Sunrise 5:40 am and sunset 5:54 pm in Mbombela

Today, Sunday, September 27, 2026, the sun rises in Mbombela, South Africa at 5:40 am and sets at 5:54 pm. That is 12 hours 14 minutes of daylight, with the sun at its highest at 11:47 am. Mbombela is gaining 1 minute 29 seconds of daylight a day at the moment.

Sunrise time Mbombela

The sun rises in Mbombela, South Africa at 5:40 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 5:18 am.

Sunrise here is moving earlier at the moment. Over the year the earliest sunrise in Mbombela falls on November 30, 2026 at 4:57 am, and the latest on July 3, 2026 at 6:43 am. Neither of those dates is the solstice, and that surprises people. The longest day in Mbombela is December 21, 2026, but the earliest sunrise and the latest sunset never sit exactly on it, because the equation of time slides underneath the whole pattern.

Sunset time Mbombela

The sun sets in Mbombela, South Africa at 5:54 pm. Light lingers after that: civil twilight runs until 6:17 pm, and full darkness, meaning the end of astronomical twilight, arrives at 7:11 pm.

The latest sunset of 2026 in Mbombela is on January 12, 2026 at 6:52 pm, and the earliest is on June 8, 2026 at 5:13 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 Mbombela

Daylight today runs to 12 hours 14 minutes, from sunrise to sunset. Solar noon, the instant the sun crosses the local meridian and stands at its highest, is at 11:47 am, which is 13 minutes before clock noon. That gap is not an error. It is Mbombela sitting at 30.97 degrees east while its clock is set to Africa/Johannesburg, plus the equation of time, which today is 9.0 minutes ahead of mean time.

The sun's declination today is -1.71 degrees, meaning it stands directly overhead at that latitude somewhere on the globe. Mbombela is at 25.48 degrees south, just outside the tropics, which is why the day here is 12h 14m rather than the flat twelve hours the equator gets. Across 2026 the length of the day in Mbombela swings by 3 hours 11 minutes, from 10h 33m on June 21, 2026 to 13h 44m on December 21, 2026.

Sunrise and sunset in Mbombela month by month

The table below is the 15th of each month of 2026, computed for Mbombela, South Africa 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 Mbombela

The sun rises and sets on every one of the 365 days of 2026 in Mbombela. 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 Mbombela 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 44 minutes in Mbombela.

Twilight times in Mbombela 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 Mbombela the stretch from the start of civil twilight to sunrise is 23 minutes.

Solstices and equinoxes in Mbombela

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 Africa/Johannesburg 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. Mbombela does not move its clocks at all. The zone stays at UTC+2 all year, so every change in the table above is the sun moving and not the clock.

Questions

What time is sunset in Mbombela?

5:54 pm today, September 27, 2026.

What time is sunrise in Mbombela?

5:40 am today.

When is golden hour in Mbombela today?

The evening golden hour runs 5:24 pm to 6:08 pm, and the morning one 5:26 am to 6:11 am.

What time does the sun set in Mbombela today?

At 5:54 pm on September 27, 2026.

What time does the sun rise in Mbombela today?

At 5:40 am, giving 12 hours 14 minutes of daylight.

How many hours of daylight does Mbombela get today?

12 hours 14 minutes, and the city is gaining 1 minute 29 seconds of daylight a day.

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

Because Mbombela sits at 30.97 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 11:47 am.

When is the longest day of the year in Mbombela?

December 21, 2026, with 13 hours 44 minutes of daylight. The shortest is June 21, 2026 with 10 hours 33 minutes.

Are these times adjusted for daylight saving?

Mbombela does not observe daylight saving, so the question does not arise. The zone stays at UTC+2 all year.

Sunrise and sunset in nearby cities

Timezone converter · Seasons and solstices · Moon phases · Day of the year