Sunrise 6:41 am and sunset 6:45 pm in New Haven
Today, Thursday, September 24, 2026, the sun rises in New Haven, CT at 6:41 am and sets at 6:45 pm. That is 12 hours 4 minutes of daylight, with the sun at its highest at 12:44 pm. New Haven is losing 2 minutes 44 seconds of daylight a day at the moment.
Sunrise time New Haven
The sun rises in New Haven, CT at 6:41 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 6:14 am.
Sunrise here is moving later at the moment. Over the year the earliest sunrise in New Haven falls on June 14, 2026 at 5:18 am, and the latest on October 31, 2026 at 7:22 am. Neither of those dates is the solstice, and that surprises people. The longest day in New Haven 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, and because the clocks move twice a year on top of that.
Sunset time New Haven
The sun sets in New Haven, CT at 6:45 pm. Light lingers after that: civil twilight runs until 7:13 pm, and full darkness, meaning the end of astronomical twilight, arrives at 8:18 pm.
The latest sunset of 2026 in New Haven is on June 27, 2026 at 8:29 pm, and the earliest is on December 8, 2026 at 4:22 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 New Haven
Daylight today runs to 12 hours 4 minutes, from sunrise to sunset. Solar noon, the instant the sun crosses the local meridian and stands at its highest, is at 12:44 pm, which is 44 minutes after clock noon. That gap is not an error. It is New Haven sitting at 72.93 degrees west while its clock is set to America/New_York, plus the equation of time, which today is 8.0 minutes ahead of mean time, plus an hour of daylight saving for part of the year.
The sun's declination today is -0.66 degrees, meaning it stands directly overhead at that latitude somewhere on the globe. New Haven is at 41.31 degrees north, at a middle latitude, which is why the day here is 12h 04m rather than the flat twelve hours the equator gets. Across 2026 the length of the day in New Haven swings by 5 hours 58 minutes, from 9h 11m on December 21, 2026 to 15h 10m on June 21, 2026.
Sunrise and sunset in New Haven month by month
The table below is the 15th of each month of 2026, computed for New Haven, CT 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 | 7:15 am | 4:47 pm | 9h 32m | 12:01 pm |
| February 15 | 6:46 am | 5:26 pm | 10h 39m | 12:06 pm |
| March 15 | 7:03 am | 6:58 pm | 11h 55m | 1:01 pm |
| April 15 | 6:12 am | 7:32 pm | 13h 20m | 12:52 pm |
| May 15 | 5:33 am | 8:04 pm | 14h 31m | 12:48 pm |
| June 15 | 5:18 am | 8:27 pm | 15h 09m | 12:52 pm |
| July 15 | 5:32 am | 8:23 pm | 14h 52m | 12:58 pm |
| August 15 | 6:01 am | 7:51 pm | 13h 50m | 12:56 pm |
| September 15 | 6:32 am | 7:01 pm | 12h 29m | 12:47 pm |
| October 15 | 7:04 am | 6:11 pm | 11h 07m | 12:37 pm |
| November 15 | 6:40 am | 4:32 pm | 9h 52m | 11:36 am |
| December 15 | 7:11 am | 4:23 pm | 9h 13m | 11:47 am |
The extremes of the year in New Haven
| Reading | Time or length | Date in 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Longest day | 15 hours 10 minutes | June 21, 2026 |
| Shortest day | 9 hours 11 minutes | December 21, 2026 |
| Earliest sunrise | 5:18 am | June 14, 2026 |
| Latest sunrise | 7:22 am | October 31, 2026 |
| Earliest sunset | 4:22 pm | December 8, 2026 |
| Latest sunset | 8:29 pm | June 27, 2026 |
The sun rises and sets on every one of the 365 days of 2026 in New Haven. 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 New Haven 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 New Haven |
|---|---|
| Morning blue hour | 6:14 am to 6:24 am |
| Morning golden hour | 6:24 am to 7:18 am |
| Evening golden hour | 6:09 pm to 7:02 pm |
| Evening blue hour | 7:02 pm to 7:13 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 53 minutes in New Haven.
Twilight times in New Haven today
| Stage | Morning | Evening | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Astronomical twilight | 5:09 am | 8:18 pm | sun 18 degrees down, the sky is as dark as it gets |
| Nautical twilight | 5:41 am | 7:45 pm | sun 12 degrees down, the horizon is just visible at sea |
| Civil twilight | 6:14 am | 7:13 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 New Haven the stretch from the start of civil twilight to sunrise is 28 minutes.
Solstices and equinoxes in New Haven
| Event | Date | Sunrise | Sunset | Daylight |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| March equinox | March 20 | 6:55 am | 7:04 pm | 12h 09m |
| June solstice | June 21 | 5:19 am | 8:28 pm | 15h 10m |
| September equinox | September 22 | 6:39 am | 6:49 pm | 12h 10m |
| December solstice | December 21 | 7:14 am | 4:26 pm | 9h 11m |
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/New_York 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. New Haven does move its clocks: the zone runs at UTC-5 in winter and UTC-4 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 New Haven?
- 6:45 pm today, September 24, 2026.
- What time is sunrise in New Haven?
- 6:41 am today.
- When is golden hour in New Haven today?
- The evening golden hour runs 6:09 pm to 7:02 pm, and the morning one 6:24 am to 7:18 am.
- What time does the sun set in New Haven today?
- At 6:45 pm on September 24, 2026.
- What time does the sun rise in New Haven today?
- At 6:41 am, giving 12 hours 4 minutes of daylight.
- How many hours of daylight does New Haven get today?
- 12 hours 4 minutes, and the city is losing 2 minutes 44 seconds of daylight a day.
- Why is solar noon in New Haven not at 12:00?
- Because New Haven sits at 72.93 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 12:44 pm.
- When is the longest day of the year in New Haven?
- June 21, 2026, with 15 hours 10 minutes of daylight. The shortest is December 21, 2026 with 9 hours 11 minutes.
- Are these times adjusted for daylight saving?
- Yes. Every time on this page is the local clock reading in America/New_York at that instant, so it already includes daylight saving when daylight saving is in force.
Sunrise and sunset in nearby cities
Timezone converter · Seasons and solstices · Moon phases · Day of the year