Time until New Year's Day

New Year's Day is 1 January, the first day of the Gregorian calendar year and a public holiday in almost every country that uses it. Britain only moved the legal start of the year from 25 March to 1 January in 1752, so the date is younger than it feels. When it falls on a Saturday or Sunday, many countries shift the day off to the nearest weekday. The countdown runs to midnight at the start of 1 January in your own zone.

The countdown matters most to people with something that turns over with the calendar: annual subscriptions, insurance renewals, memberships and resolutions all take 1 January as their pivot. Banks and government offices close, and where the holiday lands on a weekend the closure moves rather than disappears, so a payment due on the 1st can clear a day or two later than expected. Several places also keep 2 January as a holiday, Scotland among them. Public transport often runs a reduced timetable on the day and an extended one the night before. A common mistake is to treat 1 January as the start of the tax or fiscal year; in much of the world it is not, and the deadlines that follow from it sit elsewhere in the calendar.

In Japan the first three days are the main family holiday of the year, with shrine visits, prepared osechi food and most businesses shut until the 4th. Russia treats it as the larger of the winter holidays and runs a public break into the second week of January. In Greece the date is the feast of Saint Basil, and a coin baked into the vasilopita decides who has the luck. The recurring mistake is assuming the Gregorian date is the new year everywhere: the Chinese, Islamic, Ethiopian, Persian and Jewish calendars all begin theirs elsewhere, and several of those beginnings move about the Gregorian year.

The next one falls on Friday, 1 January 2027, and this page counts down to the midnight that starts it in whatever time zone your browser reports.

Rome moved the start of the consular year to 1 January in 153 BC and Caesar's reform kept it there. Medieval Christian Europe found the date pagan and pushed the year's beginning about: Venice used 1 March, much of France used Easter, and England settled on 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation. A document dated February in an English archive therefore belongs to a year that had not yet turned, which is why historians writing about the period give both years at once.

The Gregorian reform of 1582 put 1 January back, and adoption was slow and political. Catholic states changed within months, Protestant and Orthodox ones took centuries. Britain and its colonies waited until the Calendar (New Style) Act came into force in 1752, when the year 1751 was cut short to nine months and eleven days were struck out of the following September. Russia held out until 1918 and Greece until 1923, which is why the Russian revolution of October is commemorated in November.