Is the US Stock Market Open Today?

The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq trade from 9:30 AM to 4:00 PM Eastern Time, Monday through Friday, on a holiday calendar published years in advance. What catches people out is not the holidays themselves but the exceptions around them: sessions that end at 1:00 PM instead of 4:00 PM, and a bond market that runs on a different calendar entirely — closed on two federal holidays when equities trade a full session. This page shows the live status of the equity market, then lays out both calendars side by side through 2028.

The three sessions of a US trading day

A normal weekday splits into three windows, all Eastern Time. Pre-market runs from 4:00 AM to 9:30 AM, regular trading from 9:30 AM to 4:00 PM, and after-hours from 4:00 PM to 8:00 PM. Only the middle window is the exchange session in the strict sense: it is the one that produces the official opening and closing prices, and the one where the closing auction concentrates the day’s largest single burst of volume.

The two outer windows run on electronic communication networks rather than the exchange floor mechanism. They are open to retail order flow at most brokers, but they carry structurally wider spreads and thinner books, which is why a headline printed at 6:00 AM can move a stock several percent on volume that would be unremarkable at midday. The gap between an after-hours print and the next morning’s official open is a routine feature of earnings season, not an anomaly.

Shortened sessions: the exception that trips people up

On a small number of days each year, both exchanges close at 1:00 PM instead of 4:00 PM. These are not holidays and they are not announced late — NYSE publishes them in the same release as the holiday calendar, years ahead. They cluster around Thanksgiving and Christmas, and they follow the holiday rather than a fixed date, so they migrate through the week from year to year.

One detail that the shortened-session tables usually omit: on those days the after-hours window closes at 5:00 PM rather than 8:00 PM. The whole day compresses, not just the regular session.

The 2027 calendar contains an instructive edge case. Christmas Day falls on a Saturday, so the holiday is observed on Friday, December 24 — which means there is no separate Christmas Eve early close that year, because Christmas Eve is the holiday. The same logic removes New Year’s Day from the 2028 calendar entirely: January 1, 2028 is a Saturday, and NYSE observes no substitute.

Equities and bonds do not share a calendar

The US bond market has no exchange and no opening bell. Trading hours and holiday closures are set by recommendation from SIFMA, the industry trade association, and the recommendations are exactly that — each firm decides for itself whether its fixed income desks stay open. Normal hours run 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM Eastern.

The divergence that matters is structural rather than incidental. Bond settlement runs through Fedwire and the Federal Reserve’s payment systems, which close on every federal banking holiday. Equity settlement does not have that dependency. So Columbus Day and Veterans Day are full bond market closures while the NYSE and Nasdaq trade an ordinary session — two days a year when the Treasury curve simply does not print while equities are moving.

SIFMA also recommends more shortened sessions than the exchanges do, typically ending at 2:00 PM: the Friday before Memorial Day, the day before Independence Day, the day after Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. Good Friday is the one date where the recommendation genuinely varies from year to year, sometimes a full close and sometimes a noon cutoff, depending in part on whether the Employment Situation report is released that morning.

Full calendar through 2028

Dates below combine the NYSE Group holiday and early-closing release with SIFMA’s US recommendations. Rows marked to be confirmed on the bond side are dates where SIFMA has published a full closure but not yet its early-close schedule.

What a closed market does not stop

A holiday closure suspends price discovery on the cash market; it does not suspend the economy. Futures on the major indices trade on CME Globex on an almost-continuous schedule and often remain open, in shortened form, on days when the cash market is shut. Foreign exchange runs continuously from Sunday evening to Friday evening regardless of US holidays. And macroeconomic releases follow their own calendar: on Good Friday, April 3, 2026 — an equity market holiday — the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the Employment Situation report on schedule, a case SIFMA flagged explicitly in its own closure recommendation for that day.

The practical consequence is that a closure is a gap in the record rather than a pause in events. When the cash market reopens, it reprices everything that accumulated in the interval at once — which is why the opening print after a three-day weekend has three days of news to absorb rather than one. The mechanism sits within the market regimes and financial dynamics framework; the underlying series are available in the macro-financial data hub.

Frequently asked questions

Last updated — 12 August 2026