Sunrise & Sunset in Chicago — Times for Any Date

Why Chicago's day length swings by more than six hours

Chicago sits at 41.88° N and 87.63° W, on the south-western shore of Lake Michigan. Latitude is the dominant control on its daylight. The city runs from 9 hours 7 minutes at the December solstice to 15 hours 14 minutes at the June solstice — a swing of 367 minutes, just over six hours, between the shortest and longest days of 2026.

This page computes sunrise, sunset, solar noon, and the golden and blue hours from the Sun's own position for whatever date you choose, rather than printing a fixed table. Everything below explains what those numbers mean for Chicago in particular — including the one-hour clock correction that catches out most first-time visitors.

Chicago lies east of its time meridian, not west

Central Standard Time is anchored on the 90° W meridian. Chicago is 2.37° east of it — worth 9.5 minutes of clock time — and the Sun crosses meridians from east to west, so that offset makes Chicago's solar noon early, not late. The calculator puts it between 11:34 in early November and 12:05 in mid-February, a 31-minute drift produced almost entirely by the equation of time.

That one fact corrects a common assumption. Chicago's late summer evenings — sunset at 19:30 CST on 28 June, the latest of the year — are not a time-zone artefact, and the 20:29 you see on a wall clock is not the Sun's doing either. A long northern summer day gets pushed one hour later by daylight time. Remove the clock change and the same sunset reads 19:29.

Standard time or daylight time? The one adjustment to make

The calculator is fixed to Chicago's standard offset of UTC−6. Every time it prints is Central Standard Time. In 2026 the city runs Central Daylight Time, one hour ahead, from 8 March to 1 November.

So on 21 June the calculator shows sunrise at 04:15, while the clock on a Chicago wall reads 05:15. Both describe the same instant. The table below gives both readings for the first of each month, so you can take whichever you need — standard time to match the calculator, clock time to match your phone.

Two rows repay a second look. 1 November is the first morning back on standard time, and sunrise lands 59 minutes earlier than it had the morning before. 31 October — the last morning of daylight time — carries the year's latest sunrise at 07:21, even though it falls nearly six weeks after the solstice that actually has the shortest day.

The formula behind every Chicago sunrise

Sunrise and sunset are not stored values. They fall out of the Sun's geometry for that date at that latitude, and the calculator implements the NOAA solar-position algorithm in four steps.

1. Fractional year. The day of the year becomes an angle: γ = 2π / 365 × (dayOfYear − 1 + 0.5).

2. Equation of time. The gap between apparent and mean solar time, in minutes: eqTime = 229.18 × (0.000075 + 0.001868 cos γ − 0.032077 sin γ − 0.014615 cos 2γ − 0.040849 sin 2γ).

3. Solar declination. How far the Sun sits above or below the celestial equator: δ = 0.006918 − 0.399912 cos γ + 0.070257 sin γ − 0.006758 cos 2γ + 0.000907 sin 2γ − 0.002697 cos 3γ + 0.00148 sin 3γ.

4. Hour angle. The Sun's angular distance from local noon when its upper limb touches the horizon, solved at the standard zenith of 90.833° — the extra 0.833° covers atmospheric refraction plus the Sun's own radius: cos H = cos(90.833°) / (cos φ cos δ) − tan φ tan δ.

Solar noon then lands at 720 − 4 × longitude − eqTime + timezone × 60 minutes, with sunrise and sunset 4H minutes either side of it. For Chicago the longitude term is −4 × 87.63 and the timezone term −6 × 60, which is why noon arrives before 12:00 all year round.

Three worked examples

Each example below is the calculator's own output for the date, run through the algorithm above. Standard time comes first, with the daylight-time reading alongside.

Example 1 — the June solstice, 21 June 2026

• Solar noon: 11:52 CST (12:52 CDT)
• Sunrise: 04:15 CST — 05:15 CDT
• Sunset: 19:29 CST — 20:29 CDT
• Length of day: 15h 14m
• Evening golden hour: 18:47–19:50 CST (19:47–20:50 CDT), a 63-minute window
• Blue hour closes at 20:03 CST (21:03 CDT)

The earliest sunrise of the year does not fall on this date. It falls on 15 June, six days earlier, and the latest sunset falls on 28 June, a week later. Both are the equation of time at work: it drifts through the solstice, so the extremes of the clock and the extremes of the geometry do not coincide.

Example 2 — the December solstice, 21 December 2026

• Solar noon: 11:49 CST
• Sunrise: 07:15 CST
• Sunset: 16:22 CST
• Length of day: 9h 07m
• Morning golden hour: 06:55–08:00 CST, a 65-minute window
• Blue hour: 06:43–06:55 CST before sunrise, 16:42–16:54 CST after sunset

This is the shortest day, but not the earliest sunset. Sunset bottoms out at 16:20 on 9 December, twelve days before the solstice, and only begins to recover in the last week of the month.

Example 3 — the March equinox, 20 March 2026

• Solar noon: 11:59 CST
• Sunrise: 05:55 CST — 06:55 CDT
• Sunset: 18:02 CST — 19:02 CDT
• Length of day: 12h 07m — seven minutes over twelve hours
• Golden hour: 05:38–06:32 CST and 17:25–18:19 CST, 54 minutes at each end

The extra seven minutes is not an error. A 90.833° zenith measures the first appearance of the Sun's upper limb, and refraction lifts the disc roughly half a degree above where pure geometry would put it. Equinox daylight always runs a few minutes past half a day — the September equinox here stretches to 12h 12m.

Golden hour and blue hour over Lake Michigan

The calculator defines the golden hour as the window in which the Sun stands between −4° and +6° above the horizon, and the blue hour as the deeper band from −6° to −4°. At Chicago's latitude those bands run long in summer and shorter in winter: 63 minutes at each end on 21 June, 65 minutes on 21 December.

The lake matters. Chicago's shoreline faces east, so the sunrise path crosses open water for anyone standing on the lakefront — North Avenue Beach, Promontory Point, or the Montrose sanctuary. In December the Sun rises south of due east over the water; in June it comes up north of due east, which puts much of the near-north skyline between you and the horizon. Sunset reverses the geometry: the Sun drops over land to the west, which is why the lakefront is a sunrise location and the western suburbs a sunset one.

Where the numbers can surprise you

• The calculator prints standard time. Between 8 March and 1 November 2026, add one hour to match a Chicago clock.
• Refraction is already included. The 90.833° zenith means "sunrise" is the first appearance of the upper limb, not the centre of the disc.
• Solar noon is never at 12:00. It ranges from 11:34 to 12:05 CST across the year, because longitude and the equation of time both move it.
• The latest sunrise is not on the shortest day. It falls on 31 October, the last morning of daylight time; the next morning is 59 minutes earlier.
• A clear horizon matters. The algorithm assumes an unobstructed sea-level horizon. Looking east across Lake Michigan comes close to that; a building canopy does not, and can delay the visible sunrise by half an hour in midwinter.
• Elevation barely helps. A hundred metres of height advances sunrise by about a minute — real, but smaller than most people expect.

Sources and standards

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