New Year's Day 2026 has already happened. It was Thursday, 1 January 2026, 239 days ago. This page is kept whichever side of today the date falls on: the date and the rule behind it are worth looking up either way. For the year after this one see New Year's Day 2027, and for the always-current countdown see the next New Year's Day.
New Year's Day 2026 is Thursday, 1 January 2026
New Year's Day 2026 fell on Thursday, 1 January 2026, which was 239 days before 28 August 2026. That is 34 weeks and 1 day, or 165 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 2026-01-01 in ISO form and 1/1/2026 in the US format, it falls in ISO week 1 of 2026, and it is day 1 of 365.
How the date of New Year's Day is decided
New Year's Day is always 1 January. As a federal holiday it moves to the nearest weekday when it falls on a weekend: to 31 December when 1 January is a Saturday, and to 2 January when it is a Sunday.
That makes it a fixed date: the same day of the same month every year, so it lands on a different weekday each time. In 2026 it is a Thursday.
New Year's Day is one of the eleven US federal holidays. Federal offices, banks and the bond market close, and it does not count as a business day in any of the business-day calculators on this site. In 2026 it falls on a Thursday, a normal working day, so there is no observed-date shift this year. When it lands at a weekend the observance moves to the adjacent Friday or Monday. The observed date is the one our business days calculator skips.
New Year's Day in the years after 2026
| Year | Date | Day | Countdown |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2027 | 1 January 2027 | Friday | New Year's Day 2027 |
| 2028 | 1 January 2028 | Saturday | New Year's Day 2028 |
| 2029 | 1 January 2029 | Monday | New Year's Day 2029 |
The date does not move, but the weekday does — which is why the same holiday gives a long weekend in some years and not others.
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 165 working days above.