Thanksgiving 2026:
the date, and the week around it.

The date, and why it moves

Thanksgiving is the only major US holiday defined by a rule instead of a fixed date: the fourth Thursday of November. That rule puts it somewhere between November 19 and November 25 every year, and it exists because of a 1941 law that moved the holiday to the fourth Thursday to give the country an extra shopping week.

Next year it lands on Thursday, November 25, 2027 — one day earlier, because the months shift. If you are planning a multi-year calendar, the federal holiday list has 2026 and 2027 together, and both come with a downloadable calendar file.

The countdown uses your device clock and counts to the start of the day. The date itself does not depend on your time zone — Thanksgiving is the whole day, not a moment.

What closes, and what stays open

Thanksgiving has been a US federal holiday since 1941, which means the public machinery stops for the day:

• Federal offices and courts are closed.
• USPS is closed, so nothing is collected or delivered. If you are mailing something, it goes in the post on Friday or later.
• Most banks close, though ATMs keep working and the apps keep moving money.
• The stock markets (NYSE and Nasdaq) are closed for the full session.
• Schools and many offices are off, which is why the Thursday before a long weekend is the traditional travel day.

What stays open is the point of the holiday for most people: almost every shop, restaurant and grocery store keeps its normal hours, and the ones that do discount do it from Black Friday onward rather than on the day itself. Restaurants are the exception to the exception — many close, and the ones that open are usually booked out.

Canada’s Thanksgiving is six weeks earlier

If you are coordinating with anyone in Canada, this is the detail that catches people out. Canada celebrates Thanksgiving on the second Monday of October, which in 2026 is October 12 — a completely different date, six weeks before the US one.

Two traditions, two dates, and both are called Thanksgiving. The Canadian holiday is a late-harvest celebration in October; the American one is a late-November holiday that grew out of the 1863 proclamation of a national day of thanks. The rest of the year’s holidays have fixed dates; this one has a rule, and its Canadian namesake has a different rule.

The shopping week, and the files behind it

Thanksgiving is the run-up: Black Friday is Friday November 27 and Cyber Monday is Monday November 30. We have a separate guide for the whole run-up with the shipping deadlines and the file-size side of it, but three things come up every year:

• The sale banner. It has to be small enough to email and sharp enough to print. The image compressor takes a big campaign image down to a size that will not get clipped, and the bulk resizer does a whole product set at once.
• Print material. Menus, flyers and price sheets. A menu is a document that gets printed and emailed, so it is worth checking the file size before it goes out — the PDF compressor does that without rasterising the text.
• The QR code on the poster or the table tent, so the flyer and the landing page point at the same place. The QR generator makes it locally.

One thing worth doing early: the December deadline, not the November one. A flyer that has to be in the post by December 5 needs to be finished and printed well before Thanksgiving, because the postal service is closed on the 26th and the queue around it is the longest of the year.

When the dinner actually is

There is no official time, and this is where a lot of day plans go wrong. In the United States the classic Thanksgiving meal is served in the early afternoon, roughly 1 to 4 p.m., which is why the holiday reads as a lunch. More households now serve at 5 or 6 p.m. or later, and the shift has been moving steadily later for years.

Two practical notes. If you are hosting, the dinner is not the thing to plan your day around — the cooking is, and it starts hours earlier. And if you are a guest, the stated time is usually a range rather than a moment; read the invitation rather than assuming a clock time, because a 1 p.m. “dinner” in the United States usually means eating between 2 and 4.

Add it to your calendar

Thanksgiving Day 2026 is Thursday, November 26, 2026. Our federal holiday guide has the full 2026 and 2027 lists, and both years download as a single calendar file you can import into Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook — one entry per holiday, with the observed date already applied.

And because the week around it is the busiest of the year for anything that has to be posted, printed or shipped, the dates you actually need are the two before: Black Friday on November 27 and Cyber Monday on November 30.