Yes, you can drive at night with a Utah learner permit — and you’re required to. Utah mandates 10 night hours out of 40 total before you can get your license. There’s no curfew restricting when permit holders can drive.

What “Night” Means in Utah

Utah defines night as sunset to sunrise. No fixed clock time. The moment the sun drops below the horizon, night starts.

That matters more than it sounds. In Salt Lake City, sunset hits around 5:00 PM in December. By June, it’s pushed past 8:55 PM. The same 7 PM drive counts as night in January and counts as nothing in July. If you’re logging hours on paper, you’d need to look up the exact sunset time before every single drive.

Moda handles that automatically. It pulls sunset and sunrise times for your actual GPS coordinates, so each session gets tagged correctly without any manual lookup.

Curfew Rules

Utah has no nighttime curfew for permit holders. You can drive at any hour as long as a licensed supervisor (21 or older) is in the car. The state trusts the supervised hours system to do the safety work.

Getting Your 10 Night Hours Done

10 hours is 20% of Utah’s 40-hour total. Not a huge chunk — but families routinely leave night driving until the end and then scramble. Don’t.

The math works out to about 2 hours per month if you hold the permit the minimum 6 months. One 30-minute drive after dinner two or three times a month gets you there without any crunch.

Utah’s simulator allowance changes the calculus. Utah is one of the only states in the country that lets up to 5 of your 40 hours come from a state-certified driving simulator. That means a family could cover 5 simulator hours and only need 35 hours of real road driving. Night hours almost certainly require actual road time — a simulator can’t replicate 9 PM on I-15 — but the simulator hours free up your total budget.

Winter is your best window for night hours. Sunset hits 5:00 PM in December, which means any drive after 5 o’clock counts. That’s after school. That’s the drive home from practice. You’re not staying up until 10 PM to get a night hour in January.

By June you’d need to wait until 9 PM. Utah summers are beautiful but terrible for permit efficiency.

Utah Permit Requirements

Requirement	Details
Total supervised hours	40
Night hours	10
Simulator hours allowed	Up to 5 (count toward the 40)
Night definition	Sunset to sunrise
Minimum permit age	15
Permit hold period	6 months
Supervisor minimum age	21
Driver’s ed	Required
Permit curfew	None

Practical Tips

Use December and January. Sunset before 5 PM means weekday evening drives automatically count as night hours. You can stack night hours without changing your routine at all.

Don’t skip the simulator if it’s convenient. If a certified simulator is accessible through your driver’s ed program, use those 5 hours. They won’t satisfy the night requirement, but they reduce the real-road total you still need.

Short drives add up. A 20-minute round trip to the grocery store is 20 minutes. Log it. Ten hours of night driving is 30 drives like that. You don’t need epic late-night routes to satisfy the requirement.

Know your location. Sunset time varies across Utah — sunset in St. George arrives 10 to 15 minutes later than in Logan in summer, and the mountain terrain means it can get dark faster even before official sunset. Use a live sunset lookup rather than guessing.

The hardest part of tracking Utah night hours accurately is that sunset shifts every day. A log that just says “7:00 PM” for every drive doesn’t tell you whether that counted. You need the actual sunset time for that date and location.

Moda logs GPS coordinates, pulls real-time sunset data, and marks each session as day or night automatically. When you sit down at the DMV, your log shows exactly what counts.

For full Utah permit requirements, see our Utah permit hours guide.

Download: Moda on the App Store

Stop manually tracking hours. Moda logs driving automatically.

Auto-detects night driving, exports DMV forms, and syncs across family phones.