Time until Thanksgiving

American Thanksgiving falls on the fourth Thursday in November, which puts it between the 22nd and the 28th. Lincoln fixed it as the last Thursday in 1863, and Congress settled on the fourth Thursday in 1941 after Franklin Roosevelt tried moving it earlier to lengthen the shopping season. Because the rule is positional rather than a fixed date, this countdown works out the weekday for each year rather than looking up a table. Canadian Thanksgiving is a separate holiday on the second Monday in October.

The travel around it is the largest domestic movement of the year in the United States, concentrated on the Wednesday before and the Sunday after, and flights for that window are priced and booked months ahead. Schools commonly close for the Thursday and the Friday, and sometimes for the whole week. Fresh turkeys are ordered weeks in advance and frozen ones need several days to thaw in a refrigerator, which is the most common domestic mistake attached to the date. Because the rule fixes the weekday, the holiday always produces a four-day weekend for anyone who also gets the Friday, and the shopping season that follows is anchored to it rather than to any calendar date. Federal offices and markets close on the Thursday, and the markets trade a shortened session on the Friday.

Liberia keeps a Thanksgiving of its own on the first Thursday in November, brought by settlers from the United States in the nineteenth century. Grenada holds a national day of thanksgiving on 25 October for quite unrelated reasons. In the Dutch city of Leiden a service is held on the American date, for the congregation that lived there before sailing. What people assume wrongly is that Canada took the American holiday and simply moved it: the Canadian day has separate roots in harvest observances, was proclaimed on various dates through the nineteenth century, and was only fixed to the second Monday in October in 1957.

The next one falls on Thursday, 26 November 2026, and this page counts down to the midnight that starts it in whatever time zone your browser reports.

Days of thanksgiving were proclaimed as occasion demanded for two centuries before the holiday existed. Washington issued one in 1789, and individual states kept their own dates without reference to each other. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of a Philadelphia magazine, campaigned for a single national day for something like thirty-six years, writing to one president after another. Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November in 1863, in the middle of the war, and every president afterwards repeated the proclamation each autumn.

Roosevelt broke the pattern in 1939 by moving it a week earlier to lengthen the shopping season, in a November that happened to have five Thursdays. About half the states refused and kept the later date, so the country spent three years with two Thanksgivings and the newspapers called the earlier one Franksgiving. Congress ended the argument with a joint resolution in 1941 fixing the fourth Thursday, which is the rule still in force and the only American holiday whose date was settled by a public row about retail.