Time until Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is the third Monday in January, which places it between the 15th and the 21st and close to King's birthday on 15 January. It was signed into law in 1983 and first observed in 1986, though it took until 2000 for every state to recognise it. It is a federal holiday and also a national day of service, which is unusual: the legislation encourages volunteering rather than simply closing offices.

Because the legislation frames it as a day of service, the volunteering projects attached to it recruit in December and early January, and school and university programmes are planned a term ahead. Federal offices, banks, post offices and most schools close, while private employers vary widely, so it is worth checking rather than assuming. The holiday shares a month with King's birthday but is not the birthday itself, and the third Monday can sit as much as six days after the 15th. Several southern states once combined the day with a Confederate commemoration, a pairing that has been unwound over time. Weather often interferes: marches in northern cities in mid-January are regularly shortened or moved indoors, and organisers tend to publish an alternative venue in advance.

Arizona lost a Super Bowl over its refusal to adopt the day and settled the question by referendum in the early 1990s, while New Hampshire called it Civil Rights Day until the end of that decade. Outside the United States the date is marked mainly by American embassies and schools. It is sometimes taken for the anniversary of King's assassination, which was 4 April 1968 in Memphis and is commemorated separately. The holiday lands on the birthday itself only in the years when 1 January is a Monday, which is the one arrangement that puts the third Monday on the 15th.

The next one falls on Monday, 18 January 2027, and this page counts down to the midnight that starts it in whatever time zone your browser reports.

A bill for the holiday was introduced four days after King's assassination in 1968 and went nowhere for fifteen years. Petitions carrying millions of signatures were delivered to Congress, the King Center campaigned without pause, and Stevie Wonder's Happy Birthday in 1980 probably did more for the cause than most of the lobbying. The objections were about cost, about the precedent of honouring a private citizen, and in some quarters about King himself. The bill passed in 1983 by margins large enough to make a veto pointless.

The memorial on the National Mall opened in 2011, the first there for an American who was neither a president nor a veteran of a war, and the only one to a Black American. Its dedication was postponed by a hurricane and held seven weeks late. King is also one of only three people with a federal holiday in their name, alongside Washington and Columbus, and the only one of the three who never held any office at all.