Time until Veterans Day

Veterans Day is 11 November, the anniversary of the armistice that ended fighting on the Western Front in 1918 at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The United States renamed Armistice Day in 1954 to honour all veterans; the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth keep the date as Remembrance Day. A brief experiment in the 1970s moved the American holiday to a Monday, and it was returned to the 11th in 1978.

The two observances that share the date are run quite differently. In the United States it is a federal holiday with ceremonies at cemeteries and memorials, and the national one at Arlington is timed to eleven in the morning. In Britain the two minutes of silence is kept at the same hour, while the larger national commemoration is held on Remembrance Sunday, the second Sunday in November, which can fall before or after the 11th. Poppies are worn through the preceding fortnight across the Commonwealth and are much less common in the United States, where a separate poppy day sits in May. American banks and schools close while most private employers do not, and retailers treat the long weekend as a sales event, which veterans' organisations regularly object to.

France and Belgium keep 11 November as a public holiday for the armistice itself, with wreaths laid at the Arc de Triomphe and at town memorials. Poland marks the same date as its Independence Day, the republic having been restored on it in 1918. Canada calls the day Remembrance Day and observes it in most provinces. The mix-up in the United States is between two dates rather than one: this holiday honours everyone who served and most of them are alive, while the May one is for those who died, so a greeting that fits the first is misplaced on the second.

The next one falls on Wednesday, 11 November 2026, and this page counts down to the midnight that starts it in whatever time zone your browser reports.

Fighting on the Western Front stopped at eleven in the morning on 11 November 1918, under an armistice signed six hours earlier in a railway carriage at Compiegne. It was a ceasefire rather than a peace: the war was formally ended by the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919, and fighting continued elsewhere in Europe for years afterwards. The two minutes of silence was proposed from South Africa and adopted in Britain for the first anniversary in 1919, and it spread through the Commonwealth from there.

The American renaming in 1954 came out of a campaign by a shop owner in Emporia, Kansas, who argued that a day for one war should be a day for all of them. Congress then moved the holiday to a Monday in 1968 along with three others, which produced enough objection from veterans' organisations and from states that simply refused to comply that it was returned to 11 November from 1978. It is the one clear reversal of the Monday holiday experiment.