Worked example: two fixed distances worth memorising
From Christmas Day to New Year's Day is always exactly 7 days — one clean week, which is why the "between the holidays" lull feels like a single unit of time. A less obvious one: from July 4 to January 1 is always 181 days, in leap years and common years alike, because February 29 can never fall between those two dates. Any date pair from March 1 to the following February 28 has this same year-proof property; it is the stretch across February 29 that shifts by one.
The 26-hour New Year
"How many days until New Year" has a different answer depending on where you stand, and for one strange day the answers overlap. The first inhabited place to enter the new year is Kiritimati in Kiribati, at UTC+14. The last inhabited places, at UTC−11 (such as American Samoa), reach midnight a full 25 hours later — and the uninhabited US territories of Baker and Howland Islands at UTC−12 stretch the planet's total celebration window to about 26 hours. Samoa and American Samoa are close neighbours in the same island chain, yet Samoa (UTC+13) celebrates a full calendar day earlier — it jumped to the western side of the date line at the end of 2011.
Who celebrates when
| Location | Time zone at New Year | Hours after the first midnight |
|---|---|---|
| Kiritimati (Christmas Island), Kiribati | UTC+14 | 0 (first) |
| Auckland, New Zealand | UTC+13 (DST) | +1 |
| Sydney, Australia | UTC+11 (DST) | +3 |
| Tokyo & Seoul | UTC+9 | +5 |
| Berlin & Paris | UTC+1 | +13 |
| London | UTC+0 | +14 |
| New York | UTC−5 | +19 |
| Los Angeles | UTC−8 | +22 |
| Honolulu | UTC−10 | +24 |
| American Samoa (last inhabited) | UTC−11 | +25 |
Southern-hemisphere zones shown with DST because January 1 falls in their summer. This page's countdown ignores all of this complexity on purpose: it counts to your midnight, which is the only one your fireworks care about.
Not everyone's new year is January 1
January 1 is the Gregorian new year. Lunar New Year (celebrated in China, Vietnam, Korea and beyond) moves with the lunisolar calendar and falls between late January and mid-February. Churches on the Julian calendar mark the "Old New Year" on January 14 — the same 13-day offset that puts Julian Christmas on January 7. If your countdown target is one of those, set the exact date in the main calculator and share the link.
Related countdowns
The year-end sequence: days until Thanksgiving, then days until Christmas (7 days before this page's target), and afterwards the long climb to days until summer. For resolutions with a deadline, the days until calculator counts to any date you pick.