How much daylight do you actually get in December?

Published 2026-08-01 · last checked 2026-08-01 · written and calculated in-house by timedatelive

Everyone talks about winter in terms of temperature. Almost nobody talks about it in terms of light, which is odd, because light is the part that actually changes how a working day feels. You can put on a jumper. You cannot put on an extra three hours of afternoon.

So here is the number nobody publishes: how many hours of daylight each popular European and near-European base gets on the shortest day of the year, and what time the sun is actually up and down when it happens.

Short answer

On 21 December, Las Palmas gets 10h 21m of daylight and Tromsø gets none at all — the sun does not clear the horizon. Most of northern Europe sits between five and eight hours; the Mediterranean sits between nine and ten.

The practical dividing line is about 9 hours 30 minutes. Above that, a normal working day still has light at both ends. Below about 7 hours, you start and finish work in the dark no matter how you arrange your calendar.

City	Country	Daylight	Sunrise	Sunset	Cost/mo
Las Palmas	Spain	10h 21m	07:49	18:10	$1,700
Marrakech	Morocco	10h 05m	08:28	18:33	$1,200
Funchal	Portugal	10h 00m	08:06	18:06	$1,800
Larnaca	Cyprus	9h 48m	06:49	16:38	$1,900
Valletta	Malta	9h 43m	07:08	16:52	$2,200
Málaga	Spain	9h 39m	08:26	18:05	$1,800
Antalya	Turkey	9h 38m	08:06	17:44	$1,100
Athens	Greece	9h 31m	07:37	17:09	$1,700
Lisbon	Portugal	9h 27m	07:51	17:18	$2,100
Madrid	Spain	9h 17m	08:34	17:51	$2,200
Istanbul	Turkey	9h 13m	08:26	17:39	$1,400
Porto	Portugal	9h 12m	07:56	17:09	$1,700
Barcelona	Spain	9h 11m	08:14	17:25	$2,400
Rome	Italy	9h 07m	07:34	16:42	$2,300
Split	Croatia	8h 57m	07:24	16:21	$1,700
Bucharest	Romania	8h 50m	07:49	16:39	$1,400
Belgrade	Serbia	8h 47m	07:13	16:00	$1,300
Budapest	Hungary	8h 26m	07:29	15:55	$1,500
Vienna	Austria	8h 20m	07:42	16:03	$2,500
Paris	France	8h 15m	08:41	16:56	$3,200
Prague	Czechia	8h 03m	07:59	16:02	$1,800
London	United Kingdom	7h 49m	08:04	15:53	$3,800
Warsaw	Poland	7h 42m	07:43	15:25	$1,700
Amsterdam	Netherlands	7h 41m	08:48	16:29	$3,200
Berlin	Germany	7h 39m	08:15	15:54	$2,400
Dublin	Ireland	7h 30m	08:38	16:08	$3,300
Copenhagen	Denmark	7h 01m	08:37	15:38	$3,300
Edinburgh	United Kingdom	6h 57m	08:42	15:40	$2,700
Stockholm	Sweden	6h 05m	08:43	14:48	$3,000
Tallinn	Estonia	6h 03m	09:18	15:20	$1,900
Helsinki	Finland	5h 49m	09:24	15:13	$2,800
Reykjavík	Iceland	4h 07m	11:22	15:29	$3,600
Tromsø	Norway	0h 00m	—	—	$3,000

Sunrise, sunset and daylight length for 21 December 2026, computed from each city’s latitude and longitude with the standard −0.833° refraction correction, then converted to local clock time using the IANA time zone database. Cost is our single-person monthly estimate.

What the numbers mean once you are actually living there

The gap between the top and bottom of that table is larger than most people picture. Las Palmas and Reykjavík are both in Europe, both reachable on a short-haul ticket, and one of them has 6h 14m more daylight per day in December than the other. Over a two-month stay that is the difference of roughly two weeks of waking hours.

The second thing worth noticing is that daylight length and sunset time are different questions. Larnaca has almost exactly the same daylight length as Málaga — 9h 48m against 9h 39m — but the sun sets at 16:38 in Larnaca and 18:05 in Málaga. That is not weather. That is where the time zone boundary happens to fall, and it makes Cyprus feel like it shuts down in the afternoon while southern Spain still feels like there is an evening ahead of you.

If you work a European schedule and your day ends around five or six, sunset time matters more to you than daylight length does. If you are up early, it is the other way round.

The three bands

Sorting the table by daylight length rather than by country produces three fairly clean groups.

Nine hours and up — the Mediterranean and the Atlantic islands. Las Palmas, Funchal, Larnaca, Valletta, Athens, Málaga, Antalya. A December here is short but not oppressive, and the shoulder hours are usable.
Seven and a half to nine hours — the middle of the continent. Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, Istanbul, Barcelona, Split. Noticeably darker than the coast, but the sun is still up for a normal lunch break.
Under seven hours — the north. Stockholm, Tallinn, Helsinki, Edinburgh, Copenhagen and everything above them. This is where people who have never wintered in the north are routinely caught out, because the number sounds survivable in the abstract and does not feel survivable in the third week.

How this was calculated. Daylight is the interval between sunrise and sunset with the sun’s centre at −0.833° altitude, the standard refraction and semi-diameter allowance used by national weather services. Solar declination and the equation of time come from the NOAA solar position algorithm; local clock times come from the IANA time zone database for the correct date, so any daylight-saving rule in force is already applied. Nothing here is estimated from a table on another website — it is geometry, and you can check it against any almanac.

Why this is not the same as 'sunny'

Daylight length is an upper bound, not a forecast. Reykjavík’s four hours can be four hours of low grey cloud, and Málaga’s nine and a half are usually not. Cloud cover, rainfall and the angle of the sun all sit on top of this number and can only make the experience worse, never better.

That is precisely why the number is useful. It is the ceiling. If a city’s ceiling is six hours, no amount of luck with the weather will give you a bright afternoon in December, and you can rule it out before you look at anything else. We keep temperature and daylight strictly separate for this reason — see winter sun and winter daylight are not the same thing, where the two lists disagree more than you would expect.

Common follow-up questions

Which European city has the most daylight in December?

Of the cities we track, Las Palmas in the Canary Islands has the most, at 10h 21m on 21 December, followed by Funchal in Madeira at 10h 00m. Both are geographically African rather than European, which is exactly why they win.

How many hours of daylight does London get on the shortest day?

7h 49m, with sunrise at 08:04 and sunset at 15:53 on 21 December 2026.

Does daylight length change much year to year?

No. The solstice daylight length for a given latitude changes by seconds between years, not minutes. The clock times shift by up to a day either side because of leap years, but the duration is effectively fixed. A figure calculated for 2026 is good for any year you are planning.

Is more daylight better than warmer weather?

That depends entirely on what you are escaping. People who struggle in winter usually report light as the problem rather than cold, in which case daylight length and sunset time are the numbers to sort on. If you want to be outdoors and in the water, temperature matters more and the ranking changes.