Gold Trading Hours on Thanksgiving and Black Friday: Halts, Early Closes and Thin Liquidity

The short answer

Gold does not shut for the whole of US Thanksgiving. It trades for part of Thursday, stops in the afternoon, restarts in the evening, then closes early on Black Friday. For Thursday 26 November and Friday 27 November 2026, the COMEX metals schedule, as listed by a futures firm that checked it against CME on 6 November, is:

• Thursday 26 November (Thanksgiving): trading continues from the Wednesday evening session, then halts at 1:30 pm Chicago time. It reopens at 5:00 pm Chicago time for the Friday trade date. No COMEX settlement price is published for Thursday.
• Friday 27 November (Black Friday): early close at 1:45 pm Chicago time. No evening session.
• Sunday 29 November: normal reopen at 5:00 pm Chicago time.

US daylight saving time ended on 1 November 2026, so in Thanksgiving week Chicago is GMT-6 and New York is GMT-5. That makes the Thursday halt 19:30 GMT and the Friday close 19:45 GMT.

Spot XAUUSD on MT5 or any other platform is not traded on CME. Your broker sets its own holiday hours, and they usually track the futures market closely. Read your broker’s notice for the week; it is the schedule that actually decides when your orders can be filled.

The times in your zone

All times below are for the COMEX metals schedule above. Your broker may stop a few minutes earlier.

Our gold market hours tool shows the normal weekly open, break and close in your own time zone, and our guide to whether gold trades on weekends covers the normal Friday close and Sunday gap.

What else is closed that week

Gold does not trade on its own. On Thanksgiving, the other US markets that move it are shut or short:

So on Thursday, London and Asia trade gold more or less as usual, but the US half of the day, normally the busiest part, is missing. With no Treasury market, there are no live US yields for gold to react to. On Friday, US desks come back for a short, thin day and most of them leave early.

Why thin liquidity matters for gold traders

“Liquidity” means how many buyers and sellers are quoting at any moment, and for how much. On a normal weekday the London and New York overlap brings the most quotes of the day; you can see this in our London vs New York sessions guide. On Thanksgiving week the US side is thin or absent. Three things follow:

1. Wider spreads. Fewer firms quote, so the gap between bid and ask grows. Spreads also jump in the minutes around the Thursday halt and the evening reopen, much as they do at the daily rollover hour.
2. Bigger moves on smaller orders. When the order book is thin, one large order can push gold further than it would on a busy day. Kitco reported on Thanksgiving 2024 that analysts warned against reading too much into that day’s price action because liquidity was “extremely thin”.
3. Gaps around the halt. Orders cannot be filled during the halt. A pending order or stop inside a gap is filled at the first price when trading resumes, which can be worse than the level you set.

There is a fourth risk that has nothing to do with the holiday itself: technical problems hurt more when few people are watching. On Friday 28 November 2025, the day after Thanksgiving, a cooling fault at a Chicago-area data centre halted CME Globex for hours, and gold’s bid-ask spread in early London trade was about 20 times wider than normal, Rigzone reported. That was not a normal holiday pattern, but it shows why size matters on thin days.

What 10 Black Fridays show in our data

Is Black Friday a quiet day for gold? We checked the COMEX gold futures (GC=F) daily bars in our data for every Black Friday from 2015 to 2025. Because CME publishes no settlement for Thanksgiving Thursday, the Friday daily bar in most years covers both the Thursday half session and the short Friday session, so it is really a two-session bar. We compared its high-low range with the median daily range of the 40 trading days before the holiday, both as a percentage of the close.

2017 has no Black Friday row in our data and is left out. In 2023 the data has a separate Thursday bar, so that year’s Friday row covers Friday only and its change is from Thursday.

What the table says, in plain words:

• Thin does not mean quiet. The two-session bar was wider than a normal day’s median in 6 of the 10 years, and about two to three times wider in 2015 and 2020.
• It can also be dead. In 2018, 2022 and 2023 the range was well below normal, even with two sessions in one bar.
• Direction was mixed. Gold closed higher in 7 years and lower in 3, and moved more than 1% in 3 years (2015, 2020 and 2025). Ten years is a small sample, and none of this predicts 2026.

The useful lesson is about uncertainty, not direction: you cannot tell in advance whether a holiday session will be flat or jumpy, and when it jumps, the thin order book can make fills worse.

Data: assets/data/gold-daily.json (COMEX GC=F daily bars via Yahoo Finance). Range = high minus low as a percentage of the close. Futures prices run a few dollars above spot.

Thanksgiving week 2026: the calendar around the holiday

The holiday sits right after a busy Wednesday. Per the official calendars behind our gold events pages:

• Wednesday 25 November, 8:30 am New York (13:30 GMT, 19:00 IST): PCE inflation and the GDP report, plus weekly jobless claims, which the Labor Department moves a day early for Thanksgiving. See the PCE event page and jobless claims and gold.
• Thursday 26 November: Thanksgiving; US stocks and bonds closed; COMEX halt in the afternoon.
• Friday 27 November: Black Friday; short US sessions everywhere.

So a large data move on Wednesday may be followed by a thin Thursday and Friday, when there are fewer participants to absorb it. That is one reason some traders cut their size for the whole week rather than just the holiday.

A simple plan for the holiday week

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

1. Read your broker’s notice. Look for the XAUUSD halt and close times, and any changes to margin or swap for the holiday. Brokers usually email or post them a few days before.
2. Put the times in your calendar. Use the table above for your zone. Mark the Thursday halt, the evening reopen and the Friday close.
3. Decide before Wednesday what you will hold. If a position should not sit through a halt or a thin session, plan to close or reduce it in normal hours.
4. Cut size if you trade. If your normal position risks 1% with a $10 stop, a thin session can easily turn that stop into a much larger fill. Some traders halve their size or sit out. Our position size calculator shows what a wider stop does to your lot size.
5. Do not use the quiet day for “easy” trades. A flat chart can reprice quickly when US desks return or the halt ends.
6. Expect wider spreads on the chart. Charts that use the bid price can show wicks that only touched because the spread widened. Our guide on spread widening on news explains how that hits stops.

Common mistakes

• Using the summer timetable. In late November the US is on standard time. If a guide gives 18:30 GMT for the halt, it is using daylight time.
• Assuming your platform follows CME to the minute. Your broker’s schedule is the one that fills your orders.
• Treating “half day” as “safe day”. Our table shows several Black Fridays with ranges far above normal.
• Leaving pending orders on through the halt. A buy stop or sell stop can trigger at the reopen at a price well away from where you set it.

Sources

• Lincoln Park Financial: Thanksgiving 2026 futures trading hours (updated 6 November 2026; metals halt 1:30 pm CT Thursday, reopen 5:00 pm CT, early close 1:45 pm CT Friday; checked against cmegroup.com/trading-hours.html)
• CME Group holiday calendar (holiday hours are usually finalised about two weeks before the holiday)
• NYSE holidays and trading hours (closed Thursday 26 November 2026; early close 1:00 pm on Friday 27 November 2026)
• SIFMA holiday schedule (US bond market closed 26 November 2026; recommended early close 2:00 pm ET on 27 November 2026)
• ICE Benchmark Administration: LBMA Gold Price holiday calendar 2026
• Kitco, 28 November 2024: thin Thanksgiving trading
• Rigzone, 28 November 2025: CME futures outage disrupts trading
• XAUUSD Global analysis of COMEX gold futures (GC=F) daily bars via Yahoo Finance, Black Fridays 2015 to 2025
• Release dates: BEA and Department of Labor schedules, as listed in our gold events data

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

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