General Conference on Weights and Measures abolishes the leap second and replaces it with a leap hour
16 October 2026
Member states of the General Conference on Weights and Measures voted to abolish the leap second immediately and to replace it with a leap hour.
The vote was taken at the twenty-eighth meeting of the Conference, held outside Paris on 15 October.
Leap seconds keep Universal Coordinated Time, which is based on atomic clocks, aligned with solar time, which follows the Earth's irregular rotation, and they have been added roughly once every one and a half years.
They have disrupted computing systems and caused clocks to fall out of alignment on the days they were applied.
The leap hour will be triggered only when Earth time and atomic time drift apart by 3,600 seconds, which the report says is likely not to be needed for thousands of years.
The resolution was formally introduced by Noel Dimarcq, a metrologist at the Cote d'Azur Observatory in Nice, and passed by majority rather than unanimously.
In plain words
UTC Universal Coordinated Time — The world's civil time standard, generated by atomic clocks and until now kept near solar time by leap seconds.
CGPM General Conference on Weights and Measures — The treaty body of member states that takes the final decisions on the International System of Units and on world time standards.