Dynamic daylight metrics provide valuable information about indoor daylighting performance over time. While a dynamic metric representing occupants’ perception is still needed, no consensus exists about the best-fitted metric and its targets. We hypothesize that outdoor daylight availability drives the perception of sufficient daylight indoors. This study delves into applying a new dynamic daylight metric that considers a reference illuminance based on outdoor daylight availability. Field studies were conducted in university classrooms located in four cities in Colombia. As a result, Daylight Autonomy based on people’s perception metric (pDA) was tested for a city in the tropical region. The pDA determines the reference daylight level that 80 % of the population would perceive as “not dark” between 50 % and 75 % of the year in a tropical climate. The daylight reference levels vary depending on the geographic location and daylight availability. The assessments using the proposed dynamic metric showed greater differences in the daylight sufficiency of indoor environments, which were more restrictive than the results using established dynamic metrics. The pDA metric represents a novel approach that considers the variability in the perception of “not dark” daylight levels, depending on daylight availability, contributing to the development of tailored metrics that acknowledge human perception.