Time until Memorial Day

Memorial Day is the last Monday in May, honouring Americans who died in military service. Note that the rule is the last Monday, not the fourth: in a May with five Mondays those are different days, which is a common source of wrong dates in hand-written calendars. It began as Decoration Day after the Civil War and moved to a fixed Monday under the Uniform Monday Holiday Act in 1971. The long weekend is treated as the start of the American summer.

Ceremonies are held at cemeteries and memorials in the morning, and the national moment of remembrance is observed at three in the afternoon local time. The flag is flown at half staff until noon and raised for the remainder of the day, a detail that is often got wrong. Practically, the weekend opens the American summer: campsites, beaches and holiday rentals take bookings for it months ahead, and road travel peaks on the Friday afternoon and again on the Monday evening. The Indianapolis 500 is run on the Sunday. Because the holiday was moved to a Monday in 1971, veterans' organisations have argued ever since for restoring the original 30 May date, on the grounds that a long weekend obscures what the day is for.

At the American cemetery in Margraten in the Netherlands, local families have adopted individual graves for generations and lay flowers on the day. Ceremonies are held at the Normandy cemetery in France as well, timed to the morning there rather than to the American afternoon. Several southern states keep a separate Confederate Memorial Day on their own dates in April, May or June, a different observance that is regularly confused with this one in listings. Waterloo in New York holds the designated title of birthplace, although rival claims from other towns have never quite gone away.

The next one falls on Monday, 31 May 2027, and this page counts down to the midnight that starts it in whatever time zone your browser reports.

Decorating soldiers' graves began in several places at once after the Civil War, and more than twenty towns have claimed to have been first. One of the earliest documented gatherings was in Charleston in May 1865, when freed Black residents reburied Union prisoners who had died in a camp there and held a procession for them. General John Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic called for a national Decoration Day on 30 May 1868, choosing a date on which flowers would be in bloom across the whole country rather than one on which anything had happened.

Memorial Day was in common use as a name from the 1880s but did not become the official one until 1967, a year before Congress moved the holiday off the 30th. Veterans' organisations have campaigned ever since for its restoration, arguing that a three-day weekend has converted a day of mourning into the opening of the summer. The argument has never had the votes, and the Monday has now held the date for more than fifty years.