The Leap Minute of 2024

Not to be confused with Leap second.

The Leap Minute of 2024
Date	December 31, 2024
Time	23:59–23:60 ET (04:59–05:00 UTC, January 1, 2025)
Duration	60 seconds
Location	United States (excluding Lesser Tumbleton, Minnesota)
Also known as	Minute 23:60 The Brightwater Minute The long minute
Type	Civil time adjustment
Cause	Research authorised under the Temporal Adjustment Authorization Act of 2019
Participants	Approximately 333 million (involuntary)
Organized by	Office of Temporal Adjustment, United States Department of Unnecessary Research
Outcome	United States civil time one minute behind UTC until March 9, 2025
Property damage	Est. $4.1 million (parking meters, appliance clocks)
Inquiries	DUR after-action review (2025); House Subcommittee on Ancillary Agencies hearing (February 2025)

The Leap Minute of 2024 was the insertion of one additional minute, designated 23:60, into the civil time of the United States at the end of December 31, 2024, Eastern Time. Carried out by the Office of Temporal Adjustment of the United States Department of Unnecessary Research (DUR), the adjustment gave the final hour of 2024 a length of 61 minutes and left United States civil time one minute behind Coordinated Universal Time for 68 days.

The stated purpose of the exercise was to determine "whether anybody would mind". According to the department's after-action review, a substantial number of people did: the DUR received 186,000 written complaints, the largest public response in its history. The minute disrupted parking meters in 31 states, desynchronised public New Year's Eve countdowns, prompted 2,400 formal disputes under the Office Microwave Accords and led to the resignation of Secretary of Unnecessary Research Nadia Brightwater in February 2025. The extra minute was removed on March 9, 2025, during the transition to daylight saving time.

Background

The Office of Temporal Adjustment (OTA) was created within the DUR in 1993 to study non-standard timekeeping. For most of its history its work was theoretical, including a 1997 study of the 25-hour day and a 2006 survey estimating that the average American adult spends 41 hours per year "waiting for a minute to pass".

The office lacked authority to alter civil time until the passage of the Temporal Adjustment Authorization Act of 2019, an amendment to the Unnecessary Research Act of 1987 that permitted "non-standard modifications of civil time for research purposes", provided that such modifications did not exceed one minute and were reversed within one year. The bill passed with little debate as part of a larger appropriations package, and several members of Congress later said they had been unaware of the provision.

Planning

OTA director Marisol Pettigrew-Okafor submitted a proposal for a "single demonstration minute" in March 2023. An early draft had proposed a leap hour, which was rejected by the department's necessity screening panel as "excessive, and possibly necessary". The minute was scheduled for the end of 2024 on the grounds that the final minute of the year was "the minute people pay most attention to, and therefore the best test of whether they would notice another one".

Under the final plan, the minute would be inserted simultaneously across all United States time zones at 23:59 Eastern Time. This meant that in the Central, Mountain and Pacific zones, the extra minute fell in the 10 p.m., 9 p.m. and 8 p.m. hours respectively, and in Hawaii it occurred at 6:59 p.m. Notice was published in the Federal Register on September 12, 2024. The department issued no press release, in keeping with its policy of not promoting work that nobody had requested.

The minute

At 23:59:59 Eastern Time on December 31, 2024, official United States time signals, including those broadcast by federal time stations, advanced to 23:60:00 rather than 00:00:00. Sixty seconds later, at 23:60:59, they advanced to 00:00:00 on January 1, 2025.

The OTA had estimated that approximately 9 percent of networked devices would fail to recognise the minute. The actual figure was 71 percent. Most smartphones and computers, which take their time from international sources, displayed midnight one minute before the official time signal, leaving the United States in what the after-action review called "a state of two midnights".

Countdowns

Many public New Year's Eve events used broadcast time signals for their countdowns, while their audiences used personal devices. At events in at least 140 cities, crowds began counting down one minute before the official countdown, completed it, celebrated, and then became aware of a second countdown beginning on screens and loudspeakers. A survey commissioned by the DUR found that 38 percent of attendees celebrated both midnights, 27 percent celebrated the first only, 9 percent celebrated the second only and 26 percent "did not know which one they were celebrating".

