When Is the Next Friday the 13th? Friday the 13th Calculator

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• 2026: three Friday the 13ths, the most a year can have. February 13 and March 13 are only four weeks apart.
• 2028: just one, October 13, after a 14-month wait from August 13, 2027, the longest gap there can be.
• 1972: one, October 13, the day Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashed in the Andes.
• 1940: two, September 13 and December 13. On Friday, September 13, 1940, German bombs hit Buckingham Palace while the King and Queen were inside.

When is the next Friday the 13th?

2026 has three Friday the 13ths: February 13, March 13 and November 13. The first one after 2026 is Friday, August 13, 2027. These are the next twelve:

• Friday, November 13, 2026
• Friday, August 13, 2027
• Friday, October 13, 2028
• Friday, April 13, 2029
• Friday, July 13, 2029
• Friday, September 13, 2030
• Friday, December 13, 2030
• Friday, June 13, 2031
• Friday, February 13, 2032
• Friday, August 13, 2032
• Friday, May 13, 2033
• Friday, January 13, 2034

How many Friday the 13ths are in a year?

Every year has at least one Friday the 13th and at most three. A month has one exactly when it starts on a Sunday, so which months a year gets depends only on the weekday of January 1 and whether it is a leap year. That makes fourteen kinds of year:

Over the Gregorian calendar's 400-year cycle, 171 years have one Friday the 13th, 170 have two and 59 have three. Three always means February, March and November in a common year that starts on a Thursday, or January, April and July in a leap year that starts on a Sunday.

The longest and shortest waits

The longest gap between two Friday the 13ths is 14 months, from a July or August to the September or October of the next year. The next one runs from August 13, 2027 to October 13, 2028. The shortest is four weeks: in a common year that starts on a Thursday, February has exactly 28 days, so February 13 and March 13 fall on the same weekday. That happened in 2015 and 2026 and comes next in 2037.

The 13th is a Friday more often than any other day

The Gregorian calendar repeats every 400 years, which is exactly 146,097 days or 20,871 weeks, so the same 4,800 thirteenths fall on the same weekdays in every cycle. They are not spread evenly: 688 are Fridays, 687 each are Sundays and Wednesdays, 685 each are Mondays and Tuesdays, and 684 each are Thursdays and Saturdays. So the 13th of a month is slightly more likely to be a Friday than any other day of the week.

Why is Friday the 13th unlucky?

Thirteen and Friday were each thought unlucky long before anyone put them together. Thirteen sat down at the Last Supper, and Friday was the day of the Crucifixion. The combined superstition is surprisingly recent: the earliest clear mention found is in an 1869 biography of the composer Gioachino Rossini, who thought both unlucky and died on Friday, November 13, 1868. Thomas W. Lawson's 1907 novel Friday, the Thirteenth, about a stockbroker who uses the superstition to crash the market, helped spread it.

A popular story traces it to the arrest of the Knights Templar on Friday, October 13, 1307, but that link was only made in the 20th century. The fear has a name, paraskevidekatriaphobia, and it is not universal: in Spain, Greece and much of Latin America the unlucky day is Tuesday the 13th, and in Italy it is Friday the 17th. Apollo 13's oxygen tank exploded on April 13, 1970, which was a Monday.

How it works, and dates before 1583

The calculator checks the 13th of each month in the year you enter and keeps the ones that fall on a Friday, using the Gregorian calendar. It covers 1583 to 9999. Before October 1582 dates were written in the Julian calendar, where the same day has a different date: the Templar arrest was Friday the 13th in the Julian calendar, but in Gregorian dates that day was October 21. To check the weekday of an older date in either calendar, use the day of the week calculator.

Related tools

To find the weekday of any date, use the day of the week calculator. To count forward to a date, use the days from today calculator. To see whether a year is a leap year, and so which kind of year it is, use the leap year calculator. To find a date's day number in the year, use the day of the year calculator.

Unlucky days on a timeline

Dates like these are easier to remember once you see them in order. To lay out the events of any period at their true distance apart, Preceden can put them on a timeline.