U.S. government shutdown history

Detailed accounts

• The 2025 government shutdown: the 43-day lapse—timeline, furloughs, SNAP, air travel, and how it ended.
• The 2026 shutdowns: the early-February multi-department lapse and the 76-day DHS shutdown.

Why shutdown day counts sometimes disagree

News coverage often counts every calendar date touched by a shutdown. Congressional Research Service reports commonly count complete days during which funding was unavailable. That is why the 2025 lapse may be called a 43-day shutdown even though CRS describes a 42-day period from October 1 through November 11, with funding restored on November 12.

The January 2018 lapse lasted two full days, although it touched three calendar dates. The February 9, 2018 lapse lasted only hours. The DHS entry retains the House historian’s published 76-day count; it is labeled separately from the full-day counts.

Government-wide vs. departmental records

The October–November 2025 lapse was the longest modern government-wide shutdown. It began October 1, 2025, and ended when P.L. 119-37 was signed on November 12. The Congressional Budget Office estimated during the lapse that a six-week shutdown would permanently reduce real economic output by about $11 billion, while much of the delayed activity would later be recovered.

Duration records change if the question is “longest lapse for one department.” The House historian lists a 76-day DHS shutdown from February 14 through April 30, 2026, after the other 11 FY2026 bills had already been enacted. The earlier January 31–February 3, 2026 partial shutdown affected multiple departments, including DHS. P.L. 119-75 then enacted five annual bills and extended DHS funding through February 13. The January lapse should not be described as DHS-only. See partial vs. full shutdown.

Correction, October 2, 2026: We corrected the January 2018 full-day count, labeled the February 2018 lapse as shorter than a day, and corrected the January 2026 scope to include multiple departments. Period labels now consistently include the restoration date.

What shutdowns cost the economy

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated the cost of the two longest government-wide or near-government-wide lapses:

Most delayed activity is recovered once furloughed employees receive back pay and agencies resume spending. The permanent loss reflects services never delivered and private activity that does not return—for example, canceled trips, delayed permits and loans, and contractor hours that are not repaid. These estimates exclude harder-to-measure effects such as backlogs and staff attrition.

Every funding gap since 1976

The modern budget process took effect for fiscal year 1977. Since then the House historian has recorded 23 gaps in appropriations. Only 13 of them led agencies to follow formal shutdown procedures—furloughing employees and stopping work that is not excepted. The other gaps were short, fell over weekends, or happened before agencies were told that the Antideficiency Act required them to stop work.

Download this table as CSV · Free to reuse with a link to this page.

Four patterns stand out:

• Early gaps rarely closed anything. All 6 gaps before 1980 ran without shutdown procedures. Agencies generally kept working and spending, expecting Congress to fund them retroactively.
• The 1980–1981 Civiletti opinions changed the rules. Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti concluded that the Antideficiency Act bars agencies from obligating funds during a lapse except for narrow purposes such as protecting life and property. Those opinions are the basis of today’s excepted-versus-furloughed distinction and of every agency’s contingency plan.
• Most lapses in the 1980s lasted three days or less. Several ended over a weekend and were resolved before most employees missed a workday.
• Lapses have grown longer. The three longest gaps—76 days (DHS, 2026), 43 days (2025), and 34 days (2018–2019)—have all happened since 2018.

The House table does not include the overnight February 9, 2018 lapse, which ended within hours. CRS counts full days slightly differently for some lapses; see “Why shutdown day counts sometimes disagree” above.

Primary sources

• House historian: funding gaps and shutdowns (all gaps since FY1977)
• CRS: Federal Funding Gaps — full-day counting
• P.L. 119-75: February 3, 2026 appropriations and DHS extension
• Congressional Research Service: Past Government Shutdowns
• CRS: Lapses in DHS Appropriations
• CRS: Continuing Appropriations for FY2026
• CBO: Economic effects of the 2025 shutdown
• CBO: Effects of the partial shutdown ending in January 2019