Sunrise 6:26 am and sunset 6:31 pm in Mexico City
Today, Thursday, September 24, 2026, the sun rises in Mexico City, Mexico at 6:26 am and sets at 6:31 pm. That is 12 hours 5 minutes of daylight, with the sun at its highest at 12:28 pm. Mexico City is losing 1 minute 6 seconds of daylight a day at the moment.
Sunrise time Mexico City
The sun rises in Mexico City, Mexico at 6:26 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 6:04 am.
Sunrise here is moving later at the moment. Over the year the earliest sunrise in Mexico City falls on June 5, 2026 at 5:57 am, and the latest on January 17, 2026 at 7:13 am. Neither of those dates is the solstice, and that surprises people. The longest day in Mexico City is June 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 Mexico City
The sun sets in Mexico City, Mexico at 6:31 pm. Light lingers after that: civil twilight runs until 6:53 pm, and full darkness, meaning the end of astronomical twilight, arrives at 7:44 pm.
The latest sunset of 2026 in Mexico City is on July 5, 2026 at 7:19 pm, and the earliest is on November 25, 2026 at 5:57 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 Mexico City
Daylight today runs to 12 hours 5 minutes, from sunrise to sunset. Solar noon, the instant the sun crosses the local meridian and stands at its highest, is at 12:28 pm, which is 28 minutes after clock noon. That gap is not an error. It is Mexico City sitting at 99.13 degrees west while its clock is set to America/Mexico_City, plus the equation of time, which today is 8.1 minutes ahead of mean time.
The sun's declination today is -0.69 degrees, meaning it stands directly overhead at that latitude somewhere on the globe. Mexico City is at 19.43 degrees north, inside the tropics, north of the equator, which is why the day here is 12h 05m rather than the flat twelve hours the equator gets. Across 2026 the length of the day in Mexico City swings by 2 hours 21 minutes, from 10h 58m on December 21, 2026 to 13h 18m on June 21, 2026.
Sunrise and sunset in Mexico City month by month
The table below is the 15th of each month of 2026, computed for Mexico City, Mexico rather than for the zone as a whole. Reading down the daylight column shows the shape of the year: short days around January, long days around July.
| Date | Sunrise | Sunset | Daylight | Solar noon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January 15 | 7:13 am | 6:19 pm | 11h 05m | 12:46 pm |
| February 15 | 7:05 am | 6:36 pm | 11h 31m | 12:51 pm |
| March 15 | 6:45 am | 6:46 pm | 12h 02m | 12:45 pm |
| April 15 | 6:19 am | 6:54 pm | 12h 36m | 12:36 pm |
| May 15 | 6:01 am | 7:05 pm | 13h 03m | 12:33 pm |
| June 15 | 5:58 am | 7:16 pm | 13h 18m | 12:37 pm |
| July 15 | 6:07 am | 7:18 pm | 13h 11m | 12:43 pm |
| August 15 | 6:17 am | 7:04 pm | 12h 47m | 12:41 pm |
| September 15 | 6:24 am | 6:39 pm | 12h 15m | 12:32 pm |
| October 15 | 6:31 am | 6:13 pm | 11h 42m | 12:22 pm |
| November 15 | 6:45 am | 5:58 pm | 11h 13m | 12:21 pm |
| December 15 | 7:03 am | 6:01 pm | 10h 58m | 12:32 pm |
The extremes of the year in Mexico City
| Reading | Time or length | Date in 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Longest day | 13 hours 18 minutes | June 21, 2026 |
| Shortest day | 10 hours 58 minutes | December 21, 2026 |
| Earliest sunrise | 5:57 am | June 5, 2026 |
| Latest sunrise | 7:13 am | January 17, 2026 |
| Earliest sunset | 5:57 pm | November 25, 2026 |
| Latest sunset | 7:19 pm | July 5, 2026 |
The sun rises and sets on every one of the 365 days of 2026 in Mexico City. 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 Mexico City 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.
| Band | Time in Mexico City |
|---|---|
| Morning blue hour | 6:04 am to 6:12 am |
| Morning golden hour | 6:12 am to 6:55 am |
| Evening golden hour | 6:02 pm to 6:44 pm |
| Evening blue hour | 6:44 pm to 6:53 pm |
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 42 minutes in Mexico City.
Twilight times in Mexico City today
| Stage | Morning | Evening | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Astronomical twilight | 5:13 am | 7:44 pm | sun 18 degrees down, the sky is as dark as it gets |
| Nautical twilight | 5:38 am | 7:18 pm | sun 12 degrees down, the horizon is just visible at sea |
| Civil twilight | 6:04 am | 6:53 pm | sun 6 degrees down, bright enough to read outside |
Twilight is longer the further a place is from the equator, because the sun cuts down through the horizon at a shallower angle. In Mexico City the stretch from the start of civil twilight to sunrise is 22 minutes.
Solstices and equinoxes in Mexico City
| Event | Date | Sunrise | Sunset | Daylight |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| March equinox | March 20 | 6:40 am | 6:48 pm | 12h 07m |
| June solstice | June 21 | 5:59 am | 7:18 pm | 13h 18m |
| September equinox | September 22 | 6:25 am | 6:33 pm | 12h 07m |
| December solstice | December 21 | 7:06 am | 6:04 pm | 10h 58m |
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 America/Mexico_City 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. Mexico City does not move its clocks at all. The zone stays at UTC-6 all year, so every change in the table above is the sun moving and not the clock.
Questions
- What time is sunset in Mexico City?
- 6:31 pm today, September 24, 2026.
- What time is sunrise in Mexico City?
- 6:26 am today.
- When is golden hour in Mexico City today?
- The evening golden hour runs 6:02 pm to 6:44 pm, and the morning one 6:12 am to 6:55 am.
- What time does the sun set in Mexico City today?
- At 6:31 pm on September 24, 2026.
- What time does the sun rise in Mexico City today?
- At 6:26 am, giving 12 hours 5 minutes of daylight.
- How many hours of daylight does Mexico City get today?
- 12 hours 5 minutes, and the city is losing 1 minute 6 seconds of daylight a day.
- Why is solar noon in Mexico City not at 12:00?
- Because Mexico City sits at 99.13 degrees west 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 12:28 pm.
- When is the longest day of the year in Mexico City?
- June 21, 2026, with 13 hours 18 minutes of daylight. The shortest is December 21, 2026 with 10 hours 58 minutes.
- Are these times adjusted for daylight saving?
- Mexico City does not observe daylight saving, so the question does not arise. The zone stays at UTC-6 all year.
Sunrise and sunset in nearby cities
Timezone converter · Seasons and solstices · Moon phases · Day of the year