wo in the morning, Sunday September 20: at that precise moment the kingdom’s clocks will go back 60 minutes and it will be one o’clock again. Morocco will abandon the GMT+1 zone it adopted permanently in 2018 and return to Greenwich Mean Time, the hour assigned to it since 1967 by article one of royal decree no. 455.67. The decision itself is not this week’s: decree no. 2.26.530, deliberated in the council of government on June 25 and published in the Bulletin officiel no. 7521 of June 29, runs to three articles and wastes no words. The first sets the moment and the gesture, the second repeals from that same date decree no. 2.18.855 of October 26, 2018, which had installed permanent summer time, and the third orders publication.
Eight years, then, will have been enough to undo what a study had recommended. The ministry in charge of administrative reform still sets out on its own website the reasons GMT+1 was chosen after five years of seasonal switching were assessed: an extra hour of daylight for leisure, lower fossil-fuel consumption and lower CO2 emissions, stimulated domestic spending, and a narrower time difference with the country’s main trading partners, to the benefit of offshoring. The same text recalled the exception that had become a habit, the return to GMT during Ramadan, to fit the particularities of the holy month. It is the exception that now becomes the rule. The gap with continental Europe will widen by an hour, winter days will brighten earlier and darken earlier, and the kingdom, which returned to GMT each Ramadan before switching back, will have no clocks left to change.
Photo: fabien barbier, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Secrétariat général du gouvernement - Bulletin officiel n° 7521 du 29 juin 2026 — décret n° 2.26.530 relatif à l’heure légale
Ministère de la Transition numérique et de la Réforme de l’administration - Horaires de travail et jours fériés — l’heure légale au Maroc
