How does United States mark War dead and veterans?
Memorial Day
- Local date
- May 31, 2027
- When is it?
- The last Monday in May.
The United States is the only one of these seven countries that separates mourning the dead from thanking the living. Memorial Day falls on the last Monday in May, written into the list of legal public holidays at 5 U.S.C. § 6103; federal offices and most state governments close. It was a fixed 30 May until the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968 moved it, along with several others, onto a Monday — which also turned it into the long weekend that opens the American summer. That is an argument the country has never settled: does a three-day weekend get more people to the cemetery, or does it turn a day of mourning into barbecues and mattress sales? The national ceremony is at Arlington National Cemetery, with a minute of silence at 11 a.m.
Veterans Day
- Local date
- November 11, 2026
Veterans Day is for the living. It is fixed to 11 November — the hour the First World War guns stopped in 1918, at eleven in the morning — and was called Armistice Day until 1954, when the object of the day widened from one war's ceasefire to everyone who has served. Its date has a history of its own: the 1968 Monday holiday law moved it to the fourth Monday in October, but the meaning of this day is tied to that particular hour, states objected, and Public Law 94-97 put it back on 11 November in 1975. Americans mix the two days up constantly, and veterans' organisations spend every November explaining the difference: you thank a living veteran for their service today; you stand in silence for the dead in May.
What is this topic?
The United States splits the dead from the survivors into two separate federal holidays: Memorial Day in May for those killed, Veterans Day on 11 November for those who came home. The other six countries mostly set aside a single day, and mostly do not give it off — Taiwan lets the defence ministry decide who gets the day, Japan's 15 August rests on a cabinet decision rather than any statute, and Indonesia's Heroes' Day is filed by presidential decree under "national days that are not holidays".
Sources and dates
Dates follow local time zones, calendars, and official notices. Check the source when a date is estimated or locally variable.