Labor Day arrives on Monday, September 6, 2027, 316 days from today. Congress fixed it on the first Monday of September in 1894, and it has never moved since.
Labor Day 2027:
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316days to go.
Time left until 12:00 AM on September 6:
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Labor Day falls on the first Monday of September.
13.2% of the time since Labor Day 2026 has gone by
Labor Day falls on the first Monday of September. It is always a Monday between September 1 and September 7, so the date changes every year.
Year
Date
Days away
2027
316 days
2028
680 days
2029
1,044 days
2030
1,408 days
2031
1,772 days
When is Labor Day? The first Monday in September, by law since 1894
On June 28, 1894, Congress made “the first Monday of September in each year, being the day celebrated and known as Labor’s Holiday” a legal public holiday. The one-sentence act put it on the same footing as Christmas, January 1, February 22, May 30 and July 4, which were all fixed dates.
That made Labor Day a Monday holiday 74 years before the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968, which shifted Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day and Veterans Day to Mondays. The 1968 law rewrote the whole holiday list, and Labor Day’s line still reads “Labor Day, the first Monday in September.”
The first Labor Day was a Tuesday
New York City held the first Labor Day on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, following plans by the city’s Central Labor Union. The program was a street parade of trade and labor organizations, then a festival for workers and their families. The Department of Labor lists the steps from that parade to federal law:
Date
Step
September 5, 1882
First Labor Day parade in New York City
September 5, 1883
The Central Labor Union holds a second one
1885 and 1886
Cities pass municipal Labor Day ordinances
February 21, 1887
Oregon becomes the first state with a Labor Day law
1887
Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York pass their own
By 1894
23 more states have adopted the holiday
June 28, 1894
The federal act makes the first Monday in September a legal holiday
Who proposed the day is still disputed. Peter J. McGuire often gets the credit, but the Department of Labor says recent research supports Matthew Maguire, a machinist who was secretary of the Central Labor Union in 1882.
Who gets Labor Day off?
Federal employees do: Labor Day is one of the 11 legal public holidays in 5 U.S.C. 6103, so federal offices close and the day is paid. Private employers make their own call. The Fair Labor Standards Act does not require pay for time not worked, holidays included, and the Department of Labor treats holiday pay as a matter of agreement between employer and employee.
Weeks from Memorial Day to Labor Day
Both holidays fall on Mondays, so the stretch between them is always whole weeks: 14 weeks (98 days) in most years. It runs to 15 weeks (105 days) only when Memorial Day lands on May 25 and Labor Day on September 7, the earliest and latest dates each rule allows. That happened in 2020 and 2026 and comes around next in 2037. The Memorial Day countdown tracks the start of that stretch.