Sunrise 6:14 am and sunset 6:29 pm in Christchurch

Today, Friday, September 25, 2026, the sun rises in Christchurch, New Zealand at 6:14 am and sets at 6:29 pm. That is 12 hours 15 minutes of daylight, with the sun at its highest at 12:21 pm. Christchurch is gaining 2 minutes 58 seconds of daylight a day at the moment.

Sunrise time Christchurch

The sun rises in Christchurch, New Zealand at 6:14 am today. That is the moment the top edge of the solar disc first clears a flat horizon, which is the definition every almanac uses and the one the times here are computed to. The sky starts to lighten well before that: civil twilight, the point at which you can read outside without a light, begins at 5:46 am.

Sunrise here is moving earlier at the moment. Over the year the earliest sunrise in Christchurch falls on December 10, 2026 at 5:42 am, and the latest on June 28, 2026 at 8:04 am. Neither of those dates is the solstice, and that surprises people. The longest day in Christchurch is December 22, 2026, but the earliest sunrise and the latest sunset never sit exactly on it, because the equation of time slides underneath the whole pattern, and because the clocks move twice a year on top of that.

Sunset time Christchurch

The sun sets in Christchurch, New Zealand at 6:29 pm. Light lingers after that: civil twilight runs until 6:58 pm, and full darkness, meaning the end of astronomical twilight, arrives at 8:06 pm.

The latest sunset of 2026 in Christchurch is on January 2, 2026 at 9:14 pm, and the earliest is on June 15, 2026 at 4:59 pm. The gap between those two readings is the whole story of the year in one line, and it is wider here than at a city nearer the equator and narrower than at one nearer the pole.

Daylight and solar noon in Christchurch

Daylight today runs to 12 hours 15 minutes, from sunrise to sunset. Solar noon, the instant the sun crosses the local meridian and stands at its highest, is at 12:21 pm, which is 21 minutes after clock noon. That gap is not an error. It is Christchurch sitting at 172.64 degrees east while its clock is set to Pacific/Auckland, plus the equation of time, which today is 8.1 minutes ahead of mean time, plus an hour of daylight saving for part of the year.

The sun's declination today is -0.78 degrees, meaning it stands directly overhead at that latitude somewhere on the globe. Christchurch is at 43.53 degrees south, at a middle latitude, which is why the day here is 12h 15m rather than the flat twelve hours the equator gets. Across 2026 the length of the day in Christchurch swings by 6 hours 29 minutes, from 8h 56m on June 21, 2026 to 15h 26m on December 22, 2026.

Sunrise and sunset in Christchurch month by month

The table below is the 15th of each month of 2026, computed for Christchurch, New Zealand rather than for the zone as a whole. Reading down the daylight column shows the shape of the year: long days around January, short days around July, because the southern hemisphere runs the opposite way round.

The extremes of the year in Christchurch

The sun rises and sets on every one of the 365 days of 2026 in Christchurch. No day here is ever entirely without a sunrise, which starts to happen only above roughly 66.56 degrees of latitude.

Golden hour and blue hour in Christchurch today

Golden hour is the stretch when the sun sits between six degrees above the horizon and four below it, which is when the light is low, warm and soft. Blue hour follows it, from four degrees below down to six, when the sun is gone but the sky still carries a blue cast. Both happen twice a day, once either side of sunrise and sunset.

Neither is literally an hour. Each band is as long as the sun takes to cross those few degrees, so it is short near the equator where the sun drops steeply and long at high latitude where it slides in at a shallow angle. This evening it runs 55 minutes in Christchurch.

Twilight times in Christchurch today

Twilight is longer the further a place is from the equator, because the sun cuts down through the horizon at a shallower angle. In Christchurch the stretch from the start of civil twilight to sunrise is 29 minutes.

Solstices and equinoxes in Christchurch

The equinoxes are the useful sanity check on any sun calculation: on those two days every place on Earth gets close to twelve hours between sunrise and sunset. It is not exactly twelve, and the reason is the same refraction and disc-edge convention that sets the times on this page. Sunrise is timed when the upper limb appears rather than the centre, and the atmosphere bends the image of the sun up over the horizon before it is geometrically there, so both ends of the day are pushed outwards by a few minutes. The seasons page has the exact instants.

How these times are worked out

The times on this page come from the NOAA solar position algorithm, the standard reduction of the calculations in Meeus's Astronomical Algorithms. The chain is short and has no fitted constants in it: the sun's mean longitude and mean anomaly at the instant, the equation of centre to get from the mean to the true position, a correction for nutation to get the apparent longitude, the true obliquity of the ecliptic, and from those two the declination and the equation of time. Sunrise and sunset are then solar noon plus and minus the hour angle at which the sun reaches an altitude of -0.833 degrees.

That number, -0.833, is doing real work. Half of it, -0.2667 degrees, is the apparent radius of the sun, because sunrise is defined by the upper edge of the disc and not its centre. The other -0.5667 degrees is mean atmospheric refraction at the horizon, which lifts the image of the sun by roughly its own diameter. Ignore both and every sunrise on this site would be three or four minutes late and every sunset three or four minutes early.

The conversion into Pacific/Auckland is done through the IANA time zone database that ships inside Node, at the actual instant of the event, so daylight saving, half hour offsets and rule changes are all handled by the database rather than by an offset written down here. Christchurch does move its clocks: the zone runs at UTC+12 in winter and UTC+13 in summer, which is why the sunset column in the table above jumps by an hour between two adjacent months.

Questions

What time is sunset in Christchurch?

6:29 pm today, September 25, 2026.

What time is sunrise in Christchurch?

6:14 am today.

When is golden hour in Christchurch today?

The evening golden hour runs 5:51 pm to 6:47 pm, and the morning one 5:57 am to 6:52 am.

What time does the sun set in Christchurch today?

At 6:29 pm on September 25, 2026.

What time does the sun rise in Christchurch today?

At 6:14 am, giving 12 hours 15 minutes of daylight.

How many hours of daylight does Christchurch get today?

12 hours 15 minutes, and the city is gaining 2 minutes 58 seconds of daylight a day.

Why is solar noon in Christchurch not at 12:00?

Because Christchurch sits at 172.64 degrees east while its clock is set to a zone meridian somewhere else, and because the equation of time shifts apparent noon by up to about 16 minutes either way through the year. Today the two effects put solar noon at 12:21 pm.

When is the longest day of the year in Christchurch?

December 22, 2026, with 15 hours 26 minutes of daylight. The shortest is June 21, 2026 with 8 hours 56 minutes.

Are these times adjusted for daylight saving?

Yes. Every time on this page is the local clock reading in Pacific/Auckland at that instant, so it already includes daylight saving when daylight saving is in force.

Sunrise and sunset in nearby cities

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