When Is... Holiday Dates by Year

“When is Thanksgiving in 2027?” and “when is Thanksgiving?” are different questions, even though they look almost identical. The second one has a stable, general answer (the fourth Thursday in November, in the US). The first one has exactly one correct, single-date answer, and that answer changes every single year — which is exactly why this hub exists as a separate, year-specific layer on top of the general holiday calendar covered on the holidays by country pages: it answers the year-specific version directly, rather than making a visitor work out which Thursday that is for themselves.

Every holiday tracked here falls into one of two genuinely different categories, and the pages are honest about which is which. Fixed-date holidays — New Year’s Day, Halloween, Independence Day — always land on the same month and day number, so the only thing that changes from year to year is which weekday they fall on and how far away they currently are. Rule-based holidays — Thanksgiving’s “fourth Thursday in November,” or Easter’s dependence on the lunar calendar — genuinely move around the calendar from one year to the next according to a defined rule, not a fixed date, which is precisely the kind of calculation that’s easy to get wrong by hand and straightforward to get right by computing it directly. Each holiday section below states its own rule in plain language, so the specific mechanism — not just the resulting date — is visible before you click through to any individual year.

Every date on every one of these 140 pages is computed, not looked up from a static table that would need manual updating every January. That matters most for the movable holidays: a fourth-Thursday-in-November rule, evaluated fresh for each specific year, is guaranteed to agree with a calendar, while a hand-maintained list of “2026: Nov 26, 2027: Nov 25” entries is exactly the kind of thing that quietly goes stale or contains a copy-paste error a few rows down. Where a holiday’s exact date depends on an astronomical or religious calculation this site can’t honestly compute from first principles — certain lunar or lunisolar observances — the page says so plainly rather than presenting a guessed date as fact.

The 5-year rolling window below (2026-2030) covers the span most people are actually planning around — this year, next year, and enough years beyond that for longer-range planning (a wedding, a long-term contract, a multi-year school calendar) without maintaining an unbounded archive of years nobody is searching for yet. Each holiday below lists its own governing rule first, then every year in the window as a direct link — pick the holiday you need, then the specific year, and the resulting page shows the exact computed date, the weekday it falls on, and a live days-away count alongside real context for that observance.