Thanksgiving Week 2026 Stock Market Hours: Closed November 26, 1 PM Close on Black Friday, and What the S&P 500 Did Every Thanksgiving Week Since 2016

The US stock market is closed on Thursday, November 26, 2026 for Thanksgiving and closes early at 1:00 PM Eastern on Friday, November 27. Wednesday and Monday are full sessions. The bond market is closed Thursday and closes at 2:00 PM on Friday. Those are the schedule facts, verified on the NYSE hours calendar and the SIFMA holiday schedule.

The more useful question is what those sessions are actually like, so we measured all ten Thanksgiving weeks from 2016 through 2025 on SPY's consolidated daily bars: the Wednesday before, the Black Friday half day, the Monday after, and the week as a whole. Short version: the half day is the thinnest session of the year, it is usually quiet, and the one time it was not quiet it was the worst Black Friday on record.

Thanksgiving week 2026 at a glance

• Monday, November 23 and Tuesday, November 24: regular sessions, 9:30 AM to 4:00 PM ET.
• Wednesday, November 25: regular session. The pre-holiday effect applies: the day before a market holiday has leaned positive since 1950.
• Thursday, November 26: NYSE and Nasdaq closed. Bond market closed (SIFMA full close). No settlement.
• Friday, November 27: stocks close at 1:00 PM ET, equity options at 1:15 PM, the bond market at 2:00 PM. Trades still settle on the normal T+1 schedule, so a Friday fill settles Monday.
• Monday, November 30: regular session, and the last trading day of November. Month-end flows land on this day.

The next early close after this one is Thursday, December 24, also at 1:00 PM ET. There is no early close on Wednesday, November 25; that is a common misconception, and the exchange calendar is explicit about it.

What the S&P 500 did every Thanksgiving week since 2016

The table reads left to right: the whole week (Monday through the Friday half day, measured from the prior Friday's close), then each of the three sessions people ask about. Returns are close to close, in percent.

• 2016: week +1.39, Wednesday +0.06, Black Friday +0.37, Monday after -0.44
• 2017: week +0.97, Wednesday -0.05, Black Friday +0.22, Monday after -0.05
• 2018: week -3.80, Wednesday +0.33, Black Friday -0.65, Monday after +1.56
• 2019: week +1.06, Wednesday +0.46, Black Friday -0.35, Monday after -0.85
• 2020: week +2.35, Wednesday -0.18, Black Friday +0.34, Monday after -0.41
• 2021: week -2.12, Wednesday +0.27, Black Friday -2.23, Monday after +1.23
• 2022: week +1.59, Wednesday +0.63, Black Friday -0.02, Monday after -1.60
• 2023: week +1.00, Wednesday +0.39, Black Friday +0.06, Monday after -0.18
• 2024: week +1.18, Wednesday -0.30, Black Friday +0.62, Monday after +0.18
• 2025: week +3.70, Wednesday +0.69, Black Friday +0.55, Monday after -0.46

Across the ten years the week finished higher eight times and averaged +0.73%. The two losing weeks were 2018, when the whole fourth quarter was a selloff, and 2021, which was all one Friday. The first week of December that followed was up eight of ten times as well, averaging +0.92%, with 2018's +4.7% rebound doing the heavy lifting.

The Black Friday half day is the thinnest session of the year

Volume is the number that stands out. On the half day, SPY traded a median 0.42 times its prior 20-session average, and seven of the ten years came in between 0.35 and 0.45 times. A 1:00 PM close is 3.5 hours of trading instead of 6.5, so hour for hour the half day runs at roughly three quarters of a normal day's pace, then stops. The daily range tells the same story: 0.53 times the prior 20 sessions on average.

Direction is close to a coin flip. Six of ten half days closed higher. The average is -0.11%, and that is entirely 2021. Set that one aside and the other nine averaged +0.13%, with the biggest move either way at 0.65%.

The exception was November 26, 2021. News of the Omicron variant broke overnight, the index fell 2.23% in the shortened session, and volume ran at 2.01 times the 20-session average, the only half day in the sample above normal. Reports that afternoon called it the worst Black Friday for the S&P 500 on record. Then came the pattern the table shows twice: the Monday after bounced +1.23%, as it had in 2018 (+1.56%) after that year's weak week.

Why the thin session matters more than the direction

A half day with 40% of normal volume means wider spreads in mid-cap and small-cap names, more time between prints, and quotes that go stale. That is a mechanics problem more than a direction problem, and it is the part we have first-hand experience with.

On October 28 this year, two JorgAI members on Schwab were stopped out of a position on a quote that was three hours old while the stock traded several dollars higher. We traced it to the exit check comparing a stale last-trade print against the stop and shipped a guard the next day: any quote older than five minutes is refetched once and, if it is still stale, that cycle skips rather than trades. A thin half day is exactly the kind of session where a last-trade timestamp can lag, which is why we wrote up what a stop-loss does when prices go quiet.

The other mechanical fact is the clock. JorgAI's scanners look for new entries on the regular daytime schedule, but on November 27 the exchange closes at 1:00 PM, so an order sent after that waits for Monday's open. A position opened on Wednesday is held across four calendar days of news, including the weekend. If that is not what you want, the auto-trader can be paused from Settings before the Wednesday close, or sized down with the per-trade dollar cap and daily spend limit.

Wednesday and the Monday after

Wednesday was the calmest of the three sessions: up seven of ten, average +0.23%, and an average absolute move of 0.34% against 0.72% for every trading day since 2016. Volume ran at 0.74 times the 20-session average. That fits the pre-holiday pattern measured across every holiday since 1950, and it is also the last chance to adjust anything before the long gap.

The Monday after is the odd one out. It closed lower in seven of the ten years, with an average absolute move of 0.70%, back at full-day volume. Two of the three biggest Mondays were rebounds from a bad week (2018 and 2021) and the biggest decline, -1.60% in 2022, followed a strong week. It is also the last trading day of November in most years, which puts it next to the turn-of-the-month window.

How this fits the rest of November

Thanksgiving week closes a month that has three other scheduled catalysts: the October jobs report on November 6, the October CPI report on November 10, and Veterans Day on November 11, when stocks trade and the bond market does not. November as a whole has been one of the stronger months in the seasonality record since 1950, and in our 2016 to 2025 sample the Thanksgiving week itself contributed a positive print in eight of ten years.

None of that is a forecast. A ten-year sample has two bad weeks in it, and the worst one came from news that broke on a Thursday night when the market was closed. What the data does say is that the half day is small, slow and usually uneventful, and that the sessions around it behave like ordinary days with slightly less volume.

Set the rules before the long weekend

Most of what goes wrong around a holiday is not the holiday; it is a position that was opened without deciding what should happen to it over four days away from the screen. JorgAI executes the rules you set in your own brokerage account: entry caps, stop-losses, trailing stops, profit targets, a daily spend limit and a max-open-positions cap. Start with the setup checklist and the rules are in place before Wednesday's close.

If you already trade with Schwab, tastytrade, Alpaca, Tradier, Kraken or Crypto.com, connect the account and the same settings apply to every entry, on a full day or a half day. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any security; it is the schedule and the measured history, so you can decide what you want the software to do with them.

Data: SPY consolidated daily bars (SIP feed) from Alpaca Market Data, 2016 through 2025, analyzed by JorgAI on October 30, 2026. Thanksgiving week = the Monday through the Friday after Thanksgiving, measured from the prior Friday's close. Volume and range ratios compare each session with the average of its prior 20 sessions. Schedule verified on the NYSE and SIFMA holiday pages the same day.