It stops “getting dark early” just after the winter solstice, when the amount of daylight starts increasing again, though how quickly you notice it depends a lot on where you live and on daylight saving time rules. In many mid‑latitude places in the Northern Hemisphere, evenings start very slowly getting lighter in mid‑December, but mornings may keep getting darker until around early January, so the change can feel frustratingly gradual.

What’s Actually Going On

  • The shortest day of the year is the winter solstice , typically around December 21–22 in the Northern Hemisphere.
  • After that date, total daylight increases a little bit each day, so strictly speaking it stops getting earlier dark right after the solstice, even if you do not notice it at first.

Why It Still Feels So Early

  • The earliest sunset usually happens a week or two before the solstice (around early to mid‑December near 40°N), while the latest sunrise comes a week or two after (around late December to early January).
  • Because mornings keep getting darker for a while, many people feel like “it’s still getting worse” even though evenings are already very slowly getting lighter.

How Much Your Location Matters

  • Higher latitudes (e.g., northern US, Canada, UK, Scandinavia) see big swings: very short winter days and very long summer days, so the “dark early” period is longer and more dramatic.
  • Closer to the equator, day length barely changes through the year, so there is much less sense of a long, gloomy early‑dark season.

Role of Daylight Saving Time

  • In regions that use daylight saving time, clocks “fall back” in early November, making sunset jump about an hour earlier overnight, which makes the early darkness suddenly feel worse.
  • Once clocks are on standard time, the natural shift of the seasons dominates, and after the solstice the trend is slowly toward later sunsets, even though it takes weeks to feel like a clear difference.

Rule of Thumb You Can Use

  • Emotionally, many people report that evenings start to feel noticeably lighter by late January into February, when the added daylight has built up to nearly an extra hour or more since the solstice at mid‑latitudes.
  • So: it technically stops getting dark earlier right after the winter solstice, but for your daily life, expect it to start feeling meaningfully less grim from late January onward, improving steadily into spring.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.