Halloween lands on October 31 every year, a night of costumes, candy and jack-o'-lanterns with roots more than two thousand years old. This countdown is to Halloween 2026, ticking down to October 31, live.
Halloween is on Saturday, October 31, 2026, which is 140 days away. The live countdown above ticks down to the exact moment, to the second.
Halloween traces back to Samhain, the Celtic festival marking summer's end, when the boundary between worlds was said to thin. Christianity layered All Hallows' Eve on top of it, Irish and Scottish immigrants carried the customs to North America, and trick-or-treating took its modern form in the 1930s, 50s.
The carved pumpkin comes from the Irish legend of Stingy Jack, doomed to wander with a burning coal in a hollow turnip. In America, the native pumpkin proved much easier to carve, and much bigger.