How much daylight you get on any given day depends on two things: the date, and your latitude (how far you are from the equator). Near the equator, the answer is the same year-round: about 12 hours of daylight, 12 hours of night. Earth’s tilt doesn’t change much for places sitting on the equator.
But the farther you go from the equator, the more daylight changes through the year. In the northern US, summer days can be 15-16 hours long; winter days can shrink to 8-9 hours. In Scandinavia, summer days stretch to 18+ hours, and winter days can be just 5-6 hours. Most everyone living far from the equator notices the difference, especially when summer feels endless and winter feels like permanent darkness.
The most extreme variation is at the poles. North of the Arctic Circle and south of the Antarctic Circle, you can experience continuous daylight in summer (the “midnight sun”) and continuous darkness in winter (the “polar night”). At the actual poles, the Sun rises just once a year - in March at the North Pole, in September at the South Pole - and stays up continuously for six months before setting for the other six. Every 24-hour cycle of day and night that most of the world takes for granted simply doesn’t happen there.
