Thanksgiving Day 2025 in the United States

Yes. Thanksgiving Day is one of the eleven legal public holidays set out in 5 U.S.C. § 6103. Federal offices close, federal employees receive the day off with pay, and every state observes it.

The Friday after Thanksgiving is not a federal holiday. Many private employers and most state governments grant it anyway, which is why the four-day break is common without being a legal entitlement.

Thanksgiving always falls on the fourth Thursday in November, so its calendar date shifts each year between November 22 and November 28.

It is the only federal holiday tied to a Thursday. Because it is fixed to a weekday, the federal observed-date rule never applies to it.

Days of thanksgiving were proclaimed irregularly from the colonial period onward. President Abraham Lincoln set the pattern in 1863 by proclaiming a national Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November, in the middle of the Civil War.

The date was set in statute in 1941. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had moved it a week earlier in 1939 to lengthen the shopping season, which caused enough confusion — some states followed, others did not — that Congress fixed it by law as the fourth Thursday.

Canada observes its own Thanksgiving on the second Monday in October, roughly six weeks earlier, reflecting an earlier harvest.

Grenada, Liberia and several other countries hold observances of the same name on different dates and with unrelated origins.