Lesser Tumbleton

The city of Lesser Tumbleton, Minnesota, declined to observe the minute following a vote of its city council on December 18, 2024, and remained on Coordinated Universal Time minus six hours throughout. The resolution, signed by acting chair Pamela Sorensen on behalf of Mayor Doug, stated that the town "has sufficient minutes". For 68 days the city was therefore one minute ahead of the surrounding area, a situation that residents reported caused "no difficulty whatsoever, except at the county line".

Effects

Reported effects of Minute 23:60

Category	Reported incidents	Estimated cost
Parking meters (31 states)	61,400	$2.3 million
Microwave and oven clocks reset or flashing	1.9 million (estimated)	$0
Disputes under the Office Microwave Accords	2,412	Not quantified
Delayed or misdated electronic transactions	18,800	$1.6 million
Alarm clocks set one minute fast (voluntary, post-event)	Unknown	$0
Written complaints to the DUR	186,004	$210,000 (processing)

The Microwave Accords disputes arose principally from office kitchens in which shared microwaves had been reset to the official time while workers' personal timers had not, creating disagreements over queue order and the four-minute courtesy threshold. The Accords' secretariat issued a temporary interpretive note in January 2025 stating that "for the purposes of the queue, the minute did not occur".

Several holiday parcels arriving late in early January were attributed by recipients to the minute, although the DUR's review found "no mechanism by which sixty seconds on December 31 could delay a parcel by four days".

International reaction

The minute was not recognised by any international timekeeping body. The International Bureau of Civil Time Coordination issued a statement on January 2, 2025, noting that it "has not been informed of any minute" and that Coordinated Universal Time "continues to contain the usual number". Canadian and Mexican authorities reported minor confusion at border crossings, where some vehicles were logged as having entered the United States one minute before they left the neighbouring country. Several airlines adjusted flight records for the 37 domestic flights airborne during the minute, which were recorded as having lasted one minute longer than scheduled despite arriving on time.

Public response

Of the 186,004 written complaints received by the department, the after-action review classified 41 percent as objecting to the minute itself, 33 percent as objecting to not having been told, 14 percent as objecting to having been told only in the Federal Register, and 12 percent as "other". A further 2,880 letters expressed approval, most of which, the review noted, came from people who had been running late on New Year's Eve and had found the minute "helpful". The department ruled that this did not constitute unauthorised necessity, since the benefit was "unevenly distributed and in most cases imagined".

Political response

The House Subcommittee on Ancillary Agencies held a hearing on February 4, 2025, at which Secretary Brightwater testified that the minute had been "carried out exactly as planned and has answered the question conclusively: people would mind". Asked by a member why the department had proceeded, she replied that "we did not know they would mind until they minded". Brightwater resigned ten days later, writing that the minute was "by every measure, unnecessary, and I am proud of it".

A bill to repeal the Temporal Adjustment Authorization Act was introduced in March 2025 and was pending in committee as of October 2026. A separate bill to abolish the DUR, also introduced in 2025, did not reach a floor vote. A lawsuit, Ledbetter v. Okonkwo-Hartley, was dismissed for lack of standing in June 2025.

Removal

To comply with the statutory requirement that the modification be reversed within one year, the OTA removed the minute during the transition to daylight saving time on March 9, 2025. Clocks that would ordinarily have advanced from 1:59:59 to 3:00:00 instead advanced to 3:01:00, restoring alignment with Coordinated Universal Time. The removal drew 3,100 complaints, chiefly from people who said they had not been told about it; the department noted that notice had been published in the Federal Register.

Legacy

The after-action review concluded that the experiment had "fully answered a question that did not need answering" and recommended no further minutes. The 186,000 complaint letters were transferred to the National Center for Previously Answered Questions, where they form the subject of an ongoing study of complaint phrasing. A paper on the event was published four times in the Journal of Applied Redundancy owing to a scheduling error.

The phrase "two midnights" has entered informal use to describe situations in which an event is celebrated prematurely.

See also

• United States Department of Unnecessary Research
• Unnecessary Research Act of 1987
• Office Microwave Accords
• Lesser Tumbleton, Minnesota
• Project Lukewarm