DaysUntilNowLive countdowns
Five dates worth a page of their own, and a blank one for everything else. Each clock runs on your device, in your time zone, and none of them asks you to sign in.
Custom countdown
Any date, any name, shareable as a link — with no account at either end.
Christmas countdown
Live to the second, with the shopping calendar and ten years of weekdays.
Easter countdown
Easter Sunday live, with ten years of dates and the Orthodox ones beside them.
Halloween countdown
October 31 to the second, with the weekday and the clock change beside it.
New Year countdown
Midnight on January 1, on your clock — with the length of the year ahead.
Thanksgiving countdown
The fourth Thursday in November, computed from the rule for ten years.
Five dates on this site get a page of their own, and each of them earns it with something that is not a countdown. Christmas carries the shopping calendar, counted both the way retailers count it and the way department stores originally did. Halloween sets its weekday against the date the clocks go back, which is the thing that actually decides how much light the evening gets. Thanksgiving has no date at all — it is a rule, recomputed every year, and the whole American shopping season is measured from it. Easter moves across five weeks of spring and drags a dozen other dates with it. New Year is the only one where midnight itself is the event.
Which one do you actually need
There are only three shapes of date question here, and they take three different tools:
- A date everybody shares. Take the ready-made page. It answers what you were going to ask next — the weekday it lands on, whether the offices are shut, how many weekends stand in the way — instead of sending you somewhere else for it.
- A date that is only yours. The custom countdown takes a date, a time if the hour matters and a name, and the link in your address bar becomes the countdown. Nothing is stored on our side and there is no account at either end, which is what almost every other countdown site in this niche asks for before it will make you one.
- A date that repeats. Neither of the above fits paydays, renewals, rotas or month ends. The planners hold the whole list and roll it forward as each date passes.
The email reminder sits under every clock on this site and covers the case where you would rather not watch at all: tick seven, three or one day before, confirm the address once, and the date comes to you.
Countdowns, and the calculators behind them
A countdown is a live answer to one question. The rest of this site answers the same kind of question without the clock: how many days lie between two dates, what date is 90 days from today, how many working days a month contains, which week number we are in, when Easter falls in a particular year and what happens when a public holiday lands on a Saturday.
Those are in the date calculators, the calendar tools and the holiday dates groups. If you would rather see every date at once than one at a time, the holiday date table lists them all with the weekday each one falls on and how far off it is — including the dates that no longer have a countdown page of their own.
Frequently asked questions
Why are there only five ready-made countdowns here?
Because a countdown deserves a page of its own only when the page can say something the date cannot. Each of these five carries a rule, a computed table and a set of questions that belong to it alone — the shopping calendar for Christmas, the clock change for Halloween, the fourth-Thursday rule for Thanksgiving, the moving date for Easter, the length of the year for New Year. Dates that would only ever repeat the same layout with a different name are better served in one place, so every other date this site tracks lives in the holiday date table with its weekday and how far away it is.
Can I get an email instead of watching a countdown?
Yes, and it is free and needs no account. Under each countdown there is a box that will email you seven days, three days or one day before the date — you tick whichever of the three you want. Nothing is stored until you click the link in the confirmation email, and one click in any message stops all of them. For your own date rather than a holiday, the custom countdown takes the date you type and reminds you about that instead.
What happens when a countdown reaches zero?
It says so. The clock is replaced by a line telling you the day has arrived, and it stays that way until midnight passes. For a recurring date the page then rolls forward on its own: reopen the Christmas countdown on December 26 and it is already counting to next year, because the target is computed from the calendar rule each time the page loads rather than stored. A custom countdown behaves differently on purpose — once its date passes it keeps the same link and counts upwards, showing time since instead of time until.
Do the countdowns keep running if I leave the tab open for days?
Yes. The clock recomputes the difference between your device time and the target once a second rather than counting ticks, so it cannot drift, and a laptop that has been asleep for two days shows the right number the moment it wakes. Browsers slow timers down in background tabs to save battery, which can make the seconds jump a little when you switch back — the figure is still correct, it has simply caught up in one step.
How we calculate this
Every countdown on this page runs in your browser against your device clock and aims at midnight at the start of the target date in your own time zone. Nothing is computed on a server: a countdown worked out in a foreign time zone is wrong by up to a day at either end of the wait, and for New Year it would be wrong by up to 26 hours.
Dates come from the rule wherever a rule exists. December 25, October 31 and January 1 are fixed calendar dates; Thanksgiving is walked out of the calendar as the fourth Thursday in November; Easter is computed with the ecclesiastical computus. Nothing on these pages is a hand-typed date, which is why the tables can be extended ten years ahead without anyone maintaining them.
The tables on each page are generated when the site is built and count from the build date printed in their captions, so they are exact on the day they ship and one day out for each day after that. The number that is right to the second is always the clock at the top of the page. Working-day figures skip Saturdays, Sundays and US federal holidays; public holidays elsewhere differ.