Stock Market Holidays and Early Closes, 2026 to 2028
Stock market holidays are the weekdays when US stock exchanges such as the NYSE and Nasdaq stay closed, plus a few sessions that end early at 1 p.m. Eastern. For the rest of 2026 that means Thanksgiving on 26 November and Christmas on 25 December, with early closes on 27 November and 24 December.
Stock market holidays are the weekdays when US stock exchanges such as the NYSE and Nasdaq stay closed, plus a few sessions that end early at 1 p.m. Eastern. For the rest of 2026 that means Thanksgiving on 26 November and Christmas on 25 December, with early closes on 27 November and 24 December.
Every date on this page is copied from the exchanges’ own pages as they read on 26 September 2026. The schedules are set a year or more ahead but can change, so the exchange page is the final word. Below the calendar, more than 33 years of SPY data show what those sessions have actually looked like.
The 2026, 2027 and 2028 holiday calendar
The NYSE page lists ten holidays, nine of them observed in 2028, and says all NYSE markets observe them. The table below copies its 2026, 2027 and 2028 columns. The 2026 dates that have already passed are kept so the pattern is visible.
| Holiday | 2026 | 2027 | 2028 |
|---|---|---|---|
| New Year’s Day | Thu 1 Jan | Fri 1 Jan | none (1 Jan is a Saturday) |
| Martin Luther King, Jr. Day | Mon 19 Jan | Mon 18 Jan | Mon 17 Jan |
| Washington’s Birthday | Mon 16 Feb | Mon 15 Feb | Mon 21 Feb |
| Good Friday | Fri 3 Apr | Fri 26 Mar | Fri 14 Apr |
| Memorial Day | Mon 25 May | Mon 31 May | Mon 29 May |
| Juneteenth | Fri 19 Jun | Fri 18 Jun (observed) | Mon 19 Jun |
| Independence Day | Fri 3 Jul (observed) | Mon 5 Jul (observed) | Tue 4 Jul |
| Labor Day | Mon 7 Sep | Mon 6 Sep | Mon 4 Sep |
| Thanksgiving Day | Thu 26 Nov | Thu 25 Nov | Thu 23 Nov |
| Christmas Day | Fri 25 Dec | Fri 24 Dec (observed) | Mon 25 Dec |
Nasdaq’s two holiday pages list 2026 only. Both the Nasdaq holiday schedule and the Nasdaq Trader calendar give the same ten 2026 closures as the NYSE, including Thanksgiving on 26 November and Christmas on 25 December. Neither showed 2027 when read, so the 2027 and 2028 columns above rest on the NYSE page alone. Check Nasdaq’s page once it posts 2027.
Observed days move a weekend holiday onto a weekday, with one exception. Independence Day 2026 falls on a Saturday, so the closure is Friday 3 July. Christmas 2027 is also a Saturday, so the market shuts on Friday 24 December 2027. New Year’s Day 2028 falls on a Saturday too, and the NYSE says no holiday is observed for it, and Friday 31 December 2027 is not on its holiday list.
Early closes and what they cut
An early close ends regular trading at 1:00 p.m. Eastern instead of 4:00 p.m. The NYSE page lists five of them from late 2026 through 2028:
- Friday 27 November 2026, the day after Thanksgiving
- Thursday 24 December 2026, Christmas Eve
- Friday 26 November 2027, the day after Thanksgiving
- Monday 3 July 2028, the day before Independence Day
- Friday 24 November 2028, the day after Thanksgiving
Options on those days close at 1:15 p.m. for eligible options, not 1:00 p.m. On the same days the late trading sessions of NYSE American, NYSE Arca, NYSE National and NYSE Texas end at 5:00 p.m. rather than running on to 8:00 p.m. Nasdaq’s 2026 list shows the same two 1:00 p.m. closes and adds that it will keep sending alerts about early-close days, with the full system operating times.
Bond trading follows a separate recommendation. SIFMA, the securities industry group, publishes a holiday schedule for US government, mortgage, corporate and municipal bond trading. Besides Thanksgiving and Christmas, for the rest of 2026 it recommends full closes on Columbus Day, Monday 12 October, and Veterans Day, Wednesday 11 November. Neither appears on the NYSE list, so stocks trade on both days while SIFMA recommends bond trading stay shut. SIFMA’s remaining 2026 early closes are at 2:00 p.m. Eastern, not 1:00 p.m.: on 27 November, 24 December and 31 December 2026.
How it works
Each exchange publishes its own calendar. The NYSE and Nasdaq post their holidays and hours separately, and for 2026 the two lists match date for date. On a holiday there is no regular session, so a stock’s daily chart simply has no bar for that date.
On an ordinary day the core session runs from 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Eastern. Both exchanges state those hours. Nasdaq lists pre-market trading from 4:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. and after hours from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., and warns that brokers set their own extended windows. The after-hours page covers how those thin sessions behave, and the premarket guide covers the early one.
A holiday is not a business day, so it pushes back anything counted in business days. The biggest one for most accounts is settlement: a trade placed right before a holiday can settle a day later than the same trade placed midweek.
Nasdaq’s hours are due to change, and that is dated. A Nasdaq trader alert read on 26 September 2026 says that on 6 December 2026 Nasdaq will introduce a new session from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. Eastern, and that trades between 9 p.m. and midnight will carry the next trading day’s date. The same alert says Nasdaq is still working with regulators on nearly continuous trading. It does not say how that session will run around a holiday, so treat the first holiday after launch as something to confirm with Nasdaq.
