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CGPM votes to abolish the leap second, adopting a future 'leap hour' instead

Member states of the General Conference on Weights and Measures voted on 15 October to end the practice of adding leap seconds to Universal Coordinated Time, a change originally scheduled for 2035. In its place, timekeepers will allow a full hour of drift to accumulate between atomic time and Earth's rotation-based time before making a single correction, a threshold not expected to be reached for thousands of years.

nature.com · 2026-10-15

Global timekeepers may scrap the leap second before October vote

Standards body CGPM will vote in mid-October on ending the leap second, the periodic one-second adjustment used since 1972 to keep atomic clock time aligned with Earth's rotation. The move is being accelerated because the next adjustment could, for the first time, require subtracting rather than adding a second—a scenario computer systems have never had to handle. In its place, officials are proposing a leap hour that would only realign timescales once they drift a full 3,600 seconds apart.

nature.com · 2026-08-31