When Does the NFL Season Start? Key Dates Every Year
When the NFL season starts and ends, worked out from the calendar: the Thursday after Labor Day, 18 weeks, and a Super Bowl on the second Sunday in February.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished NFL Season & Playoffs25 min read
- Regular-season weeks
- 18
- Games per team
- 17
- First Kickoff Game
- 2002
- Super Bowl Sunday
- Second in February
Labor Day is the anchor. Every NFL regular season since 2002 has been opened by a single national-television game on the Thursday after the first Monday in September, and the rest of Week 1 follows that Sunday and Monday. That puts the first game of any season between September 4 and September 10, and the first full Sunday between September 7 and September 13.
So the direct answer to when does the NFL season start: the Thursday after Labor Day, almost always hosted by the team that won the previous Super Bowl. The regular season then runs 18 weeks, each club playing 17 games with one bye, and ends on the first or second weekend of January. The playoffs take four more weekends, with an open week before the Super Bowl, which lands on the second Sunday in February. Those rules come from the National Football League's scheduling practice and the 2020 collective bargaining agreement with the NFL Players Association, not from any one season's schedule, which is why the dates can be worked out years ahead.
What follows explains where each date comes from, where the rule has bent, and what the rest of the football year looks like between one February and the next.
The Labor Day rule and the Thursday Kickoff Game
The league does not publish a rule that says "the season begins on the Thursday after Labor Day." It does not need to. The practice has held for more than two decades because it solves two problems at once. The Labor Day weekend belongs to college football, whose opening weekend now spreads from Thursday to Monday, and to the end of summer travel. A Thursday a few days later gives the NFL a night with no competition, a national audience back from vacation, and a standalone game it can sell as an event.
The game itself has a name, the NFL Kickoff Game, and a format that has barely changed. One game, played in prime time on Thursday, with the defending champion at home and its championship banner unveiled before kickoff. Most of the remaining Week 1 games follow on Sunday, with Monday night closing the week. For years that Monday slot carried two games, one in the East and one on the West Coast.
Why Thursday rather than Sunday? Mostly television. A season opener on a Sunday has to share the day with every other game; on a Thursday it has the country to itself. The defending champion supplies the storyline. The opponent is chosen when the league builds the schedule, usually with an eye on an attractive matchup rather than a division rival, although division games have opened seasons too.
The date range that follows from it
Labor Day is the first Monday of September, so it can fall on any date from September 1 to September 7. Add three days and the Thursday opener falls between September 4 and September 10. The first Sunday of the season is three days after that, between September 7 and September 13. Every other date in the regular season is an arithmetic step from that Sunday.
| Season | Labor Day | Kickoff Game | Host | Super Bowl |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | September 6 | Thursday, September 9 | Tampa Bay Buccaneers | February 13, 2022 |
| 2022 | September 5 | Thursday, September 8 | Los Angeles Rams | February 12, 2023 |
| 2023 | September 4 | Thursday, September 7 | Kansas City Chiefs | February 11, 2024 |
| 2024 | September 2 | Thursday, September 5 | Kansas City Chiefs | February 9, 2025 |
| 2025 | September 1 | Thursday, September 4 | Philadelphia Eagles | February 8, 2026 |
Five seasons, five openers three days after Labor Day, five Super Bowls on the second Sunday in February. The pattern is regular enough that a fan can plan a wedding around it.
Wednesday openers, games abroad and champions who did not host
Twice the opener has moved to a Wednesday. The first time had nothing to do with football. In 2012 the Democratic National Convention scheduled President Barack Obama's acceptance speech for the night of Thursday, September 6, and the league moved its opener a day earlier rather than share the evening. The New York Giants, the defending champions, hosted the Dallas Cowboys on Wednesday, September 5, and lost 24-17.
The second came in 2026, when the Kickoff Game was again placed on a Wednesday, September 9, two days after Labor Day. This time the reason was the rest of Week 1. The league had scheduled a game in Melbourne, Australia, for the Friday of that week, and the time difference put it on American screens on the Thursday night the opener would otherwise have owned. Moving the Kickoff Game back a day gave each of them a clear night. The defending champion Seattle Seahawks hosted the New England Patriots, the team they had beaten in Super Bowl LX seven months earlier.