A worked example
Thanksgiving week 2026, counted in core hours. Monday 23 to Wednesday 25 November are normal sessions of 6.5 hours each, 19.5 hours in all. Thursday 26 November is closed. Friday 27 November runs from 9:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., 3.5 hours. The week totals 23.0 hours against 32.5 in a normal five-day week, 70.8% of it. Christmas week 2026 comes out the same: three full sessions, a 1:00 p.m. close on Thursday 24 December and a closure on Friday 25 December.
What the same week looked like in 2025, from SPY’s own data. On Wednesday 26 November 2025, the session before the holiday, SPY closed at $679.68, up from $675.02, a move of 0.69%. It traded 71,879,600 shares, 84.2% of the median of its previous 20 sessions (85,346,200). On Friday 28 November it closed at $683.39, up 0.55%, on 49,212,000 shares. That was 59.3% of its 20-session median of 83,056,200: the thinnest session of the week by far.
The point of the arithmetic is planning, not prediction. A week with 70.8% of the usual hours, and a Friday that trades about three fifths of normal size, is a week where an order sized for a full day may take longer to fill and a plan built on Friday’s close has less session behind it.
The original data
The test. It uses every SPY daily bar from 29 January 1993 to 25 September 2026 (8,472 sessions) with its share count. A market holiday is any weekday with no bar that matches one of the ten NYSE holiday rules, including the observed-day shifts; the rule reproduces the NYSE’s 2026, 2027 and 2028 tables exactly. That gives 298 holidays. Eleven other weekday closures matched no holiday rule and are left out.
What was measured. For each holiday I measured the session before and the session after against every session in the sample: the size of the close-to-close move, whether it closed higher, and shares traded as a share of the median of the previous 20 sessions.
| Group | Sessions | Average size of move | Closed higher | Median shares traded vs usual |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Session before a holiday | 298 | 0.649% | 57.0% | 89.0% |
| Session after a holiday | 298 | 0.837% | 51.7% | 86.3% |
| Monday after an ordinary weekend | 1,532 | 0.786% | 55.8% | 88.4% |
| All sessions | 8,471 | 0.778% | 54.0% | 99.5% |
Trading is lighter on both sides of a holiday. The median session before a holiday traded 89.0% of its usual shares and the session after 86.3%, against 99.5% for all sessions. 34.3% of pre-holiday sessions and 36.4% of post-holiday sessions ran below three quarters of normal, against 19.3% of all sessions. The session after a holiday is barely thinner than an ordinary Monday, at 88.4%, so part of that dip is the weekend, not the holiday.
Two holidays account for much of it. The session before Christmas traded a median 49.8% of normal across 33 years, and the Friday after Thanksgiving 42.9%. The NYSE page marks the Friday after Thanksgiving as a 1:00 p.m. close in 2026, 2027 and 2028, and Christmas Eve as one in 2026, so a shorter day and a thinner day arrive together. Leave those two out and the median session before or after the other eight holidays traded 94% of normal, against 89.0% and 86.3% with them in.
Moves were smaller before a holiday and a little larger after. The average move on the session before was 0.649%, 0.83 times the all-session figure. The session after averaged 0.837%, 1.08 times all sessions and 1.06 times an ordinary Monday, which fits an extra closed day’s news landing on one open.
The direction showed no reliable pattern. Pre-holiday sessions closed higher 57.0% of the time against 54.0% for all sessions. With 298 cases the 95% range on that figure runs from 51.4% to 62.7%, so it comfortably includes the all-session rate. Split in two, it is not consistent: from 1993 to 2009 it was 51.7% against 52.9%, lower than an ordinary day, and from 2010 to 2026 it was 62.1% against 55.3%.
A lead that flips sign between halves is not something to trade. It may reflect the strong years after 2010 as much as any holiday effect. The full list of 298 holidays with each session’s numbers is in the SPY holiday sessions CSV, and the group figures are in the summary CSV.
Video creators barely cover this. In our 24,971-video study of trading videos, 62 titles are about premarket, after-hours or extended hours, with a median of 7,838.5 views. Only 2 titles mention a holiday at all, and one of those is a software sale.
When it fails
Using last year’s calendar. Dates move every year, and observed days shift them further: Christmas 2027 is closed on Friday 24 December, and New Year’s Day 2028 is not observed at all. The Juneteenth holiday shows how the list itself can grow: SPY’s history has no Juneteenth closure before 2022.
Assuming every market keeps stock hours. SIFMA’s bond calendar closes on Columbus Day and Veterans Day, when stocks trade, and its remaining 2026 early closes come at 2:00 p.m. Options on an early-close day run to 1:15 p.m. for eligible options. Futures and foreign exchanges keep their own calendars, which this page does not cover.
Reading a holiday session’s move as a signal. A session trading at half its usual size says less about demand than a normal one, and the direction test above found nothing dependable. A breakout on the Friday after Thanksgiving has had fewer participants deciding it.
Leaving a plan built for a full day. An order or alert timed for the last hour of trading will not get that hour on an early close. The closing-hour guide is written for a normal session ending at 4:00 p.m., and on 27 November and 24 December 2026 the close comes three hours sooner.
Forgetting that closures are not only holidays. SPY’s data holds 11 weekday closures that match no holiday rule, including four in a row in September 2001. Holding through any closed stretch carries overnight risk that no calendar can schedule.
Related
Holidays switch sessions off, and the trading session clock shows which sessions are running on any normal day. The after-hours page explains the thin evening session that ends early on an early-close day. Settlement timing, which a holiday pushes back, is worked through on the settlement page. Why thin holiday weeks cost more to trade is covered under seasonality, and the weekend and holiday gap risk sits under overnight risk.
Treat the early-close time as the close. I would put 1:00 p.m. Eastern next to any order or plan that assumes a full session on 27 November and 24 December, and check the exchange’s own calendar again in December before relying on next year’s dates.
— Michael Whitman
This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.