The stock market doesn’t actually follow the federal holiday calendar, even though most people assume it does. In 2026, the NYSE and Nasdaq will close for 10 full holidays, not the 11 the federal government observes, and one of those 10 isn’t a federal holiday at all. Knowing the exact dates matters for more than just planning a day off: settlement timelines, dividend payment dates, and options expirations all shift around these closures in ways that catch traders off guard every year.

The Full 2026 Closure Calendar

Both the NYSE and Nasdaq observe an identical holiday schedule, confirmed well in advance through NYSE’s official calendar. Here is the complete list for 2026.

Why the List Doesn’t Match the Federal Calendar

This is the detail that trips up even experienced investors: the stock market stays open on two federal holidays, Columbus Day and Veterans Day, while banks, post offices, and government offices close. At the same time, the exchanges close for Good Friday, which isn’t a federal holiday at all and has never been recognized as one by the U.S. government.

Good Friday is the one closure on the NYSE calendar with no connection to any federal holiday, a tradition that has simply outlasted the reasoning behind it. worldtimedata

The Good Friday closure isn’t a recent addition. The NYSE has treated it as a non-trading day since the exchange’s earliest decades in the nineteenth century, long before Columbus Day or Veterans Day existed as federal holidays at all. Columbus Day and Veterans Day, meanwhile, stay open simply because they were never added to the exchange’s holiday list in the first place, and there’s been no push from the industry to add them since.

The Two Early-Close Days

Beyond the 10 full closures, the market runs a shortened session on two additional days in 2026, closing at 1:00 p.m. Eastern instead of the usual 4:00 p.m.

Independence Day eve doesn’t get its own early close in 2026, since July 4 itself falls on a Saturday and the observed holiday moves to Friday, July 3 instead. In years when July 3 lands on a regular business day rather than the observed holiday, that date typically becomes a third early-close day.

How Weekend Holidays Get Rescheduled

When a fixed-date holiday like Independence Day or Christmas falls on a Saturday, the market doesn’t simply skip the closure. It observes the holiday on the preceding Friday instead. If a holiday falls on a Sunday, the closure moves to the following Monday. This is exactly what happens with July 4 in 2026: since it lands on a Saturday, the market closes on Friday, July 3, rather than trading normally that week and losing the holiday entirely. New Year’s Day is the one holiday that regularly breaks this pattern, not because of any special rule written specifically for it, but because of how a broader NYSE rule interacts with the calendar. Exchange Rule 7.2 allows the preceding Friday closure to be skipped whenever “unusual business conditions” apply, such as the end of a monthly, quarterly, or annual accounting period. Since the Friday before a Saturday New Year’s Day is always December 31, the final trading day of the calendar year, that exception applies almost every time, which is why the market has stayed open on that Friday in practice rather than closing for the holiday a day early.

The Bond Market Runs a Different Calendar

Anyone trading both stocks and bonds needs a second calendar entirely. The bond market follows a schedule set by SIFMA, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, which recommends its own set of closures and early closes. SIFMA’s list overlaps with the NYSE calendar on most dates but not all of them, and bond markets typically close on both Columbus Day and Veterans Day even though stocks keep trading. Anyone managing fixed-income positions alongside equities needs to check the bond market’s separate holiday and hours schedule rather than assuming it mirrors the stock exchange calendar exactly.

A Mechanism Worth Knowing, Even in Years It Doesn’t Apply

Standard monthly options contracts expire on the third Friday of each month. In April 2026, that’s April 17, well clear of the April 3 Good Friday closure, so there’s no collision this year. But in years when Good Friday does land on that third Friday, the exchange moves the entire expiration to the preceding Thursday instead of skipping it or pushing it later. It’s a rule worth knowing regardless of the current year, since it affects quarterly triple witching sessions most heavily, when stock options, index options, and futures all expire simultaneously and any date shift ripples through volume and volatility across the entire session.

The Bigger Pattern

The stock market’s holiday calendar looks like a simple list of days off, but it’s really a set of small, specific rules layered on top of each other: a 90-year-old religious tradition that predates the exchange’s modern federal alignment, a weekend-shift rule with one deliberate exception, and a completely separate calendar running in parallel for bonds. None of it is complicated once mapped out, but it’s specific enough that assuming the market follows “the holidays” in general, rather than checking the actual dates, is exactly how a trader ends up placing an order into a closed session. The full picture only makes sense alongside how NYSE and Nasdaq trading hours actually work the other 250-plus days of the year when the market is open on schedule.