Time until Halloween

Halloween is 31 October, the eve of All Saints' Day and a descendant of the Gaelic festival of Samhain. It is a fixed date, so the weekday changes each year and a Halloween on a Friday or Saturday tends to be a much bigger evening than one in the middle of the week. It is not a public holiday, and trick-or-treating usually runs from late afternoon into the early evening rather than at the midnight this countdown targets.

Costumes, sweets and pumpkins are bought in the last week of October, and particular costume sizes tend to sell out before that, so a countdown reading a fortnight is a useful prompt. Door-to-door conventions differ from town to town, and some places formally move trick-or-treating to the nearest weekend evening or set a curfew, which is worth checking locally rather than assuming. Shops stock Halloween goods from late September in countries where it is established, and the season overlaps with the first Christmas ranges in the same aisle. In Mexico and parts of Central America the following two days are Day of the Dead, a distinct observance with its own traditions rather than a local version of Halloween. European clocks go back in late October, so the evening is already dark.

In Ireland the night is marked with bonfires and a barmbrack holding hidden tokens, drawing on Samhain, the older marker of the start of winter. Scotland keeps guising, where children perform for their treat rather than simply asking, and lanterns were cut from turnips long before pumpkins arrived. In the Philippines families spend the first days of November cleaning and visiting graves. The date confusion in Ireland is with the October bank holiday, which is the last Monday of the month and so usually falls a few days short of the 31st, meaning the day off and the night itself only rarely coincide.

The next one falls on Saturday, 31 October 2026, and this page counts down to the midnight that starts it in whatever time zone your browser reports.

The night sits on an older Gaelic quarter day. Samhain marked the end of the harvest and the start of winter, and the medieval Irish tales place otherworldly events on it. The church put All Saints on 1 November in the ninth century and All Souls on the 2nd soon after, which gave the eve its name: All Hallows' Eve, contracted in Scots to Halloween. Going from door to door in disguise for food is recorded in Scotland and Ireland as guising by the sixteenth century, and separately as souling, in which the poor asked for cakes in return for praying for the dead.

The pumpkin is American. Irish and Scottish lanterns were cut from turnips and mangel-wurzels, which are hard work to hollow and smell unpleasant once lit, and the switch happened after emigration to a country where a large soft squash was cheap and everywhere. Trick-or-treating in its present form is a North American invention of the 1920s and 1930s, and it came back across the Atlantic late enough that plenty of people in Britain and Ireland still take it for an import rather than a return.