| Date | the fourth Thursday of November (every year) |
|---|---|
| Next occurrence | — |
| Unix timestamp | — |
| Time remaining | — |
When is Thanksgiving (US)?
Thanksgiving in the United States falls on the fourth Thursday of November, so its calendar date shifts each year. It centres on a large meal shared with family and traditionally opens the holiday shopping season.
Because Thanksgiving is a "fourth Thursday" holiday rather than a fixed date, the countdown computes the exact day for the current year in your browser.
Thanksgiving dates, 2026–2035
The next 10 occurrences, with the weekday each falls on and the Unix timestamp of midnight UTC at the start of the day.
| Year | Date | Weekday | Unix timestamp (00:00 UTC) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | November 26 | Thursday | 1,795,651,200 |
| 2027 | November 25 | Thursday | 1,827,100,800 |
| 2028 | November 23 | Thursday | 1,858,550,400 |
| 2029 | November 22 | Thursday | 1,890,000,000 |
| 2030 | November 28 | Thursday | 1,922,054,400 |
| 2031 | November 27 | Thursday | 1,953,504,000 |
| 2032 | November 25 | Thursday | 1,984,953,600 |
| 2033 | November 24 | Thursday | 2,016,403,200 |
| 2034 | November 23 | Thursday | 2,047,852,800 |
| 2035 | November 22 | Thursday | 2,079,302,400 |
The story behind Thanksgiving
The American Thanksgiving traces its story to a 1621 harvest meal shared by the Plymouth colonists and the Wampanoag, but as a national holiday it is a product of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. George Washington proclaimed a one-off day of thanksgiving on November 26, 1789. Regular observance owes most to Sarah Josepha Hale, the magazine editor who campaigned for decades until Abraham Lincoln, in 1863, proclaimed a national Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November. That rule held until 1939, when Franklin Roosevelt moved the holiday a week earlier to lengthen the Christmas shopping season during the Depression; the change was so unpopular, and so unevenly adopted by the states, that it was nicknamed "Franksgiving". Congress settled the matter in December 1941 with a joint resolution fixing Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November, which is the rule still in force. Under it the date can fall anywhere from November 22 to November 28. The Macy's parade in New York has run since 1924, and the day after, Black Friday, has become the informal start of the holiday retail season. Canada keeps a separate Thanksgiving on the second Monday of October.
How this countdown is calculated
Thanksgiving is not a fixed date: it is the fourth Thursday of November, as set by Congress in 1941. The countdown finds the first Thursday of November in the current year, adds three weeks, and if that date has already passed it repeats the calculation for next year. The result always falls between November 22 and November 28.
The big number at the top of this page is computed live in your browser the moment the page loads and ticks down every second — there is no stale, pre-baked figure here. It measures the gap between your current local time and the next the fourth Thursday of November, then breaks it into days, hours, minutes, and seconds. Because the math runs on your own device, the result is always correct for your time zone and is never cached out of date.
The Unix timestamp of Thanksgiving (US)
Beyond the human-friendly countdown, this page also shows the Unix timestamp of the target date — the number of seconds since January 1, 1970 UTC. That single integer is what databases, schedulers, and APIs actually store. If you are building a feature that fires on Thanksgiving (US) — a banner, an email, a cron job — the timestamp shown above is the value to compare against. You can also drop the date straight into the Epoch Converter to inspect it in every format, or into the Date Duration Calculator to measure the span from any other date.
Ways people use a Thanksgiving countdown
- Planning — knowing the exact number of days left helps with shopping, travel, and booking before deadlines pass.
- Sharing — send the live countdown link to friends, family, or a team channel so everyone sees the same ticking clock.
- Engineering — use the Unix timestamp above to schedule jobs or gate features around the date.
- Curiosity — sometimes you just want to know "how many days until Thanksgiving?" and get a precise answer rather than a rough guess.
Want a different date?
This page is part of a small reference of common countdowns and notable timestamps. Browse the full timestamp and countdown hub to find New Year, Christmas, Halloween, the Y2038 deadline, and more — or build a countdown to any moment of your choosing with the Countdown Timer.
Related countdowns
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