The longest day on Earth today
Punta Arenas, Chile gets 15 hours 10 minutes between sunrise and sunset on November 5, 2026. The shortest day anywhere in the catalogue today is 0 minutes, in Longyearbyen, Norway.
Computed at 5 November 2026 at 14:02 UTC. This ranking is true for November 5, 2026 and for no other date. Tomorrow the order shifts, and within a few weeks the leading city changes hemisphere.
The twenty longest days on Earth today
| # | City | Daylight | Sunrise | Sunset | Latitude |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Punta Arenas, Chile | 15h 10m | 05:52 | 21:02 | 53.2°S |
| 2 | Dunedin, New Zealand | 14h 27m | 06:08 | 20:35 | 45.9°S |
| 3 | Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina | 14h 26m | 06:00 | 20:27 | 45.9°S |
| 4 | Queenstown, New Zealand | 14h 23m | 06:17 | 20:40 | 45.0°S |
| 5 | Christchurch, New Zealand | 14h 16m | 06:05 | 20:21 | 43.5°S |
| 6 | Hobart, Australia | 14h 13m | 05:48 | 20:01 | 42.9°S |
| 7 | Puerto Montt, Chile | 14h 06m | 06:32 | 20:38 | 41.5°S |
| 8 | Wellington, New Zealand | 14h 06m | 06:02 | 20:07 | 41.3°S |
| 9 | Lower Hutt, New Zealand | 14h 05m | 06:01 | 20:06 | 41.2°S |
| 10 | Osorno, Chile | 14h 02m | 06:35 | 20:37 | 40.6°S |
| 11 | Valdivia, Chile | 13h 59m | 06:37 | 20:36 | 39.8°S |
| 12 | Neuquen, Argentina | 13h 55m | 06:18 | 20:13 | 39.0°S |
| 13 | Temuco, Chile | 13h 54m | 06:37 | 20:31 | 38.7°S |
| 14 | Bahia Blanca, Argentina | 13h 54m | 05:55 | 19:49 | 38.7°S |
| 15 | Geelong, Australia | 13h 53m | 06:10 | 20:02 | 38.1°S |
| 16 | City of Port Phillip, Australia | 13h 52m | 06:08 | 19:59 | 37.8°S |
| 17 | Melbourne, Australia | 13h 51m | 06:08 | 19:59 | 37.8°S |
| 18 | Mar del Plata, Argentina | 13h 51m | 05:38 | 19:29 | 38.0°S |
| 19 | Hamilton, New Zealand | 13h 51m | 06:07 | 19:58 | 37.8°S |
| 20 | Tauranga, New Zealand | 13h 51m | 06:03 | 19:54 | 37.7°S |
How today's day length was worked out
For each of the 6,338 cities in the catalogue we take the local civil date in that city's own time zone, which is not the same date everywhere at once, solve for the instant the Sun's upper limb crosses the sunrise horizon in the morning and again in the evening, and subtract. The result is in the table above without any rounding beyond the minute it is printed to.
Day length depends on latitude and the date, and on nothing else of consequence: longitude moves the clock times of sunrise and sunset but not the gap between them, and altitude is ignored, which costs a few minutes at a city on a high plateau with a low horizon. Where the Sun does not set at all the entry reads as a full 24 hours, and where it does not rise it reads as zero, because those are the true values rather than missing ones.
Our catalogue covers 6,338 cities: every place GeoNames lists above 100,000 residents, plus 448 smaller ones this site has published from the start. It is not every settlement on Earth. A research station or a village further from the equator than anything here would beat the top row today, and this page cannot see it.
Why this city and not another
Only two things decide the answer on any given day: how far from the equator a place is, and which side of it. The hemisphere tilted towards the Sun takes every long day, and within that hemisphere the further from the equator the longer the day, without exception. So the leaderboard is really a latitude list filtered by season, and today it is topped by Punta Arenas, Chile at 53.2 degrees south.
That also means the whole table swaps ends twice a year. Around each equinox the two hemispheres are level and the spread across the entire planet collapses: today it is 15 hours 10 minutes from the longest day on Earth to the shortest. At the solstices the same spread is more than sixteen hours, because one pole is in permanent daylight while the other is in permanent night. If you want the extreme version rather than today's, the June solstice and December solstice rankings hold still.
The 24 hour ceiling
Today no city in the catalogue is inside a midnight sun run, so every entry in the table is a genuine sunrise-to-sunset measurement and the ranking is a clean ordering by latitude. For part of the year that is not true: cities inside the Arctic Circle hit the 24 hour ceiling and the ranking flattens out at the top. The midnight sun ranking counts days instead, which keeps working when hours stop discriminating.
The opposite floor applies too. A city in polar night reads zero, and zero is not a near miss for a short day, it is a different state. That is what the shortest day ranking has to deal with at the other end of this same list.
Questions about this ranking
- Where is the longest day on Earth today?
- Punta Arenas, Chile, with 15 hours 10 minutes of daylight on November 5, 2026. The answer is recomputed every time this page is served, so it is current rather than stored.
- Does the longest day change from day to day?
- The city at the top changes slowly, over weeks, as the Sun's declination moves. The number changes every day. Around the solstices the top of the table barely moves; around the equinoxes it is volatile, because the whole planet is within a few minutes of the same day length.
- Why is the spread between longest and shortest so small today?
- It is 15 hours 10 minutes today. The spread depends entirely on how far the Sun is from the celestial equator. Near an equinox it is close to zero everywhere; at a solstice it runs from zero hours to twenty four.
- Is altitude taken into account?
- No. Every calculation assumes a flat sea-level horizon. A city on a plateau looking down on a plain sees the Sun a few minutes earlier and later than this page says, and a city in a deep valley sees it later and earlier.