Holiday hours and half days for ES and NQ traders: when the futures close, and how thin sessions trade

Holiday hours for ES and NQ, in ET

Two clocks run on a holiday. The stock market's hours are set by the NYSE and Nasdaq a year or more ahead. The futures hours are set by CME Group, which publishes them about two weeks before each holiday. ES and NQ trade on CME, so its times are the ones that decide when you can get out of a position.

From the UK, add five hours in late November and December: the 1:00 PM ET close is 6:00 PM UK time and the futures close at 6:15 PM. Our US market hours clock shows the stock market's holidays and early closes in your own time zone. It deliberately doesn't guess the futures' holiday hours, which is what the table above is for.

How Thanksgiving week works for futures traders

Wednesday: the real data day

With Thursday off and Friday short, the week's data gets pulled forward. On Wednesday 25 November 2026 the PCE inflation report, the measure the Fed watches most closely, lands at 8:30 AM ET, and our calendar has the GDP revision, weekly jobless claims and durable goods orders at the same minute, with new home sales at 10:00 AM. That makes Wednesday a full session with real news, and often a bigger one than the half day after it. In both 2024 and 2025, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving covered more ground than the Friday after it, in ES and in NQ.

Thursday: futures open, stocks shut

The stock market is closed, but ES and NQ are not. The futures keep trading from Wednesday evening through Thursday morning, stop at about 1:00 PM ET and reopen at 6:00 PM ET. Thursday has no trade date of its own: CME publishes no settlement prices that day, and everything traded from Wednesday evening to Friday's close counts toward Friday. With no stock market and much of the US away, it is some of the thinnest trading of the year.

Friday: the half day

The stock market opens at 9:30 AM ET as usual and closes at 1:00 PM ET. CME settles ES and NQ at 1:00 PM ET, the same minute, and the futures are expected to keep trading until 1:15 PM ET, as they did in 2024 and 2025. Then they shut for the weekend until 6:00 PM ET on Sunday. A trade balance report lands at 8:30 AM ET. The next trading day, Monday 30 November, is the last of the month, which brings flows of its own, covered in our guide to how funds rebalance at the end of a month or quarter.

Christmas Eve and New Year

Christmas Eve, Thursday 24 December 2026, is the second half day of the season: stocks close at 1:00 PM ET and ES and NQ are expected to close at 1:15 PM ET. Christmas Day falls on a Friday this year, so both stay shut until the futures reopen at 6:00 PM ET on Sunday 27 December. The data comes early again: our calendar has GDP and PCE inflation at 8:30 AM ET on Wednesday 23 December, and weekly jobless claims on Christmas Eve itself.

By then the December contracts have expired, on Friday 18 December, so you will be trading the March ones. Our guide to options expiration, quad witching and the roll covers that switch. New Year's Eve is a full day for both markets, and New Year's Day, Friday 1 January 2027, is closed.

What the last two Thanksgivings and Christmas Eves did

Holiday sessions are usually thin, but thin is not the same as quiet. These are the sessions around the last two Thanksgivings and Christmas Eves in the front ES and NQ contracts, with each range set against the average of the 20 sessions before it.

Three things stand out. The half day after Thanksgiving was small both years, about two thirds of a normal range in 2024 and about a third in 2025, even though those figures include Thanksgiving Day's trading as well. The Wednesday before was the bigger session every time. And Christmas Eve 2024 broke the pattern: on about half the volume of the day before, ES rose about 1% and covered more ground than an average day.

Thanksgiving 2025: the night the futures stopped

The 2025 half day was short for another reason. Late on Thanksgiving evening, a cooling failure at a data center used by CME halted trading across its electronic futures and options markets, ES and NQ included. The halt began shortly before 10:00 PM ET on Thursday 27 November and lasted more than ten hours. Stock index futures came back at about 8:30 AM ET on Friday, an hour before the stock market opened, and nobody holding ES or NQ through the night could close the position until then.

ES still finished the session up 0.46%, and gave it back on the Monday after, down 0.48%. The lesson is about holding over a holiday, not about direction: on a thin night there are fewer ways out if something goes wrong.

How to trade a holiday week

Most of what makes a holiday week different happens at known times.

• Move your own finish time. If your plan says "flat by 3:45 PM", it needs a new number on a half day.
• Trade smaller, or not at all. Three of the last four half days covered between a third and two thirds of a normal day's range in ES, and a thin market fills stops further away. Our guide to how many points ES and NQ move in a day covers sizing a session against its likely range.
• Don't carry a holiday move into Monday as a view. A drift on thin volume says little about the next full session, as the Monday after Thanksgiving 2025 showed.
• Check your broker and your firm. Brokers can offer less of the futures session than CME does, and if you trade a funded account, check how your firm treats holiday sessions before you trade one.

Where our Volatility Scale fits

Our Volatility Scale sizes each session before the open, and the day before a market holiday is one of its inputs. It first came up on Friday 4 September 2026, the session before the Labor Day weekend, where it held the expected move down for both ES and NQ and sat among the five biggest inputs on the call, even with the jobs report due that morning. ES went on to cover about 39 points from high to low, around three quarters of its average range.

Holidays and half days through 2027