Guide

Winter solstice 2026: the shortest day, and how much of it your home gets

Monday 21 December 2026 is the shortest day of the year. Here is when the solstice falls, how long the day is in Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim, Stavanger and Kristiansand, computed with the same solar model as our reports, and the thing that matters most for a home: the length of the day and the sun on your wall are two entirely different figures. The lookup is free, with no login.

Check how much sun the address gets on 21 December →

When is the winter solstice 2026?

The winter solstice 2026 is Monday 21 December at 21:50 CET. It is the moment the sun stands furthest south in the sky, and the day it happens is the shortest of the year across the whole northern hemisphere. From the day after, the days get longer again, slowly over Christmas week and noticeably from the middle of January.

The earliest sunset still comes about a week before the solstice, and the latest sunrise about a week after it. That is because solar time and clock time do not keep step all year, not because anything is wrong with the calendar. So the afternoons start to brighten before the solstice itself, while the mornings keep getting darker for a week into Christmas.

How long the day is on 21 December 2026

The table is computed with the same solar position model that sits behind every report on Soltreff, for the centre of each city, over a flat horizon with no buildings, trees or hills. The sun counts as up while the centre of its disc is above the horizon, the way the report's sun path does it. Almanacs such as timeanddate.no can differ by one to two minutes at either end. Akershus follows Oslo within about ten minutes.

The last column is the point. An ordinary three-storey building, twelve metres tall, casts a shadow of around a hundred metres in Oslo at midday on 21 December, and around two hundred metres in Trondheim. That is why the length of the day says so little about a home.

Day length is not the sun your home gets

The day length in the table is the ceiling: no wall gets more. Most get far less, and many get nothing. A wall sees only half the sky, and on 21 December the sun rises in the southeast and sets in the southwest without ever getting further north than that. A wall facing north, northeast or northwest therefore gets zero minutes of direct sun that day, however open the view, and the same holds for almost all of December.

For a wall facing south, east or west, what stands in front of it decides. With the sun as low as it is, between 3 and 9 degrees above the horizon at its highest depending on the city, a neighbouring twelve-metre building shades eighty metres or more. A flat on the first or second floor behind such a building, or a terraced house behind a row of spruces, can get zero minutes of sun on 21 December even though the day is four to six hours long. A few floors up, in the same building and on the same wall, the sun can be on the window for the whole of the short day.

That is why "sun all day" in a listing can be true as a day length and false as a winter promise. What your wall keeps of the day is decided by the floor and by what stands in the way, not by the compass direction alone. The west-facing page shows how much the direction can give month by month; this page is about the day with the least to be had.

What the report says about 21 December

Every report on Soltreff shows minutes of direct sun on 21 December for exactly the floor and facade you choose, computed from Kartverket's laser scan, in which the neighbouring buildings, trees and terrain actually stand. The figure sits beside the sun hours for the whole year, and under them, when it is available, is the map of what takes the sun, numbered, with direction and distance. So you see not just that the winter is dark, but what makes it dark for this particular wall.

December is a minimum figure where the scan is confirmed flown with leaves on the trees. We cannot tell whether a tree is deciduous or a spruce, so December is computed as if the leaves stayed on all winter. If foliage is in the way, the report also shows what gets through without leaves, as a range from the minimum figure upwards. Where we have not confirmed that the scan was flown with leaves on the trees, the report says so and calls the December figure an estimate, not a minimum. The method says which sources the figures rest on, and what has been checked.

This page shows no figure from the reports. The day length above is geometry, the same for everyone; what your home gets of it is the answer the lookup gives for the address. The lookup needs only street and house number, floor, and the wall the windows face.

Common questions

When is the winter solstice 2026?

Monday 21 December 2026 at 21:50 CET. It is the shortest day of the year, and from the day after, the days get longer again.

How long is the day in Oslo on 21 December?

5 hours and 53 minutes in 2026, with sunrise at 09:19 and sunset at 15:11, computed for the centre of Oslo over a flat horizon. Almanacs can differ by a couple of minutes. The sun reaches 6.8 degrees above the horizon at its highest, and that low, how much of the day a home actually gets is decided by the floor and by what stands in front of the wall.

Why does my flat get no sun in December?

Because the sun is so low that almost anything takes it. Around the solstice the sun in our cities reaches only 3 to 9 degrees above the horizon at midday, and a three-storey building then casts a shadow of eighty metres or more. A flat on a low floor behind a neighbouring building, or a wall facing north, can get zero minutes of direct sun even though the day is four to six hours long. The report shows the 21 December figure for your floor and facade, and the map under it, when it is available, shows what takes the sun.

Check the sun at an address →

We cover Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim, Stavanger, Kristiansand and Akershus for now, plus parts of neighbouring municipalities. The rest of Norway is coming.