🎃How many days until Halloween?

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Midnight, and the hours that actually matter

Every countdown to a date reaches zero at midnight, and Halloween is the clearest case of that being the wrong moment. The night people are waiting for starts when it gets dark on October 31 and is usually finished by nine, so the counter above is running about eighteen hours ahead of the doorbell.

That gap is worth knowing in the last week rather than in September, when the difference between “forty days” and “forty days and eighteen hours” is noise. On the day itself, switch from days to the hours column and read it against your own sunset.

The one thing this page cannot tell you is when it gets dark where you are, because that depends on how far north you live and where you sit in your time zone, not on the calendar. Two towns keeping the same clock can be forty minutes apart on light.

Ten Halloweens, and the clocks that follow

The second column of dates is the American clock change, computed from the same rule as the Halloween date beside it. In the United States it always falls after Halloween, so the evening keeps its extra hour of daylight; in Europe the clocks have already gone back by the last Sunday in October, so a European Halloween runs in standard time and is dark an hour earlier by the clock.

That has a practical effect on any countdown that spans the change. Real elapsed time is what the counter measures, so a countdown running across the weekend the clocks go back gains an hour, and one running across the spring change loses one. The holiday dates tools work out both changeover weekends for the US, the EU, the UK, Australia and New Zealand, which are governed by four different rules.

The hours are set by your town, not by the calendar

There is no national trick-or-treating time anywhere. In the United States the window is published by the city or township, in some places as an ordinance with an end time, and in others simply as a recommendation on the police department’s page. A few communities put their evening on October 30 entirely.

So the honest advice from a countdown site is: count to the date here, and check the hours locally in the last fortnight. The things that override the published window are weather, a school event on the same evening, and a weekday date that pushes families into the weekend.

Two further consequences catch people out. Neighbourhoods with a reputation for Halloween draw visitors from several towns, which stretches the evening at both ends; and in years when the 31st falls on a Sunday, plenty of towns move the whole thing to the Saturday even though nobody has changed the date of Halloween.

The three nights, in order

Halloween is not a standalone date but the first night of a sequence, and the other two are public holidays in more countries than Halloween is in any:

• October 31 — All Hallows’ Eve. The evening before All Saints’ Day, and the direct descendant of Samhain, the Gaelic festival that marked the end of the harvest and the start of winter.
• November 1 — All Saints’ Day. A public holiday in much of Catholic Europe and Latin America, which is why the day after Halloween is a day off in France, Spain, Italy, Poland and Austria and an ordinary Tuesday in the United States and the United Kingdom.
• November 2 — All Souls’ Day. Kept in Mexico as the second day of Día de Muertos, which runs from November 1 and is a distinct tradition rather than a local Halloween.

Public holidays are set by national law, so treat any working-day count on this site as the American one unless the page says otherwise. If you are counting to something in that first week of November instead — a family grave visit, a school return, a deadline — the countdown you build yourself takes any date and puts it in the link.

The Thanksgiving countdown is the next fixed point after this one, the Christmas countdown is the one everybody skips ahead to, and the full list of countdowns has the rest.