Daylight on the June solstice
Oulu, Finland is the highest-latitude city in the catalogue that still gets a sunset on 21 June. 6 cities above it get none at all, and Punta Arenas, Chile at the other end of the planet gets 7 hours 32 minutes.
The longest June solstice days that still have a sunset
| # | City | Daylight on 21 June | Latitude | Country |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Oulu, Finland | 22h 03m | 65.0°N | Finland |
| 2 | Fairbanks, AK | 21h 50m | 64.8°N | United States |
| 3 | Severodvinsk, Russia | 21h 32m | 64.6°N | Russia |
| 4 | Arkhangel'sk, Russia | 21h 31m | 64.5°N | Russia |
| 5 | Nome, AK | 21h 28m | 64.5°N | United States |
| 6 | Reykjavik, Iceland | 21h 09m | 64.1°N | Iceland |
| 7 | Umea, Sweden | 20h 53m | 63.8°N | Sweden |
| 8 | Ukhta, Russia | 20h 42m | 63.6°N | Russia |
| 9 | Trondheim, Norway | 20h 36m | 63.4°N | Norway |
| 10 | Noyabrsk, Russia | 20h 26m | 63.2°N | Russia |
| 11 | Kuopio, Finland | 20h 15m | 62.9°N | Finland |
| 12 | Yellowknife, Canada | 20h 00m | 62.5°N | Canada |
| 13 | Jyvaeskylae, Finland | 19h 53m | 62.2°N | Finland |
| 14 | Yakutsk, Russia | 19h 46m | 62.0°N | Russia |
| 15 | Petrozavodsk, Russia | 19h 39m | 61.8°N | Russia |
| 16 | Syktyvkar, Russia | 19h 35m | 61.7°N | Russia |
How the solstice numbers were produced
Every one of the 6,338 cities in the catalogue had its sunrise and sunset solved for 21 June 2026 at its own coordinates, and the gap between them is the figure in the table. Cities where the Sun never sets are lifted out of the ranking and counted separately, because ranking a set of identical 24 hour entries by anything other than latitude would be inventing an order that the data does not contain.
21 June is used as the solstice date rather than the exact astronomical instant, which drifts between the 20th and the 22nd depending on the year and the leap cycle. The difference does not matter at the precision quoted: within a day either side of the solstice, day length changes by a second or two at temperate latitudes, because the Sun's declination is at a turning point and its rate of change is momentarily zero. That flatness is also why the solstice is the one date in the year where a one-day error is harmless.
Nothing on this page depends on a time zone, a clock or a daylight saving rule. Day length is the interval between two solar events, and it is the same number whatever the local clock says. That makes this the most stable ranking in the family: it will read the same next year and the year after, which is not true of the pages that quote clock times.
Twenty two hours, and still a sunset
The headline is deliberately the longest day that still ends, rather than the longest day outright, because "24 hours" is shared by 6 cities and tells you nothing about which of them is furthest north. Oulu, Finland is the interesting case: 22 hours 3 minutes of daylight, which leaves under two hours of night, and in practice that night is entirely twilight. The Sun dips a few degrees below the horizon and comes straight back up. Locals will tell you the midnight sun reaches much further south than the Arctic Circle, and in the sense that matters to a person outdoors at midnight, they are right.
Below that, the table falls away quickly. Each degree of latitude buys roughly ten to twenty extra minutes of solstice daylight in the sixties, but only about four minutes in the forties and barely one near the tropics. Day length is not linear in latitude, and the solstice is where that nonlinearity is most obvious.
The same date in the other hemisphere
While the north is having its longest day, the south is having its shortest, and the June solstice ranking read from the bottom is a southern winter ranking. Punta Arenas, Chile gets 7 hours 32 minutes on 21 June, which is the least of any city we publish on that date. Six months later the two ends of this table trade places almost exactly, which is what the December solstice ranking shows, and the size of that trade for each individual city is the annual daylight swing.
One asymmetry survives the swap. Earth is at its furthest from the Sun in early July and its closest in early January, so the southern summer is shorter and more intense than the northern one, and the northern winter is shorter than the southern one. That affects the dates of the seasons rather than the day lengths on this page, which are set by tilt alone.
Questions about this ranking
- Which city has the longest June solstice day?
- 6 cities in the catalogue have no sunset at all on 21 June, so they tie at a full day. The longest day that still ends belongs to Oulu, Finland at 22 hours 3 minutes.
- Why use 21 June rather than the exact solstice instant?
- Because day length is at a turning point and barely moves across the 20th to the 22nd. Using a fixed date costs a second or two of accuracy and makes the page reproducible for any year without an ephemeris.
- Is the June solstice the longest day everywhere?
- Only in the northern hemisphere. South of the equator it is the shortest day of the year, which is why the bottom of this ranking is a list of southern cities.
- Does daylight saving affect these numbers?
- Not at all. Day length is the gap between two solar events. Clocks move the labels on sunrise and sunset, not the interval between them.