NFL Countdown

What this page counts down to

The clock at the top of this page tracks the next NFL kickoff anywhere in the league — not a fixed date, and not one team’s game. Whenever a fixture finishes, the countdown moves to whatever is scheduled next, so during the season it is usually measuring hours and during the summer it is measuring months. Below it, every team in both conferences has a card showing its own next opponent and date, and each card links through to a full-screen countdown for that game that you can share or put on a screen.

On game days the page also shows a halftime countdown, which exists for a specific reason: halftime is roughly thirteen minutes and everyone leaves the room. It is a timer for getting back before the second half starts.

How an NFL season is structured

The league year has a shape that repeats, which is what makes a countdown useful in the first place. Training camps open in late July, followed by three weeks of preseason games in August that do not count in the standings. Week 1 kicks off on the Thursday after Labor Day with the reigning champion at home.

The regular season runs eighteen weeks in which each team plays seventeen games and takes one bye. Most are on Sunday afternoon in two windows, with a national game Sunday night, one on Thursday and one on Monday. Thanksgiving carries three. A handful of fixtures each year are played abroad, which is why some kickoffs land in the morning for viewers in the United States. The final week is scheduled entirely as divisional matchups, played simultaneously, so no team can rest while a rival’s result is still unknown.

The postseason

Fourteen teams reach the playoffs — seven from each conference: four division winners and three wild cards. Only the top seed in each conference gets a bye. From there it is single elimination: Wild Card weekend, the Divisional round, the two Conference Championship games, and then the Super Bowl, played two Sundays after the conference championships at a neutral site chosen years in advance. The Pro Bowl Games fill the week in between.

Offseason milestones worth a countdown

The gap between the Super Bowl and Week 1 is about seven months, and it has its own calendar. The Scouting Combine runs in Indianapolis in late February. The new league year and free agency open in mid-March. The Draft is three days in late April. The schedule release lands in May — the one day of the offseason when every fixture on this page changes at once. Then camps open again in late July and the cycle restarts.

Where the times come from

Kickoff times on this page come from published league schedule data, refreshed rather than typed in by hand, and are converted to your device’s local time zone. Some games are marked as time-to-be-announced, which is not an error on our end — the league deliberately leaves late-season windows open so it can move a meaningful game into prime time. Those fixtures show a date without a time until the slot is confirmed. Our data sources page explains the refresh cadence and what happens when the feed is unavailable.

Frequently asked questions