NFL Bye Weeks Explained: How to Plan Your Fall Around Your Teams' Weekends Off
Every NFL team gets one weekend off during the regular season. If you only follow one team, the bye is a minor annoyance, a Sunday when you watch someone else. If you follow a couple of NFL teams and a couple of college teams like I do, byes start to shape your whole fall. They're the weekends you can actually say yes to things.
Here's how byes work, what the 2026 calendar looks like, and how I'd use them.
What a bye week is
The NFL regular season is 18 weeks long, and each team plays 17 games. That leaves one week where your team doesn't play at all. That's the bye. It isn't a postponed game, and nothing gets made up later. Your team just doesn't play that week.
A few things are worth knowing:
- Byes are set when the schedule comes out in the spring. In 2026 the schedule was released on May 14.
- Byes don't move when games are flexed. Flexible scheduling moves a game to a different time slot within its week (Sunday afternoon to Sunday night, for example). It doesn't move games between weeks.
- Byes fall in a middle stretch, not at the ends. In 2026, byes run from Week 5 through Week 14, according to the league's schedule announcement.
The 2026 bye calendar
NFL.com published every team's 2026 bye at schedule release. With the Sunday date of each week added (Week 1's Sunday was Sept. 13), it looks like this:
| Week (Sunday) | Teams on bye |
|---|---|
| Week 5 (Oct. 11) | Panthers, Chiefs |
| Week 6 (Oct. 18) | Bengals, Lions, Dolphins, Vikings |
| Week 7 (Oct. 25) | Bills, Jaguars, Chargers, Commanders |
| Week 8 (Nov. 1) | Texans, Saints, Giants, 49ers |
| Week 9 (Nov. 8) | Steelers, Titans |
| Week 10 (Nov. 15) | Bears, Broncos, Eagles, Buccaneers |
| Week 11 (Nov. 22) | Falcons, Browns, Packers, Rams, Patriots, Seahawks |
| Week 12 (Thanksgiving week) | No byes |
| Week 13 (Dec. 6) | Ravens, Colts, Raiders, Jets |
| Week 14 (Dec. 13) | Cardinals, Cowboys |
| Weeks 15–18 | No byes |
A few patterns stand out.
Week 11 is the heavy one. Six teams are off, the most of any week. NFL.com flagged it as the one real problem week for fantasy players.
Thanksgiving week has no byes. All 32 teams play in Week 12. That week includes the first Thanksgiving Eve game (Packers at Rams on Wednesday, Nov. 25), the Thursday tripleheader and the Black Friday game. The Packers and Rams both have their bye in Week 11 to set up that Wednesday game.
After Week 14, nobody gets a break. From mid-December on, every team plays every week, including the Week 16 Christmas games and the Week 17 and Week 18 Saturday games. If you have a December trip to plan, you won't find an NFL bye to hide it in.
Some teams have byes right after a trip abroad. Washington and Jacksonville both played in London earlier in the season and had Week 7 byes. That's not a rule, though. Pittsburgh played in Paris in Week 7 and has its bye in Week 9. Check your own team's schedule on our team pages rather than assuming.
Don't forget the college side
College teams have open dates too. Conferences schedule them, and they vary a lot from team to team. The rebuilt Pac-12's 2026 schedule shows how they spread out. Weeks 1–5 had no byes for any member, and pairs of teams were off in Weeks 6, 7, 8 and 10.
That matters if you follow both levels, because an NFL bye on Sunday does nothing for you if your college team plays Saturday night. A truly free weekend is one where all your teams are off, or play at times that don't clash with your plans. Those weekends are rarer than you'd think.
How I'd plan a fall around byes
Here's the method. It works whether you follow two teams or six.
1. Put every team's off weeks on one calendar
List the NFL bye and the college open dates for every team you follow, all in one place. Mixing an NFL Sunday-based week with a college Saturday is where people slip, so write down actual dates, not week numbers.
2. Look for overlaps
As a hypothetical, say your household follows the Bears and the Broncos. Both are off in Week 10 (Nov. 15). If your college team also has a Nov. 14 open date, that's your weekend for a wedding, a trip or a long-delayed family visit. If you follow the Chiefs and the Bills instead, their byes come in different weeks (Week 5 and Week 7). You get two partly free Sundays and no fully free one.
3. Use your team's bye to see a game in person
A bye is also a good time to see a game your team isn't in. A college game on the Saturday of your NFL team's bye weekend won't cost you anything on Sunday.
4. Handle fantasy football early
If you play fantasy, check your roster against the bye weeks before the season starts, not on the Thursday of a bye week. In 2026 the crunch is Week 11, with six teams off: Atlanta, Cleveland, Green Bay, the Rams, New England and Seattle. If your starters are bunched on those teams, you'll want to know in September, while the waiver wire still has options. Watch out for city mix-ups, too. The Rams are off in Week 11, but the Chargers' bye was back in Week 7.
5. Don't plan December around byes
Since Weeks 15–18 have no byes, late-season trips are a question of kickoff times, not off weeks. Those are exactly the weeks when the NFL's flexible scheduling can move a Sunday afternoon game into primetime, or the reverse. The NFL says Sunday night flex decisions in Weeks 14–17 are generally made at least six days ahead, and Week 18's schedule isn't set until after Week 17. Keep December plans flexible. (January works the same way: here's how the NFL playoff schedule is set.)
A bye-week checklist
- Write down every team's bye or open date as a calendar date.
- Circle the weekends where every team you care about is off.
- Mark Thanksgiving week and Weeks 15–18 as "everyone plays."
- Recheck late-season kickoff times regularly, since that's when flex happens.
- If you print your schedule, reprint it after big changes. A PDF is a snapshot (more in our PDF and calendar guide).
On One Page Season, when you combine your teams on one page, a bye shows up as a gap: no game that week for that team. With your NFL and college teams on the same chronological list, the free weekends stand out without any cross-referencing. Byes are one of the few parts of the football calendar that never change, so it's worth planning around them early.
Sources
- NFL.com, "2026 NFL schedule release: Every team's bye week"
- NFL Football Operations, "2026 NFL Schedule Announced"
- NFL.com, 2026 Flexible Scheduling Procedures
- NFL.com, 2026 Week 16 schedule (Week 16–18 designated games)
- Pac-12 Conference, 2026 football broadcast schedule (bye weeks by week)
Times, TV assignments and prices can change; check the linked sources and providers before you plan or pay. Commentary is our own. Send a correction if you spot an error.