Time until Columbus Day

Columbus Day is the second Monday in October, falling between the 8th and the 14th. It became a federal holiday in 1937 and moved to a Monday in 1971. A growing number of states and cities now observe the same day as Indigenous Peoples' Day, either alongside the older name or in place of it, so what the day is called depends heavily on where you are. Canadian Thanksgiving shares the date, which makes it a busy travel weekend across the border.

Parades in cities with large Italian-American populations are the main public events, and they are usually held on the Sunday or the Monday; the one that runs up Fifth Avenue in New York is the largest of them. North of the border the same Monday is Canadian Thanksgiving, which fills the flights and makes the weekend one of the busiest for road travel between the two countries. Autumn colour in the northeast tends to peak around then, so accommodation in New England is booked out months ahead and priced accordingly. Cities that have adopted Indigenous Peoples' Day generally hold powwows, marches or teaching programmes on the same Monday, in some places a few streets from the parade.

Spain keeps 12 October as its national day, with a military parade in Madrid and the name Dia de la Hispanidad. Several Latin American countries mark the same date under other titles, and Venezuela renamed its version the Day of Indigenous Resistance. Argentina calls it a day of respect for cultural diversity. The date is shakier than it looks: the landfall of 1492 was recorded as 12 October under the Julian calendar, and converting that to the Gregorian one now in use puts the anniversary on 21 October, so the commemoration is held on a date that does not match the day it claims.

The next one falls on Monday, 12 October 2026, and this page counts down to the midnight that starts it in whatever time zone your browser reports.

Eleven Italian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans in 1891, after a jury acquitted men accused of killing the city's police chief, and the diplomatic crisis that followed led President Harrison to proclaim a one-off national observance of the Columbus anniversary the next year. Italian-American organisations took the date up as a claim to belonging in a country that treated them as barely white, and campaigned for a permanent holiday for decades. Colorado adopted one in 1907 and the federal holiday followed in 1937.

Indigenous Peoples' Day was first proposed at a United Nations conference in 1977 and first adopted by a city, Berkeley, in 1992 for the five hundredth anniversary; South Dakota had already renamed its own holiday Native American Day in 1990. Dozens of states and several hundred cities now mark the second Monday one way, the other or both. In 2021 a president issued a proclamation for Indigenous Peoples' Day for the first time, while the statutory federal holiday underneath it was left unchanged.