So the rule for the opener is looser than "Thursday." The weekend after Labor Day is the fixed point. The weekday the league opens on bends when the rest of Week 1 requires it.
Champions who opened on the road
The champion-hosts tradition has two clear exceptions.
The Baltimore Ravens won Super Bowl XLVII in February 2013 and should have opened the 2013 season at home. They could not. The Baltimore Orioles had a home game scheduled for the same Thursday night at Oriole Park at Camden Yards, which shares parking and a downtown footprint with the Ravens' stadium next door, and Major League Baseball would not move it. The league sent the Ravens to Denver instead, where Peyton Manning threw seven touchdown passes in a 49-27 Broncos win on September 5, 2013.
The second exception was deliberate. In 2019 the league marked its 100th season by opening with the Green Bay Packers at the Chicago Bears, the league's oldest rivalry, on Thursday, September 5. The defending champion New England Patriots raised their banner on the Sunday night instead, at home against the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Week 1 outside the United States
Since 2024 the opening week has also included a game abroad. On Friday, September 6, 2024, the Philadelphia Eagles beat the Green Bay Packers 34-29 in São Paulo, Brazil, the first regular-season NFL game in South America. The league returned to São Paulo for Week 1 in 2025, with the Los Angeles Chargers beating the Kansas City Chiefs 27-21 on Friday, September 5. In 2026 the opening-week trip went further: the San Francisco 49ers and the Los Angeles Rams played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Friday, September 11, local time, the first regular-season NFL game in Australia.
A Friday game in early September looks odd to anyone who knows why the NFL usually avoids Friday nights in the fall. In 2024 and 2025 it was simple arithmetic: both dates fell before the second Friday in September, which is when the restriction in a 1961 federal law begins. Melbourne in 2026 worked differently. Friday there was still Thursday evening in the United States, so the telecast American stations carried was a Thursday one. That law, and why the league respects it, is the subject of our guide to why the NFL doesn't play on Saturday.
The effect on the calendar is small but real. Week 1 can now stretch across a Wednesday or Thursday opener, a game abroad, the main Sunday slate and a Monday night, which means it starts before Labor Day week has finished feeling like a holiday and runs until the following Monday night.
Eighteen weeks: when the NFL season ends in January
The regular season is 18 weeks long. Each of the 32 clubs plays 17 games and has one bye, a week off placed somewhere in the middle of the schedule. That format began in 2021. Before it, from 1990 through 2020, the league played 16 games across 17 weeks, apart from 1993, when every team had two byes and the season ran 18 weeks.
Eighteen weeks from a first Sunday between September 7 and September 13 puts the last Sunday of the regular season between January 4 and January 10. In practice Week 18 begins on the Saturday, with a doubleheader the league has scheduled since 2022, and finishes on Sunday with every remaining game, closing with a Sunday night game picked late in the season for its playoff stakes. All of Week 18's matchups are division games, which is why so many of them decide titles and seeding.
- 18Weeks in the regular season
- 17Games per club
- 1Byes per club
- 32Clubs in the league
Fixed by the 17-game format adopted for the 2021 season. Byes are placed by the league when it builds the schedule each spring.
How the bye weeks are spread, and why none of them falls in September, is covered in our guide to the NFL bye week. The longer story of how the schedule grew from 12 games to 14, then 16, then 17 is told in our page on how many games are in an NFL season.
Why the end date matters more than it used to
Under the 16-game format the regular season ended in late December in some years and on the first Sunday of January in others. The extra week pushed the end firmly into January, after the New Year's Day college bowl games rather than alongside them. That has two practical consequences. The playoffs now begin a week later in January than they used to, and Christmas falls in Week 16 or Week 17 rather than the final week, which changes which games carry playoff weight on the holiday.
The final weekend is also the one the league leaves unfinished longest. Kickoff times for Week 18 are not set until the week before, after Week 17 has been played, so that clubs competing for the same playoff spot can be put in the same window and none of them takes the field already knowing its fate.
January and February: four playoff rounds and Super Bowl Sunday
Fourteen teams make the playoffs, seven from each conference. The top seed in each conference gets a bye through the first round. The other twelve play six games on the weekend after the regular season ends, known as wild-card weekend, which runs from Saturday through Monday night.
