Gold Trading Over Christmas and New Year: Holiday Hours, Thin Liquidity and Why to Cut Size

The short answer

Gold trades for most of the holiday season, but the market is thinner, shorter and broken up by two long weekends. In 2026 both Christmas Day and New Year’s Day fall on a Friday, so each holiday turns into a three-day break: the market shuts on Thursday (early on Christmas Eve, at the normal time on New Year’s Eve) and reopens on Sunday evening.

For COMEX gold futures, a futures data site that checked the schedule against CME on 5 November 2026 lists:

• Thursday 24 December (Christmas Eve): early close at 12:45 pm Chicago time. No evening session.
• Friday 25 December (Christmas Day): closed.
• Sunday 27 December: reopen at 5:00 pm Chicago time.
• Thursday 31 December (New Year’s Eve): normal close at 4:00 pm Chicago time, no evening session.
• Friday 1 January 2027 (New Year’s Day): closed.
• Sunday 3 January 2027: reopen at 5:00 pm Chicago time.

The US is on standard time all through the holidays, so Chicago is GMT-6 and New York is GMT-5. Our gold holiday calendar lists every US, UK, euro-area and Japanese holiday that thins the gold market, with a calendar feed you can add to your phone.

Spot XAUUSD on MT5 or any other platform is not traded on CME. Your provider sets its own holiday hours, and they usually follow the futures market closely, sometimes stopping a few minutes earlier. The notice from your own platform is the schedule that decides when your orders can be filled.

The times in your zone

All times are for the COMEX schedule above. Your platform may differ slightly.

For a normal week, our gold market hours tool shows the open, the daily break and the close in your own time zone, and the holiday hours glossary entry explains why platforms change their hours on public holidays.

What else is closed over the holidays

Gold reacts to bonds, the dollar and stocks, and those markets keep their own holiday hours:

Two things stand out for 2026:

1. Boxing Day moves to Monday 28 December. Boxing Day falls on a Saturday, so the UK bank holiday is on the following Monday. The LBMA says its prices are not published on UK bank holidays. Gold still trades that day on COMEX and on most platforms, but the London morning, normally one of the busiest parts of the gold day, is mostly missing.
2. The bond market closes early twice. With US Treasuries closing at 2:00 pm New York time on 24 and 31 December, the yields that gold usually follows stop updating in the afternoon.

The last big data before the break

According to our economic calendar, the November PCE inflation report and the third estimate of third-quarter GDP are due on Wednesday 23 December 2026 at 8:30 am New York time (13:30 GMT, 19:00 IST), the day before the Christmas Eve early close. That is unusual: a high-impact inflation number landing when many desks are already winding down.

If PCE surprises, the move may have fewer participants to absorb it, and then the market closes early the next day and shuts for three days. Our PCE event page shows how gold has moved in past PCE release hours. Weekly jobless claims usually come out on Thursday; in a Christmas Eve week the Labor Department may move them, so check the calendar that week rather than assuming the normal day.

Why thin liquidity matters

Liquidity is how many buyers and sellers are quoting at any moment, and for how much. In the holiday weeks it falls for simple reasons: many bank and fund traders take leave, year-end books are closed, and few large players want to open new risk before the new year. That changes trading in four ways:

1. Wider spreads. Fewer firms quote, so the bid-ask gap widens, and it widens most around the early closes, the Sunday reopens and the daily rollover hour.
2. Bigger moves on smaller orders. In a thin order book, one large order can push the price further than usual, and a quiet chart can suddenly jump.
3. Gaps over the long weekends. From the Christmas Eve close to the Sunday reopen is about three days. News keeps coming while the market is shut, and the price can reopen away from Thursday’s close. A stop inside the gap fills at the first price available.
4. Rule changes from the exchange. Exchanges review margins when prices swing. On Friday 26 December 2025 CME issued a notice raising margins on gold, silver and other metals, effective on Monday 29 December; Bloomberg reported on 31 December that CME raised precious-metal margins for the second time in a week, effective after the close that Wednesday. On that Monday gold fell 5% early in the session, the Associated Press reported. A higher margin requirement at the exchange can be passed on by providers too.

What 10 years of year-end sessions show in our data

Is the holiday period really quiet for gold? We took the COMEX gold futures (GC=F) daily bars in our data for 2016 to 2025 and compared the sessions from 24 to 31 December with the median session from 1 to 20 December of the same year, a normal, pre-holiday baseline. We also looked at the first session of January.

Range = high minus low as a percentage of the close. The first January session is the next year’s (for example, 2025’s row shows 2 January 2026). Sessions missing from the data source are left out, which is why some years have 4 holiday sessions.

