The earliest sunrise on Earth today
In Nacala, Mozambique the Sun comes up at 04:40 this morning and is gone again by 17:21. Nowhere else in the catalogue sees daylight earlier on its own clock, and 81 cities see it before five.
Computed at 5 November 2026 at 14:04 UTC. Read at this instant, and every entry moves a little every day. This is a ranking of clock readings, not of instants: it asks which city sees the Sun earliest on its own watch.
The twenty earliest sunrises by the clock today
What "earliest" means on this page
For each city we solve the instant of sunrise on its own local date, then convert that instant into the city's own clock and rank by the reading. A sunrise at 04:58 beats one at 05:02 regardless of which continent either is on or which instant either happened at. That is the question people actually ask: not when the Sun rose in absolute terms, but how early somebody had to be up to see it.
Ranking instants instead would be a different page and a much duller one. Somewhere on Earth the Sun is rising at every moment of every day, so the earliest sunrise by instant is simply whichever city is furthest east of the last one, and the answer would change every few minutes with no meaning attached to it.
The list covers the 6,338 cities in our catalogue that have a sunrise today: places above 100,000 residents plus 448 smaller originals, less any currently in polar day or polar night, which have no sunrise to rank. Somewhere below our population floor there is a town with an earlier reading than the top row.
Why the winners are always at the eastern edge of a wide zone
Three things push a sunrise earlier on the clock: being east within your time zone, being in summer at your latitude, and not observing daylight saving, which would push the reading an hour later. Stack all three and you get Nacala, Mozambique, whose 04:40 sunrise is the product of a clock set on a meridian far to its west.
It is the same underlying mismatch that the clock ahead of the Sun ranking measures at solar noon, seen from the morning end. The cost is paid in the evening: Nacala, Mozambique loses the light at 17:21, so a working day that ends at five ends in darkness for much of the year while several hours of morning light have already gone unused.
The other end of the same morning
The latest sunrise anywhere today is 10:40, in Utqiagvik, AK, which is 6 hours later on the clock than the top of this table. Two cities on the same planet on the same morning, one of them already at work in daylight while the other is still in the dark, and the difference is almost entirely a matter of where zone boundaries were drawn.
That spread is a clock artefact rather than an astronomical one, which is the point worth taking away. The Sun does the same thing everywhere; the clock is what varies. The latest sunrise ranking works the same list from the bottom.
Questions about this ranking
- Where does the Sun rise earliest today?
- By the clock, Nacala, Mozambique at 04:40. By instant the answer changes every few minutes and means nothing, so this page ranks clock readings.
- Why is the earliest sunrise not in the far east of the world?
- Because the date line resets the clock. What matters is a city's position within its own time zone, not its position on the globe.
- How many cities see sunrise before 5am today?
- 81 of the 6,337 we publish that have a sunrise at all today.
- Does this change through the year?
- Constantly. Every entry moves by a minute or two a day, the hemisphere at the top flips with the seasons, and any city starting or ending daylight saving jumps an hour in one step.