Thanksgiving NFL Games 2026: Schedule and History

The 2026 Thanksgiving Week Schedule

All five games belong to week 12. Kickoff times are Eastern; the two sources agree on every team, kickoff and stadium.

Records are visitor first, through Thursday of week 6 (80 games played). The two afternoon games are division games, and both pair teams with identical records today: Chicago and Detroit are 3-2, with point differentials of +23 and +16, and Philadelphia and Dallas are 2-3, at -20 and +2. The night game has the best combined record: Kansas City is 4-0 (+41), one of three unbeaten teams with Minnesota and San Francisco, and Buffalo 4-1 (+23). Five weeks of games remain before then, so these records will look different by November 26; the standings are updated every game day.

Every team playing on Thanksgiving Day comes in on four days' rest, since all six play the Sunday before. The Wednesday game is the opposite: Green Bay and the Rams both come in on 10 days. The schedule-quirks page explains how the league built that week.

The Exhibit

Why the Hosts Lose More

From 1999 to 2025 the NFL played 73 regular-season games on Thanksgiving: two a year through 2005, three a year since 2006, and two in 2020, when the third game, Baltimore at Pittsburgh, was played the following Wednesday, December 2. Detroit and Dallas hosted every year. The home teams won 33 and lost 40, a .452 share. In the other 6,828 regular-season games played at a home team's stadium over the same seasons, hosts won .564.

Most of that gap comes from the hosts themselves. Detroit went 8-19 at home on Thanksgiving, Dallas 15-12, and the third game's hosts 10-9. Detroit had the worse record of the two teams, counting each side's other games that season, in 19 of its 27 Thanksgiving games. Across all 73, the visitor had the better record 40 times and the host 30 times; in 3 the two were level.

Split that way, the holiday mostly disappears. When the host had the better record, it won 21 of 30 on Thanksgiving (.700), close to the .713 such hosts won in other games. When the visitor had the better record, the host won 10 of 40 (.250), against .412 in other games. That second gap is about two standard errors on 40 games, which is enough to notice and not enough to call a Thanksgiving effect. A host that is the weaker team has done worse than usual on the holiday, but 40 games cannot separate that from chance.

Two other things stand out in the 73 games. They score a little more: 46.0 points per game, against 44.2 across all regular-season games from 1999 to 2025. And 35 of them were division games, which this year's afternoon pair continues.

Does the Extra Rest Afterward Help?

A Thanksgiving team gives up three days of rest before the game and usually gets them back after it: most play their next game ten or more days later, against an opponent coming off a normal week. Of the 146 next games after a Thanksgiving game from 1999 to 2025, 108 came with a rest edge of three days or more.

The edge has not shown up in the results. The Thanksgiving teams went 69-76-1 in their next game. From each team's record in its season's other games, with the usual home edge, they would have been expected to win 70.3; they won 69.5. In the 108 games with a rest edge of three or more days they won 51.5 against 52.2 expected. The extra rest after the holiday has bought nothing this record can see. Across the whole schedule, the rest and scheduling page found that a big rest gap is worth about a field goal, so 108 games are a small sample against that, not a refutation of it.

For 2026, five of the six Thanksgiving Day teams get that edge next: Chicago at home to Jacksonville, Detroit at Atlanta, Philadelphia at Arizona and Buffalo at New England on Sunday, December 6, each with 10 days against 7, and Dallas at Seattle on Monday night, December 7, with 11 against 8. Kansas City does not. It plays again on Thursday, December 3, at the Rams, on 7 days against 8.

The Matchups' Thanksgiving History

• Chicago at Detroit has been a Thanksgiving game six times in the period, as often as Washington and Dallas and behind only Green Bay and Detroit's eight: Detroit won in 1999 (21-17), 2014 (34-17) and 2024 (23-20), Chicago in 2018 (23-16), 2019 (24-20) and 2021 (16-14). Three each. Detroit lost four of its last five Thanksgiving games, the latest 31-24 to Green Bay in 2025.
• Philadelphia at Dallas has been the holiday game once in the period, in 2014, when Philadelphia won 33-10. Dallas has won its last four Thanksgiving games, including 31-28 over Kansas City in 2025.
• Kansas City at Buffalo has never been a Thanksgiving game in the period. Buffalo's night game is the third game's 20th edition since 2006, and that slot has moved around: its hosts have gone 10-9.
• Black Friday has had one game a year since 2023, and the visitors have won two of three: Miami 34-13 at the Jets in 2023, Kansas City 19-17 over Las Vegas in 2024, and Chicago 24-15 at Philadelphia in 2025.

None of this history decides a 2026 game. Records five weeks from now will say much more about these matchups than the holiday does. To see how the Thanksgiving results could move the races, you can pick those games and the rest of the season in the playoff picker.

What This Page Does Not Show

• Who will win. The page gives schedules, records and history, not picks.
• Games before 1999. The game log used here starts in 1999; Thanksgiving football is much older than that.
• Why weaker hosts do worse. Travel, the short week and the crowd are all possible; 40 games cannot tell them apart from chance.
• Records as of the holiday. The 2026 records are through Thursday of week 6, five weeks early.

Method and Sources

Thanksgiving  = the fourth Thursday of November; every regular-season game on that date, 1999-2025 (73 games)
better record = winning percentage in the team's other regular-season games that season (the game itself excluded,
                ties count half)
other games   = every other regular-season game at the home team's stadium, 1999-2025 (6,828; neutral sites left out)
next game     = each Thanksgiving team's following regular-season game (146)
expected wins = log5 from the two teams' records in their other games, plus a home edge of .56 when one team is at home

The script make_thanksgiving_2026_chart.py checks the 2026 schedule against both sources, reads the records from the standings file, finds every Thanksgiving game, splits the results, computes the next-game expectation, draws the exhibit and asserts every number on this page.

Sources: the nflverse schedule and game log, pulled 9:21 am ET on October 18, 2026, and the ESPN public scoreboard for November 25-27, 2026, read the same morning. Records are through Seattle at Denver on Thursday, October 15.

Further reading

• Reading the 2026 Schedule: rest edges, short weeks and the Wednesday game
• Home-Field Advantage in the NFL Is Shrinking: how much the home stadium is worth in general
• Is Thursday Night Football Really Worse?: what short weeks do to play
• Does Rest Matter in the NFL?: rest edges across the whole schedule
• 2026 NFL Standings: updated every game day