Time until Saturday

Saturday is the busiest day of the week for anything that has to be done in person, and the countdown above runs to the midnight that opens it in your own zone. Where the weekend is Saturday and Sunday it is the first day off, and where it is Friday and Saturday it is the second, which is worth keeping in mind before assuming a colleague abroad shares your idea of a free morning. Under the ISO numbering it is the sixth day of the week, and under the American convention the seventh.

What people plan around a Saturday almost always needs booking rather than waiting. Weddings, amateur fixtures, markets, museums and family visits concentrate on it, and venues price it above every other day. The practical constraints run the other way. Bank branches close or keep short hours, business post is not collected, and many couriers treat a Saturday delivery as a priced extra rather than a default. Shop hours are longer than on a Sunday across most of Europe, and in Germany, Austria and Norway the Saturday is the only weekend day on which a supermarket is open at all. Parking restrictions and controlled zones often still apply, which catches people who assume the weekend rules are the same on both days.

Britain keeps a blackout on live football broadcast between a quarter to three and a quarter past five on a Saturday afternoon, held in place so that television does not empty the grounds of lower-league clubs. Japan phased Saturday lessons out between 1992 and 2002, giving up one Saturday a month at a time until the school week was five days, and some prefectures have since put a few of them back. Nepal takes Saturday alone as its weekly day off, so the Friday before it is an ordinary working day. Israel and the countries of the Gulf that work Sunday to Thursday close on the Saturday along with everyone else, which makes it the one day most of the world has off at the same time.

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

Saturday is the only English weekday that still carries a Roman god. Four of the other six were given Germanic gods in place of the Roman ones as the seven-day week travelled north, so Mars became Tiw and Jupiter became Thunor, while Sunday and Monday were translated outright from dies Solis and dies Lunae. No local figure was felt to match Saturn, so dies Saturni was simply borrowed and has kept its Roman name ever since.

Most of Europe went the other way and named the day after the sabbath. Spanish sabado, Italian sabato, Portuguese sabado and Greek Savvato all descend from the Hebrew shabbat, and French samedi comes from the same root by a longer road. German is split down the middle: Samstag in the south and west, also from the sabbath, against Sonnabend in the north and east, which means the eve of Sunday. Jewish observance still keeps the day the name refers to, running from sunset on Friday to nightfall on Saturday, and Seventh-day Adventists keep it as their day of worship.