Overview
- Kiritimati in Kiribati, operating on UTC+14, was confirmed as the first inhabited place to enter 2026.
- New Zealand followed with Auckland’s Sky Tower fireworks, and Sydney staged a major harbor display that included a minute of silence for the recent Bondi Beach attack.
- The International Date Line is a convention from 1884 with an irregular path that creates the west‑to‑east sequence of New Year arrivals.
- Kiribati’s 1994 time shift placed its eastern islands on the same calendar day, and Samoa’s 2011 move aligned it with Australia and New Zealand, reshaping who celebrates earliest and latest.
- The final crossings to 2026 will occur at the uninhabited U.S. islands of Howland and Baker, with American Samoa among the last inhabited territories to celebrate, as the global turnover spans roughly 26 hours.