How Many Days Until Christmas? Live Countdown

The count above runs to 00:00 on 25 December in your own time zone, the moment Christmas Day begins. It works out which Christmas is next by itself, so the page is right in any year without anybody updating it.

For a lot of people the day that matters is the 24th. Across most of Europe and Latin America the main celebration is Christmas Eve, Nochebuena or Heiligabend, and the presents are opened that evening rather than the next morning. If that is your Christmas, put 24 December and the hour of dinner in the box and the count moves a day earlier.

The working days figure below the clock is the one to read for anything with a delivery attached. Carriers publish last posting dates in the week before Christmas, and it is the weekdays left, not the calendar days, that decide whether a parcel sent today arrives. On Christmas Day itself the count runs the other way and tells you how long it has been Christmas.

Orthodox churches that keep the Julian calendar celebrate on 7 January instead. For that date, or any other, the countdown takes one.

How to use it

Read the count at the top: days, hours, minutes and seconds, moving as you watch.
Look below it for the same span as whole days, weeks and working days.
Change the date in the box to count down to anything else instead.

Questions

Does it count to Christmas Eve or Christmas Day?

To Christmas Day, midnight at the start of 25 December. That is the calendar answer, but in much of Europe and Latin America the celebration happens on the evening of the 24th. If that is the one you are waiting for, put 24 December with the time of dinner in the box and the count runs to it.

How many weeks until Christmas?

The weeks figure below the clock gives the whole span as weeks and part of a week, and the days total beside it gives it as days. Weeks are the more useful unit early in the autumn, when a plan for presents or travel is measured in them.

What does it show on Christmas Day?

It counts up from midnight, telling you how long Christmas has been going, rather than jumping to next year. On 26 December it moves on to next Christmas, which is when a year away is the honest answer.

Which time zone is this counting in?

Yours, the one your device is set to. The target is midnight at the start of the day in your own local time, because that is when the day arrives where you are. A holiday reaches Kiribati about a day before it reaches Hawaii, and each of them sees their own count here rather than anybody else's.

Does it keep counting while I leave the tab open?

Yes, it ticks once a second for as long as the page is open, and picks the count back up from the clock when you return to the tab. Nothing is stored between visits, so opening it again simply asks your clock what time it is now.

Is any of this sent anywhere?

No. The arithmetic runs in WebAssembly inside this tab, and the only thing it reads is your device clock. There is no account, no cookie of ours and no record of what you looked up. Load the page once and it keeps working with the network off.

The same question, other days

Each of these counts to the start of its own day, in your time zone, with the same live seconds and the same working days figure.

Your data stays on your device

Everything above runs inside your browser as WebAssembly compiled from Rust. Nothing you type is uploaded, logged or stored on a server. You can load this page once, go offline, and it still works.

This page makes no requests at all, to anywhere. That is not a promise in the copy: it is a Content-Security-Policy header your browser enforces, and connect-src on it is none. Open the network tab and watch nothing happen.