The World Welcomes 2026: From Christmas Island to the Bering Strait
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The first country to celebrate the New Year is Kiribati, an island nation in the central Pacific Ocean. Consisting of 33 islands in total, Kiribati has only 20 of them inhabited over its total territory recorded at 2,900 kilometers.
Shortly after Kiribati rings in the New Year, other cities and countries of New Zealand’s Chatham Islands, Russia’s Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, and Australia’s Sydney follow suit as some of the first countries to celebrate the New Year.
Conversely, the U.S. is among the last countries to celebrate the new year by comparing Kiribati’s local time.
The name Christmas Island dates back to 25 December 1777, when it was discovered by Captain James Cook.
Sydney, which has long styled itself as the “world capital of New Year’s Eve,” will follow four hours after Kirbati, when champagne corks are popped and fireworks light up the sky.
Below is the snapshot of the first and last countries to celebrate the arrival of the new year, with all time zones completed in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
This sequencing is shaped by the International Date Line, which runs in a zig-zag pattern from north to south and only partially follows the 180th meridian, the antipode of Greenwich. Since 1995, the line has made a pronounced eastward deviation, cutting across two time zones and encompassing, among others, the Kiribati archipelago, Samoa and Tonga. From Kirbati, travelling roughly 2,500 kilometres to the south-west, one reaches the islands of American Samoa, which will be the last places in the world to celebrate the arrival of the New Year.
Russia holds the distinction of experiencing the most New Year’s celebrations. Stretching across 11 time zones, the country spans from the Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad to the Chukotka Peninsula, which faces Alaska across the Bering Strait. As the International Date Line passes through the middle of the strait, Russia’s Chukotka and the US state of Alaska, despite being separated by only a few kilometres of sea, mark the New Year a full 24 hours apart.