The divisional round follows a week later, two games on Saturday and two on Sunday. The conference championship games are played the Sunday after that, the AFC and NFC title games back to back in the afternoon and early evening. Then comes the gap. One open weekend separates the conference championships from the Super Bowl, which is played on the second Sunday in February.
| Round | Games | Days | Weeks after Week 18 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wild-card round | 6 | Saturday to Monday | 1 |
| Divisional round | 4 | Saturday and Sunday | 2 |
| Conference championships | 2 | Sunday | 3 |
| Open week | 0 | None | 4 |
| Super Bowl | 1 | Sunday | 5 |
The open week exists for the Super Bowl itself. It gives the two teams time to travel to a neutral site chosen years in advance, the host city time to run a week of events, and the league two weeks of promotion rather than one. Teams have not always welcomed the gap. Coaches occasionally argue it disrupts a playoff rhythm. It has stayed anyway, except in a handful of seasons when the calendar or circumstances forced a change, and since Super Bowl XXXVIII in 2004 it has been a constant.
Who plays whom in each round, and how ties for a seed are broken, is explained in our article on NFL playoff seeding.
Super Bowl Sunday is not a fixed date
The game is tied to a Sunday, not to a date, which is why it moves around inside one week of February. The earliest it can now be played is February 8. The latest is February 14, which in some years puts the Super Bowl on Valentine's Day. That is what Super Bowl LXI is, scheduled for February 14, 2027 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California: the latest date on which the NFL has ever scheduled the game, and the first time it falls on Valentine's Day. The cause is nothing more exotic than the calendar. Labor Day 2026 fell on September 7, the latest it can, which put the first Sunday of the season on September 13, the latest it can be.
Working out the NFL season start date for any year
The arithmetic is simple enough to do on the back of an envelope, and it works for any season played under the current 17-game format.
- Find Labor Day, the first Monday in September.
- Add three days for the Kickoff Game, the Thursday after it. In a year when the league picks a Wednesday, subtract one.
- Add six days to Labor Day for the first Sunday of the regular season.
- Add 17 weeks, or 119 days, to that first Sunday for the Sunday of Week 18.
- Add 22 weeks, or 154 days, to the first Sunday for Super Bowl Sunday.
Step five is the one people find surprising, but it is just the count from the previous section: 18 regular-season Sundays, three playoff Sundays and an open Sunday, then the game. The result always lands on the second Sunday in February. Leap years do not disturb it, because February 29 comes after the Super Bowl.
- Labor DayThe first Monday of September, which falls between September 1 and September 7.
- Kickoff GameThe Thursday after Labor Day, three days later. The league moved it to a Wednesday in 2012 and in 2026.
- First SundaySix days after Labor Day. Fifteen or so of the Week 1 games are played on this day.
- Week 18Seventeen weeks after the first Sunday, which lands it between January 4 and January 10.
- Super BowlTwenty-two weeks after the first Sunday, which is always the second Sunday in February.
Valid under the 17-game, 18-week format used since 2021. A change to the number of games or the playoff structure would change steps four and five.
The method applied to coming seasons
The table below applies the formula. It is a calculation, not a published schedule, and the league can change any part of its format through its owners and the collective bargaining agreement with the NFLPA, which runs through the 2030 season. The one confirmed deviation is 2026, when the opener was played a day early.
| Season | Labor Day | Opener | Week 18 Sunday | Super Bowl Sunday |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | September 7 | Wednesday, September 9 | January 10, 2027 | February 14, 2027 |
| 2027 | September 6 | Thursday, September 9 | January 9, 2028 | February 13, 2028 |
| 2028 | September 4 | Thursday, September 7 | January 7, 2029 | February 11, 2029 |
| 2029 | September 3 | Thursday, September 6 | January 6, 2030 | February 10, 2030 |
| 2030 | September 2 | Thursday, September 5 | January 5, 2031 | February 9, 2031 |
The swing between the earliest and latest possible openers is six days, and it carries all the way through. A season that starts September 4 ends with a Super Bowl on February 8. One that starts September 10 ends on February 14. Neither date is a decision anyone makes in a given year. Both are what happens when Labor Day lands where it does.
