The shortest day on Earth today
Longyearbyen, Norway gets 0 minutes of daylight on November 5, 2026, less than any other city in the catalogue. Punta Arenas, Chile gets 15 hours 10 minutes on the same date.
Computed at 5 November 2026 at 14:04 UTC. Valid for November 5, 2026 only. This is the one ranking on the site that can invert completely: the city at the bottom today will be near the top in six months.
The twenty shortest days on Earth today
| # | City | Daylight | Sunrise | Sunset | Latitude |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Longyearbyen, Norway | never rises | none | none | 78.2°N |
| 2 | Utqiagvik, AK | 5h 00m | 10:40 | 15:39 | 71.3°N |
| 3 | Tromso, Norway | 5h 54m | 08:30 | 14:23 | 69.6°N |
| 4 | Norilsk, Russia | 6h 03m | 09:48 | 15:51 | 69.4°N |
| 5 | Murmansk, Russia | 6h 11m | 09:25 | 15:35 | 69.0°N |
| 6 | Rovaniemi, Finland | 6h 59m | 08:30 | 15:29 | 66.5°N |
| 7 | Fairbanks, AK | 7h 22m | 08:52 | 16:14 | 64.8°N |
| 8 | Oulu, Finland | 7h 23m | 08:19 | 15:42 | 65.0°N |
| 9 | Nome, AK | 7h 26m | 10:01 | 17:27 | 64.5°N |
| 10 | Severodvinsk, Russia | 7h 29m | 08:19 | 15:48 | 64.6°N |
| 11 | Arkhangel'sk, Russia | 7h 30m | 08:16 | 15:45 | 64.5°N |
| 12 | Reykjavik, Iceland | 7h 34m | 09:23 | 16:57 | 64.1°N |
| 13 | Umea, Sweden | 7h 39m | 07:32 | 15:11 | 63.8°N |
| 14 | Ukhta, Russia | 7h 43m | 07:16 | 14:59 | 63.6°N |
| 15 | Trondheim, Norway | 7h 44m | 08:09 | 15:53 | 63.4°N |
| 16 | Noyabrsk, Russia | 7h 48m | 07:47 | 15:35 | 63.2°N |
| 17 | Kuopio, Finland | 7h 51m | 07:56 | 15:47 | 62.9°N |
| 18 | Yellowknife, Canada | 7h 54m | 08:23 | 16:17 | 62.5°N |
| 19 | Jyvaeskylae, Finland | 7h 58m | 08:00 | 15:59 | 62.2°N |
| 20 | Yakutsk, Russia | 8h 02m | 08:02 | 16:05 | 62.0°N |
How the bottom of the table is decided
Each city's local civil date is taken in its own zone, sunrise and sunset are solved for that date at its own coordinates, and the difference is the day length. Sorting ascending rather than descending gives this page. No city is excluded for being small or obscure: the full 6,338 rows are ranked and the first twenty printed.
Two entries are not really measurements. A city in polar night has no sunrise to subtract from, so it is recorded as zero daylight, and zero is a fact rather than a gap. A city in midnight sun is recorded as a full day. Both appear at the correct end of the ranking, but neither is telling you how far from the equator the place is, only that it is past the threshold.
The scope caveat cuts harder on this page than on most. Our 6,338 cities are the ones with populations above 100,000 plus 448 smaller ones we have always published, and the winter hemisphere's extreme latitudes are thinly settled. Whatever the true shortest inhabited day is on November 5, 2026, it is being had somewhere smaller than anything in this table.
Why the equator is never the answer
It is tempting to assume the shortest day belongs near the equator, because the equator is where the Sun is feeblest in winter in most people's mental picture. The opposite is true. The equator is the one latitude that never has a short day: it takes almost exactly twelve hours of daylight on every date of the year, varying by only a few minutes. Pontianak, Indonesia, at 0.0 degrees, gets 12 hours 7 minutes today, which is within minutes of what it gets in January and in July alike.
Short days are a high latitude phenomenon, and always in the hemisphere tilted away from the Sun. So the bottom of this table is the mirror image of the top of the longest day table, and the two swap over across the year. The further a place is from the equator, the more violently its day length moves, which the annual swing ranking measures directly.
A short day is not a dark day
Daylight here means the Sun above the horizon, and that undersells how much usable light a place actually gets. Civil twilight, the period when the Sun is within six degrees of the horizon, adds a meaningful chunk at each end, and adds far more at high latitudes than in the tropics, because a low Sun climbs and falls at a shallow angle there. A city with 0 minutes of sunlight may have well over an hour more of light you could read a street sign by.
That is also why the shortest-day city and the darkest-feeling city are often not the same place. Cloud, latitude and the angle of the Sun's path all matter, and only the last is something a sunrise calculation can see.
Questions about this ranking
- Where is the shortest day on Earth today?
- Longyearbyen, Norway, with 0 minutes of daylight on November 5, 2026, out of the 6,338 cities this site publishes.
- Is the shortest day near the equator?
- No. The equator has the steadiest day length on Earth, close to twelve hours all year. Short days belong to high latitudes in the hemisphere currently tilted away from the Sun.
- What happens when a city has no sunrise at all?
- It is recorded as zero daylight and sorts to the very bottom, which is accurate. Today 1 city is in that state.
- How much does this change from day to day?
- Near a solstice, barely at all. Near an equinox, by a couple of minutes a day at every city, and the identity of the bottom city can change within a week because the whole field is bunched within 15 hours 10 minutes.