How the New Year countdown works
The countdown targets midnight at the start of 1 January in the time zone set on your device. When the page loads, it first shows the number of days worked out for a reference time zone; your browser then recalculates everything with your own clock and updates the days, hours, minutes and seconds every second. If you travel or change your device’s time zone, reload the page and the countdown follows your new local midnight.
The line under the clock gives whole calendar days, not counting today: on 31 December it reads 1 day, while the clock shows the hours, minutes and seconds left. On 1 January the page says the new year is here, and from 2 January it counts to the following one. The key dates panel shows New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day with their weekdays.
How many days until New Year: examples
The last three months of the year always have 31, 30 and 31 days, so these counts never change:
| From | Arithmetic | Days until 1 January |
|---|---|---|
| 1 October | 31 + 30 + 31 | 92 |
| 1 November | 30 + 31 | 61 |
| 1 December | 31 | 31 |
| 25 December | 31 − 25 + 1 | 7 |
From 1 January of one year to 1 January of the next there are 365 days, or 366 in a leap year such as 2028. To count from any other date, you can count the days between two dates.
New Year’s Day, 2027 to 2031
| Year | New Year’s Eve | New Year’s Day |
|---|---|---|
| 2027 | Thursday 31 December 2026 | Friday 1 January 2027 |
| 2028 | Friday 31 December 2027 | Saturday 1 January 2028 |
| 2029 | Sunday 31 December 2028 | Monday 1 January 2029 |
| 2030 | Monday 31 December 2029 | Tuesday 1 January 2030 |
| 2031 | Tuesday 31 December 2030 | Wednesday 1 January 2031 |
Midnight around the world
New Year does not arrive everywhere at once. Kiritimati in Kiribati, at UTC+14, is among the first inhabited places to celebrate, and American Samoa, at UTC−11, is among the last, about 25 hours later. Because this page uses your own clock, its zero is always your local midnight, not a fixed world time. To follow a celebration in another city, compare that city’s time zone with yours.
Good to know
- New year, new week numbers. The first days of January can still belong to the last ISO week of the previous year. 1 January 2027 is a Friday, so it falls in week 53 of 2026; see the 2027 calendar with week numbers.
- A short party timer. For a countdown of a fixed length, such as the last ten minutes before midnight, a 10 minute timer with a full-screen mode and an alarm sound does the job.
- The countdown is pure calendar arithmetic based on your device’s clock, so make sure the clock is set correctly.