The league year: 4 p.m. Eastern on a Wednesday in March
Ask a front office when the NFL year begins and the answer will not be September. It will be a specific minute in March.
The league year is the accounting and contractual year the NFL runs on, and it begins at 4 p.m. Eastern time on a Wednesday in mid-March. In recent years that Wednesday has been March 15 in 2023, March 13 in 2024, March 12 in 2025 and March 11 in 2026, with the exact date set by the league each year. Everything that depends on a "year" in the collective bargaining agreement turns over at that moment. Player contracts are written in league years, so a deal that "expires after the 2025 season" actually expires when the 2026 league year opens. The salary cap for the new year takes effect, and every club has to be under it. Free agency begins. Trades agreed in the weeks before, which cannot be processed until the new year, become official.
Nothing about the hour is ceremonial. It is the moment the league office starts accepting and processing contracts for the new year, and on a typical opening afternoon the transaction wire fills with deals that were in fact agreed earlier in the week and could not be filed until then.
The negotiating window before it
The 2020 agreement allows clubs to negotiate with the agents of players who are about to become unrestricted free agents during a window that opens at noon Eastern two days before the league year begins. No contract can be signed until the league year opens. Fans and broadcasters call this the "legal tampering period," which is a contradiction the league tolerates in exchange for an orderly start to free agency. Tampering itself, outside that window, is still a violation the league investigates.
How the rights work once the market opens, including the tenders that let a club match an offer, is set out in our guide to how NFL free agency works.
February to April: the combine, the franchise tag window, free agency and the draft
The season ends on Super Bowl Sunday. The next one starts, on paper, within days. The period from mid-February to late April is the busiest administrative stretch of the football year, and it runs in the same order every spring.
The scouting combine
The NFL Scouting Combine is held in Indianapolis in late February and into early March. Several hundred draft-eligible college players are invited to be measured, examined by club doctors and interviewed by teams, and most of them run and lift in front of scouts at Lucas Oil Stadium. Indianapolis has hosted it since 1987. What the combine measures, and which of those numbers actually predict anything, is examined in our explainer on the NFL combine.
The franchise tag window
Overlapping the combine is the window in which clubs can designate a franchise or transition player, a one-year tender that keeps a pending free agent off the open market at a set price. The window opens in mid-to-late February and closes at 4 p.m. Eastern a little over a week before the league year begins. A club can use one tag per year. A tagged player who does not sign a long-term contract by a deadline in mid-July plays the season on the one-year tender.
Free agency and trades
The new league year opens in mid-March, as described above, and the first week of free agency moves most of the money. Trades also become official from that point, which is why a deal "agreed" in early March shows up in the transaction wire on the Wednesday afternoon.
The draft
The NFL Draft is held over three days in late April, Thursday to Saturday. The first round is on Thursday night, rounds two and three on Friday and rounds four through seven on Saturday. The host city rotates, and the event has been staged outdoors in recent years with crowds in the hundreds of thousands. The order of selection is set by the previous season's results, with the Super Bowl champion picking last in each round.
Within an hour of the last pick, clubs begin signing undrafted rookies, which is the last big roster event of the spring.
May to July: the schedule release, the offseason program and the dead period
The NFL does not publish its regular-season schedule when the season ends. The opponents are known in January, because they are set by a rotating formula of division, conference and inter-conference matchups. The dates are not. The league builds them over the winter and spring, testing a very large number of candidate versions against stadium availability, broadcast windows and travel, and releases the full schedule in mid-May, usually on a weekday evening in a televised event.
The offseason program
The collective bargaining agreement limits what clubs can do with players between seasons. The offseason program runs for nine weeks in the spring and is divided into phases:
- Phase One: two weeks limited to meetings, rehabilitation and strength and conditioning work, with only the strength staff on the field.
- Phase Two: three weeks of on-field individual and group drills, still with no offense-against-defense work.
- Phase Three: four weeks that include up to ten days of organized team activities, the OTAs, where seven-on-seven and eleven-on-eleven drills are allowed without live contact.
