”) comes a few days before the March equinox and after the September one. For daily times all year, use the sunrise and sunset calculator.

How the times are calculated

The method is from Jean Meeus’ Astronomical Algorithms (2nd edition, chapter 27). A polynomial in the year gives the mean instant, and 24 periodic terms correct it for the pull of the Moon and planets. The instant is then refined with the VSOP87 theory of the Sun until its apparent longitude is exactly 0°, 90°, 180° or 270°. The result is in Terrestrial Time. Subtracting ΔT, the lag of Earth’s rotation (about 69 seconds in the 2020s; observed values to 2026, NASA’s Espenak–Meeus formulas otherwise), gives UTC.

For 2001–2050 every instant agrees with Fred Espenak’s published table to within 2 minutes (most within one), and the 2026 times match the US Naval Observatory. Before about 1800 and after 2150 ΔT can only be estimated, so the clock times there could be several minutes out. The dates are on the Gregorian calendar, which is why the range starts in 1583.