What Time Does the Sun Set? Free Sunset Calculator

What Time Does the Sun Set?

If you are wondering what time does the sun set today, this free sunset calculator answers it instantly for any location on Earth. Enter your city or coordinates, pick a date between 1900 and 2100, and get the sunset time rounded to the minute, plus sunrise, solar noon, and total day length as supporting details.

Sunset timing shapes the back half of the day. It decides when your after-work run runs out of light, when the evening light turns good enough for photos, and how late the kids can stay at the park. Checking the sunset before you make evening plans takes ten seconds and saves you from guessing.

How to Use the Sunset Calculator

The tool sits just above this page, and using it is three quick steps.

1. Enter your location. Pick one of the preset cities (New York, London, Sydney, Tokyo, Dubai, Karachi, Los Angeles, or Paris) and the coordinates and standard-time offset fill in for you. Or switch to custom entry and type any latitude, longitude, and UTC offset. Presets use standard time, so if daylight saving time is in effect where you are, adjust the offset up by one hour.

2. Pick a date. Choose any calendar date from 1900-01-01 to 2100-12-31. Check today, plan next weekend’s barbecue, or look up the sunset on a future vacation date.

3. Read your results. The sunset time is the headline result, shown with your location label and the UTC offset that was used. Sunrise, solar noon, and day length appear underneath, giving you the full picture of that day’s light.

How Sunset Times Are Calculated

This calculator runs on the sunrise and sunset algorithm from the NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory, the method NOAA publishes for its solar position work, with equations drawn from Jean Meeus’ Astronomical Algorithms. The same engine drives the sunrise calculator on this site; the only difference here is that sunset is the headline result.

What happens inside, without the jargon:

• The tool takes your date and turns it into a day-of-year number, then computes the sun’s mean anomaly, a measure of where Earth sits in its yearly trip around the sun.
• It derives the sun’s true longitude and its declination for that date, which together describe the tilt of the sun’s daily arc across your sky.
• It solves for the local hour angle at a zenith of 90.833 degrees. That figure is the technical definition of sunset: the moment the sun’s upper limb disappears below the horizon, including an allowance for average atmospheric refraction, which bends sunlight and keeps the sun visible for a couple of extra minutes after it has geometrically set.
• The result is converted from UTC into your local time using the offset you gave, then rounded to the nearest minute.

According to NOAA, the method is theoretically good to about a minute for latitudes between 72 degrees north and 72 degrees south. We checked this engine against published reference values and it landed within roughly a minute or two in every test. Smoke, haze, and mountains can nudge the visible sunset by a bit, but the calculated minute is reliable for any planning purpose.

Polar edge cases are handled without guesswork. Around the summer solstice in the far north, the tool reports that the sun does not set on that date instead of producing a fake time. In the polar night it says the sun does not rise.

Worked Example: Sunset in London on December 21, 2026

Picture a December evening in London. You select London from the presets, enter 2026-12-21, and keep the offset at UTC+0 since London is on standard time that month. The calculator returns:

• Sunset: 3:53 PM
• Sunrise: 8:03 AM
• Solar noon: 11:58 AM
• Day length: 7 hours, 49 minutes

December 21 is the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere, the shortest day of the year. A 3:53 PM sunset explains why the evening commute happens in full darkness all through December in London. If you are meeting friends for an outdoor walk, you now know to finish by about 3:30 PM. And if you are a photographer, the flip side of this short day is that the warm low light of golden hour arrives mid-afternoon instead of late evening.

Now run the same calculation for Dubai on 2026-06-21, the summer solstice, with the offset at UTC+4. Sunset lands around 7:12 PM, sunrise around 5:28 AM, a long bright day of about 13 hours and 44 minutes. Same calculator, same mathematics, a completely different evening than London in December.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does the sun set so early in December?

Earth’s axis tilts, so the sun’s daily arc shrinks in the winter of each hemisphere. In the northern hemisphere, the arc is shortest around December 21, and sunset slides to its earliest point of the year. The sun is not “setting early” by accident; it is following a predictable curve the calculator reproduces exactly.

What is the difference between sunset and dusk?

Sunset is the single moment the sun’s upper edge drops below the horizon. Dusk, or twilight, is the fading light that follows, while the sun is just below the horizon and the sky still glows. This tool reports the sunset moment itself. For the warm-light window before sunset, see our Golden Hour Calculator.

Does this tool tell me when it gets dark?

It gives you the sunset time, which is the start of darkness rather than the end of light. Usable twilight usually lingers for 30 to 45 minutes after sunset at mid latitudes, longer in summer and shorter near the equator. Plan evening activities against the sunset time with that buffer in mind.

Is the sunset time the same everywhere in my time zone?

No. Time zones are wide political bands, but sunset follows longitude. Moving east within a time zone makes sunset earlier, and moving west makes it later, by about a minute per 15 miles. Two cities in the same time zone can easily differ by 20 minutes or more. That is why the calculator asks for coordinates rather than just a time zone.

Why does the sunset time change every day instead of staying fixed?

The sun’s declination drifts a little each day as Earth orbits, so the arc it traces across your sky lengthens or shortens continuously. Near the equinoxes the change is fastest, close to two minutes per day at mid latitudes, and near the solstices it nearly stalls. The calculator accounts for the exact date you enter.

Related Tools

• What Time Is Sunrise Today? – the morning companion: sunrise, solar noon, and day length for early planners and dawn photographers.
• Golden Hour Calculator – pin down the soft, warm light around sunset that photographers and filmmakers plan shoots around.
• Moon Phase on My Birthday – which moon was overhead the night you were born, with illumination and phase name.
• Sidereal Natal Chart – a full astrological birth chart using sidereal positions, the star-based side of sun and moon astrology.