Clubs with a new head coach may start earlier and hold an additional voluntary minicamp. Everything in the program is voluntary except one thing. A single mandatory minicamp, held in June, is the only offseason event a veteran under contract can be fined for skipping. What players actually do at those sessions, and where the line on contact falls, is the subject of our page on NFL OTAs and minicamp.
The dead period
After minicamp ends in mid-to-late June, the calendar goes quiet for roughly five weeks. Players are off. Coaches take vacations, often the only real ones they get. Front offices keep working on contracts, and the mid-July deadline for long-term deals with franchise-tagged players is the one hard date in the stretch. The football press calls these weeks the dead period, and the label is accurate.
Late July and August: camp, the Hall of Fame Game and the cut to 53
Training camp opens in late July. Rookies report first, a few days ahead of veterans, and quarterbacks and injured players may be brought in early too. Under the 2020 agreement the first days of camp are an acclimation period: helmets only, then shells, with full pads not permitted until a set number of practice days have passed. The rules were tightened in 2011 and have stayed restrictive since, which is one reason camps no longer look like the two-a-day marathons of the 1980s.
The Hall of Fame Game
The preseason opens with a single game in Canton, Ohio, played in the same week as the Pro Football Hall of Fame's enshrinement ceremony, usually at the start of August. The two clubs that play it start camp earlier than everyone else and, because of it, play four preseason games rather than three. The game has been played in some form since 1962 and is now staged at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium, next to the museum.
Three preseason weekends
Every other club plays three preseason games across three August weekends, a number fixed when the regular season grew to 17 games in 2021. Before that, the preseason was four games for most of the modern era. Starters play less in those games than they used to, and some do not play at all. What the games are now for is the argument in our explainer on the NFL preseason.
The cut to 53
On the Tuesday after the final preseason weekend, at 4 p.m. Eastern, every club must reduce its roster from 90 players to 53. That deadline falls in the last days of August, a little over a week before the opener. Most of the players released are claimed by no one and become eligible for practice squads, which clubs begin assembling the next day. The 53 is the number that matters for the season, though not every one of them dresses on a game day, because the league caps the active list for each game below the full roster.
From the cut to the Kickoff Game is about nine days. That is the shortest stretch of the year in which nothing much happens on the calendar and a great deal happens in the building.
In-season dates that come around every year
The regular season has its own fixed points, and most of them can be found on a calendar before the schedule is released.
| Marker | When it falls | What fixes the date |
|---|---|---|
| Byes begin | Week 5 or 6 | League scheduling practice under the 18-week format |
| Trade deadline | Tuesday after Week 9, early November | Set by the league; moved a week later in 2024 |
| Thanksgiving | Fourth Thursday of November | Three games since 2006, Detroit and Dallas at home |
| Black Friday | The day after Thanksgiving | An afternoon game, first played in 2023 |
| First Saturday games | Third Saturday of December | A federal broadcasting law protecting college and high school football |
| Christmas | December 25 | At least one game every year since 2020 |
The trade deadline
The deadline arrives on a Tuesday afternoon in the first week of November. Until 2024 it followed Week 8; the owners moved it one week later that spring, to the Tuesday after Week 9. After the deadline a player can still change teams through the waiver system, but trades are closed until the new league year opens in March.
Thanksgiving, then Saturdays, then Christmas
Thanksgiving is the oldest of the holiday games. The Detroit Lions have hosted on the day since 1934 and the Dallas Cowboys since 1966, with a third, rotating prime-time game added in 2006. Since 2023 the day after has also carried a game, kicking off in the afternoon.
The first Saturday games of the regular season appear on the third Saturday of December, after a window in federal law that protects college and high school football closes. Christmas follows. December 25 has carried at least one game every year since 2020, whatever day of the week it falls on, a tradition traced in our guide to NFL Christmas Day games.
How the Kickoff Game and the champion-hosts custom began
For most of the league's history there was no national opener at all. The season began on a Sunday with a full slate, and the opening Sunday moved around September from one year to the next, sometimes landing on Labor Day weekend itself, depending on the length of the schedule and the number of byes. Nobody outside the league office could have told you the date with a formula.