What the table says, in plain words:

• Usually quieter. In 9 of the 10 years the typical holiday session was narrower than a normal early-December session. Across all 45 holiday sessions, the median was about 0.79 times the normal range, and only 15 of the 45 were wider than normal.
• But not safe. 4 of the 45 sessions were at least 1.5 times wider than normal. The most extreme was 29 December 2025, when gold’s daily range was 6.11% and it closed 4.59% lower, during the CME margin increase described above. That one session was more than four times wider than that December’s normal day.
• Some days were almost dead. 6 of the 45 sessions had half the normal range or less; on 27 December 2018 the range was just 0.05%. Dead days and wild days both happen in the same week.
• January wakes up. The first session of the new year was wider than the normal early-December day in 8 of 10 years (median 1.2 times), as desks return and new-year positions go on.

Ten years is a small sample, and none of this predicts what 2026 will do. The useful lesson is about uncertainty, not direction: the holiday weeks are usually calmer, but when they move, they move in a thin market, often just before a long closure.

Data: assets/data/gold-daily.json on this site (COMEX GC=F daily bars via Yahoo Finance, read live on 14 November 2026). These are futures prices, which run a few dollars above spot XAUUSD; the percentages are close to what spot did. Our gold seasonality tool shows which calendar months have the widest ranges, and the best month for gold guide covers December’s average return.

Swap and the long weekends

If you hold a leveraged gold position past the daily rollover, you pay (or sometimes receive) a swap. Most providers charge the normal weekend in one go, three nights on the triple-swap day. Holidays complicate this: when a weekday is closed, some providers move or add the extra night to a different rollover. With two Friday holidays in 2026, check how your platform charges each holiday week. Our swap calculator shows what a given swap rate costs for your lot size, and our guide to holding a gold trade overnight explains how swap is booked.

A simple plan for the holiday weeks

This is a checklist, not advice on what to trade:

1. Read your broker’s holiday notice. Look for the XAUUSD close and reopen times, any margin changes and how swap is charged over each holiday. These notices usually arrive in mid-December.
2. Put four times in your calendar. The Christmas Eve close, the 27 December reopen, the New Year’s Eve close and the 3 January reopen, from the table above in your zone.
3. Decide what you will hold before 23 December. PCE lands that day and the market closes early the next. If a position should not sit through three closed days, plan to close or reduce it in normal hours.
4. Cut size if you trade. If your normal trade risks 1% with a $15 stop, a gap or a thin fill can make the real loss far larger. Many traders halve their size for the holiday weeks or simply stop. Our position size calculator shows what a wider stop does to your lot size.
5. Cancel pending orders you would not want filled at the reopen. A buy stop or sell stop left on over the weekend can trigger at the Sunday open far from its level.
6. Do not treat a quiet chart as easy money. The data above shows dead days and the widest day of the decade in the same week.
7. Review instead of trading. The holiday weeks are a good time to go through your year’s journal. Our risk management guide for volatile gold markets and the weekly gold cheat sheet help you plan the first weeks of January.

Common mistakes

• Using last year’s dates. In 2025 Christmas fell on a Thursday; in 2026 it is a Friday, so the closures and reopens fall on different days.
• Forgetting Boxing Day. The London holiday on Monday 28 December thins the market even though COMEX is open.
• Assuming your platform follows CME to the minute. Your broker’s notice is the one that fills your orders.
• Holding full size through PCE on 23 December. A surprise in a thin market, followed by an early close, is a poor mix.

If you have read our guide to gold on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, the idea is the same, only longer: the holiday weeks combine thin markets, early closes and long gaps, so the safest edge is a smaller position.

Sources

• A futures holiday-hours calendar read on 14 November 2026 (not linked here because it is run by a trading company; we never link or promote trading firms), listing the COMEX gold and silver times for 24 and 25 December 2026, 31 December 2026 and 1 January 2027 and stating they were checked against CME Group’s published hours on 5 November 2026.
• CME Group: holiday and trading hours (official holiday notices; the page did not load for us on 14 November 2026).
• SIFMA: US bond market holiday schedule (early closes at 2:00 pm ET on 24 and 31 December 2026; closed 25 December and 1 January).
• NYSE: holidays and trading hours (closed 25 December 2026 and 1 January 2027; early close at 1:00 pm ET on 24 December 2026).
• GOV.UK: UK bank holidays (25 December 2026, Boxing Day substitute on 28 December 2026, 1 January 2027).
• LBMA: precious metal prices (prices are not published on UK bank holidays).
• Associated Press via The Gleaner, 31 December 2025 (gold down 5% early on 29 December 2025 after CME’s Friday margin notice).
• Bloomberg: CME hikes precious-metal margins again after price swings (second increase in a week, gold, silver, platinum and palladium, effective after the close on Wednesday 31 December 2025).
• Our measurements: COMEX gold futures (GC=F) daily bars via Yahoo Finance, as published on this site in assets/data/gold-daily.json (read live on 14 November 2026), 2016–2025 December sessions and the first January session of each following year.
• US release dates: our economic calendar, from the BEA release schedule (PCE and GDP on 23 December 2026).

Educational content only, not financial advice. Trading gold with leverage carries a high risk of loss.

Frequently asked questions