Hanukkah 2026 is Saturday, 5 December 2026
There are 108 days between 19 August 2026 and Hanukkah 2026, which falls on Saturday, 5 December 2026. That is 15 weeks and 3 days, or 73 working days once Saturdays, Sundays and the US federal holidays in between are taken out — the figure that matters if you are counting delivery lead time or a work schedule rather than sleeps. The date is 2026-12-05 in ISO form and 12/5/2026 in the US format, it falls in ISO week 49 of 2026, and it is day 339 of 365.
How the date of Hanukkah is decided
Begins at sunset on 25 Kislev in the Hebrew calendar and lasts eight nights, usually falling in December and occasionally late November.
That makes it a computed date: there is no fixed day and no simple weekday rule, so it has to be worked out from a formula or a calendar of its own each year. In 2026 it works out as Saturday 5 December.
This date is an estimate, not a fixed point. Hanukkah depends on observation rather than arithmetic, so the date announced locally can differ by a day from any date calculated in advance, and it can differ between countries in the same year. We show the arithmetic approximation and label it, rather than presenting it as settled. If the date matters — for travel, a booking or time off — confirm it with the community or authority you are following. How we produce these dates, and which of them are approximate, is set out on the holiday sources page.
Hanukkah is an observance rather than a federal holiday. Offices, banks and schools stay open unless an individual employer chooses otherwise, and it counts as an ordinary business day in every calculator here. Only the eleven federal holidays are treated as non-working days — the list and the reasoning are on the holiday sources page.
Hanukkah in the years after 2026
| Year | Date | Day | Countdown |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2027 | 25 December 2027 | Saturday | Hanukkah 2027 |
| 2028 | 13 December 2028 | Wednesday | Hanukkah 2028 |
| 2029 | 2 December 2029 | Sunday | Hanukkah 2029 |
Both the date and the weekday move, because the rule is not tied to either.
Every convention used above — whether the start date counts, how month ends are clamped, which holidays close an office — is written out on the methodology page, including how we count the 73 working days above.