The modern opener was a product of a specific moment. In September 2002 the league opened the season with a Thursday night game, the San Francisco 49ers at the New York Giants at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, presented with a concert in Times Square a year after the September 11 attacks. San Francisco won 16-13. It was promoted as the NFL Kickoff, and it drew the kind of audience the league wanted to repeat.
The 2003 opener was again a Thursday night game, the New York Jets at the Washington Redskins. The defending champions, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, did not host it.
The custom of the champion hosting began in 2004. The New England Patriots, winners of Super Bowl XXXVIII the previous February, opened the season at Gillette Stadium against the Indianapolis Colts on Thursday, September 9, 2004, and won 27-24 after Mike Vanderjagt missed a tying field goal at the end. That game set the template that has held since: the banner ceremony, the prime-time Thursday slot, and an opponent chosen for the matchup.
Why the champion matters to the format
Making the champion the host gave the league a reason for the game to exist every year. The Super Bowl winner's return is an event regardless of the opponent. It also tied the opening night to a specific stadium months in advance, which is why a conflict like the Orioles game in 2013 could not be solved by moving the Ravens across town. The league had no other building in Baltimore to use, and the champion's banner does not travel well.
There is also a modest competitive edge in the arrangement, though it is small enough to argue about. A home game on opening night is still a home game. Champions have not won every Kickoff Game they hosted, and several have lost them.
How the calendar drifted later, and what an eighteenth game would do
Super Bowl I was played on January 15, 1967, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. For its first thirty-five years the game belonged to January. The earliest it has ever been played was January 9, 1977, when the Oakland Raiders beat the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl XI at the Rose Bowl. The move into February came gradually, and then all at once.
| Super Bowl | Date | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| I | January 15, 1967 | The first game, mid-January |
| XI | January 9, 1977 | The earliest Super Bowl ever played |
| XXXVI | February 3, 2002 | The first in February, after the 2001 season was pushed back a week |
| XXXVII | January 26, 2003 | The last played in January |
| LVI | February 13, 2022 | The first after the 17-game season |
| LX | February 8, 2026 | Second Sunday in February, the current pattern |
| LXI | February 14, 2027 | The latest date ever scheduled, and the first on Valentine's Day |
The jump into February in 2002 was an accident of history. After the September 11 attacks, the league postponed its Week 2 games and played them at the end of the regular season, which pushed the playoffs back by a week and Super Bowl XXXVI, in New Orleans, to February 3. The following year the game was back in January. From Super Bowl XXXVIII in 2004 onward it has been played in February every year, once the open week before the game was restored.
Selected games only, numbered by position in the calendar year: January 15 is day 15, February 13 is day 44. The upward drift reflects longer regular seasons, more playoff rounds and the open week before the game.
Show the numbers
| Item | Day of the year |
|---|---|
| I (1967) | 15 |
| XI (1977) | 9 |
| XXXVI (2002) | 34 |
| XXXVII (2003) | 26 |
| LVI (2022) | 44 |
| LX (2026) | 39 |
| LXI (2027) | 45 |
What the seventeenth game did
The 17th game, added in 2021, pushed everything back by one week. The regular season gained a Sunday, so the playoffs moved a week later and the Super Bowl moved from the first Sunday in February to the second. That is the whole explanation for why a game that was played on February 7 in 2021 was played on February 13 in 2022.
What an eighteenth would do
The league has said in public that it is interested in an 18-game regular season, and any such change would have to be negotiated with the NFLPA, most likely in talks on the agreement that follows the current one. The calendar consequences are not mysterious. Unless the opener moved earlier, into the Labor Day weekend that college football occupies, an additional regular-season week would push the Super Bowl to the third Sunday in February. That is the Sunday before Presidents' Day, a federal holiday on the Monday, which some in the league have pointed to as a benefit for viewers who would have the next day off.
An 18th game would almost certainly take another preseason game with it, as the 17th did, and the bye structure would have to be decided again, possibly with a second bye per team. Those are negotiations rather than certainties, and nothing on this page should be read as a forecast. What can be said is that the last expansion, from 16 games to 17 in 2021, moved the end of the season later rather than the start earlier. The weekend after Labor Day has proved harder to move than February. Anyone wanting more on the sport's structure will find it collected on our American football page.