The clocks fell back on November 1, and now it’s dark before dinner. If your teen has a learner’s permit, that early sunset is good news. It’s the easiest time of year to get the night hours on Indiana’s driving log done.
Here’s what the state asks for, what counts as night, and how to fit 10 hours into your normal routine.
How many night hours Indiana requires
Indiana requires at least 50 hours of supervised driving, and at least 10 of them must be at night, according to the BMV’s driver’s license page. The night hours are part of the 50, not extra. There’s no separate daytime minimum: a teen who logs 12 hours at night needs 38 more in daylight to reach 50.
There are two exceptions. If the learner’s permit carries a daytime-only restriction (the Indiana Driver’s Manual calls it restriction G), your teen skips the 10 night hours but still needs all 50. The log form also says bioptic drivers don’t have to drive at night.
Night and day hours share one form, the Log of Supervised Driving that goes to the BMV with the license application. If you haven’t started that log yet, begin with how the Indiana 50-hour driving log works, then come back here for the night column.
What counts as night on the log
Indiana doesn’t give the log an official start time for night. The BMV’s Log of Supervised Driving, State Form 54706, has a DAY column and a NIGHT column, and it never says where one ends and the other begins.
So use the line Indiana already draws for headlights. The Driver’s Manual says drivers must use headlights between sunset and sunrise. Once the sun is down and the headlights are required, count the drive as night.
Two habits keep it simple:
- Pick your rule once and use it for every entry. A log where night starts at sunset one week and at 9 p.m. the next is hard to keep straight.
- Check sunset on the day you drive. Your phone’s weather app shows it.
When it gets dark in Indiana
Sunset moves by about four hours over the year, and that changes how much night driving a normal evening gives you. These times come from the U.S. Naval Observatory’s sun data for 2026:
| Date | Sunset in Indianapolis |
|---|---|
| June 21 | 9:16 p.m. |
| October 31 (last day of daylight time) | 6:44 p.m. |
| November 1 (first day of standard time) | 5:42 p.m. |
| Early December | about 5:20 p.m. |
| December 21 | 5:23 p.m. |
Terre Haute runs a few minutes later: 5:29 p.m. on December 21. Evansville is on Central time, so its clocks read an hour earlier, and the sun sets there at 4:34 p.m. that day.
In June, a night drive means heading out after 9:15 p.m. In December, the drive home from basketball practice already counts.
Splitting a drive that crosses sunset
Plenty of drives start in daylight and end in the dark. The log has room for both. Put the minutes before sunset in the DAY column and the minutes after it in the NIGHT column, on the same line.
Say your teen drives from 5:00 to 5:45 p.m. on December 21 in Indianapolis. Sunset is 5:23. That’s 23 minutes of day and 22 minutes of night, both logged on one line for that date.
How to get your 10 night hours
Ten hours sounds like a lot until you break it up. Twenty drives of 30 minutes gets you there, and from November through January a lot of ordinary trips happen after sunset.
- Use the trips you’re already taking. Practice, the grocery store, a friend’s house. If it’s after sunset, your teen drives.
- Start on familiar, well-lit streets. Your own neighborhood at night looks different. Let your teen learn that before adding new roads.
- Add an unlit road once they’re steady. A county road with no streetlights teaches headlight use better than anything in town.
- Practice the low-beam rule. The Driver’s Manual says to switch to low beams within 500 feet of an oncoming car and within 200 feet of a car you’re following. Have your teen call out when they switch.
- Work on glare. When oncoming lights are bright, the manual’s advice is to look toward the right side of the road instead of into the lights. Slow down a little on roads your teen doesn’t know.
- Log it the same night. Write the date, the day minutes and the night minutes before you go to bed.
Spread the hours out. One long night drive the week before the license test won’t teach as much as twenty short ones over a winter.
Why the practice matters after the license
For the first 180 days with a probationary license, Indiana teens can’t drive between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. But in the winter, 5:30 p.m. is already dark. The night hours on the log are the practice your teen gets with you in the passenger seat before those evening drives are theirs alone.
Logging night hours with Drive Now
Drive Now records each drive by GPS and sorts the time into day and night for you, on one log. When the hours are done, it fills in State Form 54706 for a parent to sign. The night setting is chosen by the driving school and can change with the season. The Indiana BMV accepts the Drive Now app log, and our post on paper logs and apps compares the two ways of keeping it.
This week
Look up tonight’s sunset, then pick one trip after it that your teen can drive. Log the minutes when you get home. That’s the first of your 10 hours.