Skip to content
Macro Bullseye

How the calendar is built

Last updated Sunday, October 4, 2026

Where the dates come from

Every date on the calendar comes from the publisher. For government agencies we read their official release calendars directly: the BLS and BEA calendar feeds, the Census Bureau’s economic indicator calendar, the Federal Reserve Board’s event calendar, TreasuryDirect’s auction announcements and Treasury’s tentative auction schedule, and the EIA’s weekly report schedules. A script checks these sources every day and rebuilds the calendar when anything changes.

Weekly jobless claims follow the Labor Department’s standing schedule: Thursdays at 8:30 AM ET, moved to Wednesday when Thursday is a federal holiday.

Options expiration follows the standard rule: the third Friday of each month, or the trading day before when the market is closed that Friday. Expirations in March, June, September and December, when index futures expire too, are marked as triple witching.

What “High impact” means

The releases that most often move stock prices are drawn in blue: Fed rate decisions and the Chair’s press conference, CPI, the jobs report, PCE inflation, the advance GDP estimate, retail sales and the ISM surveys. Options expiration days get their own color.

Dates marked “Est.”

Some private publishers don’t offer a machine-readable schedule. For those, we use dates confirmed on the publisher’s own site where we have them. Where we don’t, we show the date their usual pattern points to (for example, the Conference Board’s consumer confidence index comes out on the last Tuesday of the month) and mark it “Est.” until it’s confirmed. Treasury auctions are marked the same way until Treasury formally announces them, usually a few days ahead.

Times

All times are US Eastern time, the time zone the agencies use, and they account for daylight saving time. You can switch the calendar to your own time zone; that setting stays in your browser.

Sources on the current calendar

The calendar now covers Oct 1 to Dec 31, 2026. It extends as agencies publish their schedules for the coming year.

Mistakes

Agencies sometimes move a release, most often around holidays or a government shutdown. When that happens the calendar follows the agency’s updated schedule on the next daily check.