Futures trading hours: the session, the daily break, and the 2026 holiday closes

CME Globex runs nearly around the clock, but not quite. The daily maintenance window, the weekly boundary and the 2026 holiday schedule, taken from the exchange's own specifications.

Last verified 9 September 2026 · how we check

Futures are described as trading twenty-four hours, and that is close enough to be useful and wrong enough to cost you. Currency markets keep a different clock, set out in forex market hours. The futures session runs almost around the clock from Sunday evening to Friday afternoon, with a daily break that catches people who assume the market never stops.

Everything below is from CME Group’s own contract specifications and holiday calendar, read on 10 August 2026. Times are given in both US zones because the exchange publishes both and the two get confused constantly.

When is the session actually open?

For CME Globex, using the E-mini S&P 500 as the reference contract:

The maintenance window is the part worth internalising. Every weekday afternoon the market halts for an hour, then reopens into the next trading date. A position held through it is exposed to whatever happens on the reopen, and orders behave differently across the boundary depending on the platform.

Note what the reopen means for dating: the Sunday evening session and the Monday daytime session belong to the same trade date. This trips up anyone reading daily data for the first time.

Why does the trade date not match the calendar date?

Because the futures day begins the previous evening. The session that opens Sunday at 6:00 p.m. Eastern is Monday’s trade date; the one opening Monday evening is Tuesday’s.

This is not a technicality when you are reading settlement prices, daily ranges or your own statement. A trade placed at 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday appears on Wednesday’s record, and the daily bar you see on a chart may start where you do not expect it to.

What else runs on a different clock?

The headline Globex session is not the only window on the same contract. The E-mini S&P 500 also carries:

• TACO, Sunday to Friday 6:00 p.m. – 9:30 a.m. Eastern, and Monday to Friday 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Eastern, with the same daily maintenance break
• BITC and related basis windows, which open Sunday evening and follow their own schedules

Most retail traders never touch these, but they explain why a platform sometimes shows a market as open when the window you actually trade is closed, or the reverse.

Which days are shortened or closed in 2026?

The exchange does not publish holidays as single days. It publishes windows, because the session before a holiday usually ends early and the session after opens late, and both land on different calendar dates from the holiday itself.

Nine of the ten run three days. Juneteenth is the two-day exception, which is the one most likely to catch someone working from the usual pattern.

Two further things the table does not show. The reopen time after a holiday differs by product group: after Thanksgiving 2026, interest rates and equities pre-open at 12:00 CT while cryptocurrencies open at 16:02 and grains do not reopen that evening at all. And CME runs separate schedules for FX Spot+ and for partner exchange products, with FX Spot+ observing only three closures across 2026 and 2027.

All of it is set out with the times in the CME holiday calendar.

⚠️ The exchange states that hours are “usually finalized approximately two weeks prior to the holiday”, with input from the NYSE and SIFMA. A calendar read months ahead is the shape rather than the timetable.

What happens when the clocks change?

Twice a year the session moves relative to local time outside the United States, and for a fortnight each time the usual mental arithmetic is wrong.

The exchange schedule is anchored to US time. When the United States changes clocks and Europe has not yet, or the reverse, the gap between the two shifts by an hour. The transitions do not fall on the same weekend: the US moves in mid-March and early November, Europe in late March and late October. That leaves roughly three weeks in spring and one in autumn when a London-based trader’s usual offset is off by an hour.

Two practical consequences. The open moves, so a session that normally starts at 23:00 local starts at 22:00 or midnight for that stretch. And the maintenance break moves with it, which matters if you routinely flatten before it.

The exchange does not announce this as a schedule change, because from its side nothing changed. Anyone trading from outside the US is expected to work it out, and platforms displaying in local time do it silently.

Why do the good hours not fill the whole session?

Liquidity is not spread evenly across the twenty-three. Volume concentrates around the US cash equity session and thins overnight, which changes what happens to your order rather than whether it fills.

In thin hours the same order meets a wider spread and less depth, so slippage rises and stops are more likely to be reached by a move that a busier book would have absorbed. The market is open; it is simply a different market.

This matters for anyone running an evaluation with a prop firm, because drawdown rules do not care what time of day produced the drawdown. Our page on prop firm challenges covers how those rules are constructed.

What to check for the contract you actually trade

The E-mini S&P 500 is a convenient reference, not a universal one. Hours differ by product, and the differences are published.

Find the contract specifications page for your instrument on the exchange site, not a third-party summary. Energy, metals and agricultural products each carry their own windows, and agricultural contracts in particular have daytime-only sessions that look nothing like the equity index schedule.

Check whether your broker restricts hours further. A firm may close positions or refuse new orders outside a narrower window than the exchange operates, and prop firms frequently impose a hard flat time. That restriction sits in the firm’s own rules, not in the exchange specification.

Confirm the time zone the platform displays. Exchange documents use Central and Eastern; platforms often display in your local zone or in exchange time without saying which. During the March and November clock changes the two drift apart for a fortnight, because US and European transitions do not fall on the same weekend.

Why we check this

Session times look like the most boring fact on a broker’s site and produce a disproportionate share of expensive surprises: a position held into a maintenance break, an early close before a holiday, a trade dated to the wrong day on a statement.

We take these from the exchange’s own contract specifications and holiday calendar rather than from summaries, and we record the date read, because the holiday schedule is finalised close to the event and changes. This page was checked on 10 August 2026.

Broker-level restrictions are a separate matter and belong to the firm; where a review on this site describes them, they come from the firm’s published rules. See the methodology and the advertising disclosure.

Sources

• CME Group — E-mini S&P 500 contract specifications
• CME Group — Trading hours and holiday calendar