Met Museum Thanksgiving Hours in NYC: Closed Two Days in a Row

The reason to lay it out is simple. A trip planned around "the Met is closed on Thanksgiving" misses half the problem, because the day before is already a closing day. Someone who plans the Wednesday around the museum finds it shut, and finds it shut again the next day.

The museum keeps a list of dated closures next to its weekly hours. For this season it has four: November 26, December 25, January 1, and May 3, 2027 for the Costume Institute Gala. Nothing on that list touches November 23, 24, 27, 28 or 29, so those days run on the normal weekly pattern. The Cloisters record carries the same Thanksgiving exception, and its own winter hours, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., apply to every open day in the table.

Because two separate rules land on adjacent days, and they will do so every year. The museum closes on Wednesdays, at both buildings, all year. Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday of November under federal law, and the Wednesday always comes first. In 2026 the fourth Thursday is November 26, so the closed pair is the 25th and the 26th. In 2027 it will be the 24th and the 25th, if the museum keeps both rules.

That sentence is the museum's whole holiday policy for the Fifth Avenue building. Note what is not in it: Black Friday, the day before Thanksgiving and the Sunday after. They are not holidays at the Met, and there is no reduced schedule for them in the record we read. Our guide to the museum's most common questions has the general closing rules for the rest of the year.

Friday, November 27 and Saturday, November 28 are the museum's two late evenings, and Thanksgiving week does not change that. Fifth Avenue is open from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. both days, four hours longer than on the other weekdays. Sunday, November 29 goes back to 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

We will not tell you how busy it is. The museum publishes nothing about its busiest or quietest hours, and pages that name the best time to visit are guessing. What the schedule does support is narrower: if you arrive after 5 p.m. on Friday or Saturday you are in the building for the evening hours, and the museum lets you re-enter on the same ticket, so a walk in the park between two rounds works. The Cloisters has no late evening. It closes at 4:30 p.m. on both days, and one ticket covers both buildings on the same date, so a combined day starts uptown at 10 a.m. and finishes on Fifth Avenue. More on that trip in our Cloisters guide.

Families sometimes ask whether the holiday weekend changes anything for children. Admission rules do not move: children 12 and under are free. The routes that work with them are on our page about the Met with kids.

The parade matters to a museum visitor mostly because of what happens the day before it. Macy's inflates the big balloons on Wednesday, November 25 on the Upper West Side, around the American Museum of Natural History. We could not open Macy's own parade page, which refuses automated requests, so the details below come from two local sources and from last year's pattern. They are a pattern, not an announcement.

A viewing guide for this year puts the inflation at the Natural History Museum on Wednesday and the parade on Thursday, November 26 at 8:30 a.m., and says Macy's had not yet released the hours or the route. It also calls this the 100th parade, a number we could not check. For the route, the guide says only that it "recently followed a 2.5-mile route" from 77th Street and Central Park West to Herald Square.

The best-documented year is 2025. The West Side Rag reported that the inflation ran from 1 to 6 p.m. on the blocks of West 77th to 81st Street between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West, with entry through a checkpoint at West 72nd Street and Columbus. It also reported that the 79th Street Transverse, the road that crosses the park between the Natural History Museum and Fifth Avenue, closed at 2 a.m. on Wednesday and reopened at noon on Thursday. The city's notice for 2026 was not online when we looked on November 5: the 2026 file at the address of last year's returned a 404.

Each museum sets its own holiday calendar, and the Met's closing says nothing about its neighbors. The one we checked is the Guggenheim, a few blocks north on Fifth Avenue: a search summary of its Plan Your Visit page lists November 26 as closed. The page itself loaded only a cookie notice for our tool, so confirm on the museum's site before you go. For the others, the list of New York museums is a starting point, and every hour on it should be read on the museum's own page that morning.

Thursday itself belongs to the parade in the morning and to the park afterward. The Met being closed, anyone who has only that day in New York can walk Central Park, which is open to everyone, with the museums of Fifth Avenue along its edge. We list walks in our Central Park walking tours section; none of them depends on the museum being open. Our earlier piece on the November marathon and the Met covers sunset times, which fall before 5 p.m. all this month.

The museum has not said yet. There was no 2026 holiday press release in its content system on November 5, 2026; the two most recent releases there are about unrelated exhibitions. What there is, is a pattern. The Met's Christmas Tree and Neapolitan Baroque Crèche opened on November 21, 2023, on November 26, 2024 and on November 25, 2025, according to the holiday releases of those years. All three dates are the Tuesday of Thanksgiving week. The display stands in the Medieval Sculpture Hall, gallery 305, and closed on January 7, 2024, January 6, 2025 and January 6, 2026.

If the pattern holds, the tree opens on Tuesday, November 24, a normal open day from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. That is a guess built on three years, and we label it as one. The museum usually announces the date in the days around Thanksgiving week. When it does, the museum's release is the source to trust, not this page.

The museum's hours, closures and Cloisters schedule come from the operating schedule records in its own content system, the one its published pages are built from, last edited on November 2, 2026, and read on November 5. The tree dates come from its holiday press releases of November 21, 2023, November 25, 2024 and November 25, 2025, read the same day. The fourth-Thursday rule for Thanksgiving is federal law.

The parade and inflation details are weaker, and we say so. They come from a viewing guide for 2026 and from the West Side Rag's 2025 coverage, not from Macy's, whose site returned an access error, and not from the city, whose 2026 notice we could not find. The Guggenheim closure comes from a search summary of its page. Check all three before you rely on them. We did not publish how crowded the museum will be, because the museum does not publish it, and we did not publish school-holiday dates, which we could not confirm. This site is independent and not affiliated with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We earn a commission on the tours above, and on nothing the museum sells.