Is the stock market open right now?

When is the US stock market open?

The regular trading session for US stocks runs from 9:30 AM to 4:00 PM Eastern Time, Monday through Friday. The two big venues — the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Nasdaq — share those hours, so whether you’re buying an S&P 500 index fund or a single tech stock, the same six-and-a-half-hour window applies. The market is closed every Saturday and Sunday, and on roughly nine holidays a year. That’s it: no overnight session for ordinary stock orders, no weekend trading, just weekdays between the opening and closing bells.

The badge at the top of this page tells you the answer right now. It reads the current time in New York, compares it to today’s session, and shows OPEN or CLOSED with a live countdown to the next bell — so you don’t have to convert time zones or remember whether today is a holiday.

Pre-market and after-hours trading

The 9:30–4:00 window is the regular session, but it isn’t the only time trades happen. Pre-market trading typically runs from around 4:00 AM to 9:30 AM ET, and after-hours trading from 4:00 PM to about 8:00 PM ET. These extended sessions exist on electronic networks, and most brokers let retail investors take part — but they come with real trade-offs. Volume is much lower, the gap between bid and ask is wider, and prices can lurch on a single order. Company news, including most earnings reports, drops outside regular hours precisely because it gives the market time to digest before the next open. If you trade these windows, use limit orders and size positions carefully; a market order in thin liquidity can fill at a price you’d never accept at midday.

2026 stock market holidays

On top of weekends, the NYSE and Nasdaq close completely on these 2026 holidays:

• New Year’s Day — Thursday, January 1
• Martin Luther King Jr. Day — Monday, January 19
• Washington’s Birthday (Presidents’ Day) — Monday, February 16
• Good Friday — Friday, April 3
• Memorial Day — Monday, May 25
• Juneteenth — Friday, June 19
• Independence Day (observed) — Friday, July 3
• Labor Day — Monday, September 7
• Thanksgiving — Thursday, November 26
• Christmas — Friday, December 25

There are also two early-close days, when the market shuts at 1:00 PM ET instead of 4:00: the day after Thanksgiving (Friday, November 27) and Christmas Eve (Thursday, December 24). When a holiday like Independence Day lands on a weekend, the exchange observes it on the nearest weekday — which is why July 4, a Saturday in 2026, gives you a closed market on Friday, July 3 instead. Because this tool pulls the live session window from the exchange itself, it accounts for these holidays and short days automatically rather than guessing from a fixed calendar.

Why time zones matter

The session is always defined in Eastern Time, because the major exchanges are based in New York. If you live elsewhere, you have to translate: on the West Coast the bell rings at 6:30 AM and the close lands at 1:00 PM; in Chicago it’s 8:30 AM to 3:00 PM; in London, 2:30 PM to 9:00 PM. Eastern Time also observes daylight saving, so the gap between New York and a city that doesn’t shift its clocks changes twice a year. Get the conversion wrong and you can miss the open entirely or place an order into a market that closed hours ago. The live clock here removes the guesswork — it recomputes the open/closed state every second from New York’s actual wall clock, daylight saving included.

Why “is it open” matters for order timing

Knowing the market’s status shapes what happens to your trade. Place an order while the market is open and it works against live prices immediately. Place the same order while it’s closed and it simply queues until the next session — where it may execute at a meaningfully different price after overnight news or a weekend’s worth of developments. A market order entered Friday night can fill far from Friday’s close once Monday’s open arrives. The open and close themselves are the most volatile, highest-volume stretches of the day, which is why many long-term investors avoid the first and last fifteen minutes and let the middle of the session settle. If you’re a buy-and-hold investor dollar-cost averaging into a fund, the exact minute matters far less — but you still want to know your order won’t sit idle over a three-day holiday weekend.

Related tools & guides

Once you know the market’s open, the next question is what to do with it. Model how a position compounds over time with the investment growth calculator, or check where interest rates sit today — Treasuries, mortgages and savings yields — on today’s rates. New to buying shares? Our guide on how to get free stocks on Robinhood walks through opening a brokerage account and placing your first trade, and if you’re curious about digital assets, how to invest in Bitcoin covers the basics. This page is an informational market clock, not trading advice — for real-time quotes and order routing, use your broker.