Sunrise 7:01 am and sunset 7:06 pm in Wilmington

Today, Thursday, September 24, 2026, the sun rises in Wilmington, NC at 7:01 am and sets at 7:06 pm. That is 12 hours 4 minutes of daylight, with the sun at its highest at 1:04 pm. Wilmington is losing 2 minutes 7 seconds of daylight a day at the moment.

Sunrise time Wilmington

The sun rises in Wilmington, NC at 7:01 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 6:36 am.

Sunrise here is moving later at the moment. Over the year the earliest sunrise in Wilmington falls on June 12, 2026 at 5:59 am, and the latest on March 8, 2026 at 7:32 am. Neither of those dates is the solstice, and that surprises people. The longest day in Wilmington 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 Wilmington

The sun sets in Wilmington, NC at 7:06 pm. Light lingers after that: civil twilight runs until 7:31 pm, and full darkness, meaning the end of astronomical twilight, arrives at 8:29 pm.

The latest sunset of 2026 in Wilmington is on June 29, 2026 at 8:28 pm, and the earliest is on December 4, 2026 at 5:02 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 Wilmington

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 1:04 pm, which is 64 minutes after clock noon. That gap is not an error. It is Wilmington sitting at 77.94 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. Wilmington is at 34.23 degrees north, in the subtropical belt, 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 Wilmington swings by 4 hours 34 minutes, from 9h 52m on December 21, 2026 to 14h 27m on June 21, 2026.

Sunrise and sunset in Wilmington month by month

The table below is the 15th of each month of 2026, computed for Wilmington, NC 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.

The extremes of the year in Wilmington

The sun rises and sets on every one of the 365 days of 2026 in Wilmington. 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 Wilmington 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 48 minutes in Wilmington.

Twilight times in Wilmington 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 Wilmington the stretch from the start of civil twilight to sunrise is 25 minutes.

Solstices and equinoxes in Wilmington

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. Wilmington 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 Wilmington?

7:06 pm today, September 24, 2026.

What time is sunrise in Wilmington?

7:01 am today.

When is golden hour in Wilmington today?

The evening golden hour runs 6:33 pm to 7:21 pm, and the morning one 6:46 am to 7:34 am.

What time does the sun set in Wilmington today?

At 7:06 pm on September 24, 2026.

What time does the sun rise in Wilmington today?

At 7:01 am, giving 12 hours 4 minutes of daylight.

How many hours of daylight does Wilmington get today?

12 hours 4 minutes, and the city is losing 2 minutes 7 seconds of daylight a day.

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

Because Wilmington sits at 77.94 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 1:04 pm.

When is the longest day of the year in Wilmington?

June 21, 2026, with 14 hours 27 minutes of daylight. The shortest is December 21, 2026 with 9 hours 52 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

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