CME holiday calendar 2026: every closure is a three-day window, and the reopen time depends on what you trade

The exchange does not publish holidays as single days. Memorial Day covers 24 to 26 May, Thanksgiving covers 26 to 28 November. After Thanksgiving, crypto reopens at 16:02 and grains do not reopen at all.

Last verified 9 September 2026 · how we check

Search for whether futures trade on Memorial Day and you get a date. The exchange publishes something different: a window. Memorial Day 2026 is listed as 24 to 26 May, three days, and the trading disruption starts on the Sunday before the holiday rather than on the holiday itself.

That gap between how the question is asked and how the exchange answers it is where people get caught.

Every 2026 closure, as CME publishes it

Read from the exchange’s own Globex schedule on 9 September 2026:

Nine of the eleven windows run three days. Juneteenth is the short one at two, and it is the holiday most likely to catch someone who assumed the usual pattern.

The window is not the closure. It is the span the exchange’s own schedule covers, because the session before the holiday usually ends early and the session after opens late, and both sit on different calendar dates from the holiday itself.

After Thanksgiving, the market reopens at six different times

This is the part no summary carries. The reopen is not one event. Taking Thanksgiving, Thursday 26 November 2026, with a trade date of Friday 27 November, times in US Central:

Three things fall out of that table.

Crypto is on its own clock. It pre-opens at 16:01 and opens at 16:02, roughly an hour before everything else, and the one-minute gap between the two is not a typo in our reading; it is what the schedule shows.

Pre-open is not open. Between 12:00 and 17:00 an interest rate trader can enter, modify and cancel orders and nothing matches. CME’s own legend is explicit: pre-open allows order entry with “no order matching”. A resting order placed at 12:30 sits unmatched for four and a half hours.

Four product groups have no entry at all. Grains, livestock, dairy and lumber are absent from the Friday schedule, which is the agricultural pattern: those pits keep more conventional hours and do not come back the same evening.

The same exchange closes different products on different days

CME runs a separate holiday schedule for FX Spot+, and it is far shorter than the main one. For the whole of 2026 and into 2027 it lists three dates:

Eleven windows on the main Globex schedule; three dates on this one. A trader in FX Spot+ is unaffected by eight of the holidays that stop the rest of the exchange.

The partner exchange schedule is different again, publishing single dates rather than windows: 1 January, 19 January, 16 February, 3 April, 25 May, 19 June, 3 July, 7 September, 26 November, 25 December 2026 and 1 January 2027.

So “is the market closed” has three different answers on the same exchange depending on which schedule your contract sits under, and the schedules are published separately.

The exchange says the schedule is not final

Printed under every table on the page:

This schedule is subject to change. Trading hours are usually finalized approximately two weeks prior to the holiday. Holiday schedules are subject to input from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA).

Two weeks. A holiday calendar read in January can be wrong by December, and any page reproducing one, including this one, is a snapshot of what the exchange published on the day it was read.

That is also why the date on this page matters more than the table. We read the schedule on 9 September 2026. For a holiday more than two weeks away, treat what you find here as the shape rather than the timetable, and check the exchange in the fortnight before.

What this changes about planning around a holiday

Count backwards from the window, not the holiday. The early close usually lands on the session before, which is a different calendar date. Memorial Day falls on 25 May; the schedule starts on the 24th.

Check your own product group, not “the market”. Six reopen times on one evening, and four groups that do not reopen at all, is not a market with a single state.

Do not carry an assumption from one holiday to another. Juneteenth’s window is two days where most are three, and FX Spot+ ignores eight of the eleven entirely.

Ask your broker what happens to working orders across the window. Platforms differ in what they do with resting orders across a session boundary, and that behaviour is in the platform’s documentation rather than the exchange’s. We set out the same point about the ordinary daily break in futures trading hours.

What we checked, and what we didn’t

Every date, window and time above was read from CME Group’s own holiday and trading hours calendar on 9 September 2026. The Thanksgiving reopen times are the schedule’s own figures in US Central Time for trade date Friday 27 November 2026.

We have read the Globex schedule, the FX Spot+ schedule and the partner exchange schedule published on that page. Other CME platforms, ClearPort and BrokerTec among them, publish their own schedules that we have not reproduced here. Nothing above covers exchanges outside CME Group, whose calendars differ, and none of it is a substitute for the exchange’s own page in the two weeks before a holiday, when the hours are finalised.

Sources

• CME Group: holiday and trading hours calendar
• CME Group: trading hours