Midnight Sun & Daylight by Month: Alaska, Iceland, Norway, Finland

In 2026 the Sun does not set in Tromsø from May 19 to Jul 25 and does not rise from Nov 28 to Jan 14. Fairbanks and Reykjavík sit just south of the midnight sun: the Sun dips below the horizon for an hour or two, but it never gets dark there from May 17 to Jul 26 and May 20 to Jul 24. Rovaniemi, on the Arctic Circle, has the midnight sun from Jun 7 to Jul 6. Anchorage’s longest day is 19 h 23 min. Pick any place above for its dates, a month-by-month chart of its daylight, and the daylight on your own trip, day by day.

How to use it

Pick a place. The five places people ask about most come first, then 27 more in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and the far south of South America. For anywhere else, pick “Somewhere else” and type a town or a latitude and longitude. Then set the first day of your trip and how many days it lasts. The answer gives the midnight sun dates, or tells you there is none. It also gives the weeks it never gets dark, the polar night and the longest and shortest day. Each day of your trip follows, with its sunrise and sunset in local time. Under the answer, the chart and the table show the average daylight of every month.

Where the numbers come from

Nothing on this page is copied from a table. Every day of the year is computed for the place you pick, with the same Sun our Golden Hour Calculator and Where Is the Sun tool use: the solar position formulas of NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory. The lines are the U.S. Naval Observatory’s. The Sun rises or sets when its centre is 0.8333° below the horizon, which allows for the size of the Sun and the air bending its light. Civil twilight lasts until the centre is 6° below. A day is a midnight sun day when the Sun never drops below the sunrise line. It is a polar night day when the Sun never comes above it, and never dark when it never drops below the twilight line. We checked the first and last day of every period on this page against the Naval Observatory’s own answers for 2026. Coordinates and time zones come from GeoNames.

The midnight sun, the bright nights and the polar night, 2026

The dates move by a day at most from one year to the next. A period that crosses New Year, like Tromsø’s polar night, runs from late in the year into January of the next.

Worked examples

• Tromsø: Tromsø: the midnight sun from May 19 to Jul 25. That is 68 days without a sunset.
• Fairbanks: Fairbanks: no midnight sun, but it never gets dark from May 17 to Jul 26. Its longest day is 21 h 50 min, and the Sun sets just after midnight.
• Anchorage: Anchorage: no midnight sun, but it never gets dark from Jun 8 to Jul 4.
• Juneau, the Alaska cruise port: Juneau: no midnight sun; the longest day is 18 h 17 min (Jun 19).
• Svalbard: Longyearbyen: the midnight sun from Apr 19 to Aug 24. That is 128 days, more than four months.
• Rovaniemi in early June: Your 7 days from Jun 2: 22 h 25 min to 24 h of daylight, 2 with no sunset, and it never gets dark.

Common mistakes

• Thinking Fairbanks or Reykjavík has the midnight sun. Neither does. Both are just south of it. The Sun sets for a short while in late June, but the sky never gets darker than twilight, so you can read outside at midnight. For a Sun that truly stays up, go further north: to Utqiaġvik in Alaska, or to Tromsø or the North Cape in Norway.
• Thinking the Arctic Circle is where it starts. The air bends the Sun’s light, and the Sun is a disk, not a point. So the midnight sun reaches a little south of the Arctic Circle, to about 65.7° north. Iceland’s north coast misses it by a hair: Akureyri’s longest day is 23 h 30 min.
• Trusting a date from a brochure to the day. Some tourist boards count the midnight sun from when the top of the Sun stays up, or as seen from a hill. Others count from the sea’s horizon. Their dates can differ from these by a day or two. Mountains to the north can hide a midnight sun the maths says is there.
• Thinking the polar night is pitch dark. In Tromsø on December 21 the Sun stays below the horizon, but there is still 4 h 22 min of twilight around noon. Only far north, in Svalbard, does midwinter get no twilight at all.
• Thinking June 21 is the only day without night. The midnight sun lasts weeks around the solstice, and the bright nights even longer. In Tromsø the nights are no darker than twilight from Apr 29 to Aug 14.
• Packing no eye mask. Hotels this far north often have blackout curtains, but not every room, cabin or campsite does. A cheap eye mask saves the first nights.

Plan the trip

For the trip itself, read things to do in Fairbanks, things to do in Svalbard and Iceland in summer vs. winter. Cruising north? See the Alaska cruise guide and what not to miss in Norway. And for the lower 48, there is which US city has the most daylight. For the dark half of the year, the Northern Lights tool tells you where and when to look. For a single day’s sunrise, sunset and golden hour, use the Golden Hour Calculator. The Solstice and Equinox tool gives the exact minute of the longest and shortest day.