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The honest answer is that it depends which room you mean. “South facing” describes a front door. The bedroom behind it might face north and never see a sunrise all year. Pick a county and a window below, and this works out exactly when direct sun reaches that room — on the shortest day, the longest, and both equinoxes.
The way you would be looking if you stood at the window and faced out. Your phone’s compass app will tell you — or check the house on a satellite map.
Times shown in
Pick a county and a direction.
Calculated by Before Regret with the NOAA solar position algorithm at each county’s US Census Gazetteer point. Open horizon unless stated; local clock time.
The same calculation the tool runs, worked through in advance for a northern county and a southern one, so the results can be read and quoted without running it.
| Window faces | King Co., WA Dec 21 | King Co., WA Jun 21 | Miami-Dade, FL Dec 21 | Miami-Dade, FL Jun 21 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| North | 0 min | 421 min | 0 min | 619 min |
| Northeast | 51 min | 386 min | 137 min | 402 min |
| East | 251 min | 477 min | 315 min | 411 min |
| Southeast | 451 min | 568 min | 492 min | 421 min |
| South | 502 min | 533 min | 630 min | 203 min |
| Southwest | 451 min | 568 min | 493 min | 420 min |
| West | 251 min | 477 min | 315 min | 411 min |
| Northwest | 51 min | 386 min | 138 min | 401 min |
Minutes of direct sun reaching the glass on the shortest and longest days of 2026, open horizon, at each county’s US Census Gazetteer point (King County 47.49°N, Miami-Dade 25.62°N).
| East window, King Co., WA, Dec 21 | Sunrise | First direct sun | Total | Before 9am |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open horizon | 07:53 | 07:55 | 251 min | 65 min |
| Lowest 15° of sky blocked | 07:53 | 10:17 | 109 min | 0 min |
The same window with and without a building or tree line close by. Local clock time.
Almost everything written about a south facing house is describing the street elevation — which way the front of the building points. That tells you about the front rooms and nothing at all about the back ones. A south facing house has north-facing rooms in it, and those rooms behave exactly like rooms in a north facing house.
South-facing windows do get the most sun overall, and they get it through the middle of the day rather than at either end. In winter that is the warmest room in the house. In an un-shaded August it is the one nobody wants to sit in.
For every direction side by side, winter against summer, in a Chicago-latitude house and a Phoenix one, see our guide to how much sun each side of a south-facing house really gets.
This is the result that surprises people. In midsummer the sun rises well north of due east — at 40°N it clears the horizon at a bearing of about 58° in June, against about 121° in December. So a north-facing window gets a genuine run of early light for several months, then loses it entirely for the winter. Set the direction to north above and the table shows the split.
What a north facing room really lacks is not light but direct light. It gets steady, even daylight all day and very little glare, which is why north-facing rooms have been the traditional choice for studios and desks.
These two differ most, and the difference is the time of day. An east facing house takes the sun early and loses it around midday. A west facing house is the mirror image: nothing in the morning, then everything from mid-afternoon until sunset, along with the heat that comes with it in summer.
Neither is better in the abstract. East light suits a bedroom or a kitchen you use in the morning. West light suits a room you sit in after work, if you can shade it in July.
A compass direction assumes an open sky, and most houses do not have one. The neighbouring roofline, a mature oak, a ridge behind the property — any of these routinely matter more than the direction does. A two-storey house about fifteen feet away blocks roughly the first 15° of sky, which on a midwinter morning is the difference between first light at 7:19 and first light at 9:07.
That is not a rounding error. In winter an obstruction does not reduce a room’s morning light, it removes it. Switch the second setting above to compare the same window both ways — for many houses this is the only comparison that matters.
Sun position is worked out for every minute of the day using the standard NOAA solar position algorithm, corrected for atmospheric refraction near the horizon. A window receives direct sun when the sun is above the horizon and within 90° of the way the window faces. County coordinates are the internal points published in the US Census Bureau 2023 Gazetteer.
It tells you whether direct sun reaches the glass, not how bright the room will feel — window size, glazing, wall colour and indirect daylight all matter and none of them are here. The obstruction setting is one approximation, not a model of your neighbour’s actual roofline. And it counts minutes of sunlight; it makes no claim about health or sleep.