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Water dynamics in the solvation shell around biomolecules plays a vital role in their stability, function, and recognition processes. Although extensively studied through various experimental and computational methods, dynamical time scales of water near DNA is highly debated. The residence time of water is one such dynamical quantity that has been probed rarely around DNA using computational methods. Moreover, the effect of local DNA sequence variation in water residence time has also not been addressed. Using 20 DNA systems with different sequences, we capture here the mean residence time (MRT) of water molecules around 360 different sites in the major and minor grooves of DNA. Thus, we show that a distribution of time scales exists even for a regular structure of DNA, reflecting the effect of chemistry, topography, and other factors governing dynamics of water. We used the stable state picture (SSP …