When Is Carnaval 2027, 2028 and 2029? Rio Dates Explained

When is Carnaval? Every date from 2027 to 2035

The next Rio Carnaval runs Fri 5 February to Tue 9 February 2027, with Ash Wednesday — the official end — on Wed 10 February. Every date in the table below is calculated rather than copied, using the same rule the Catholic calendar uses, so it will still be right in ten years.

Read the table as five days with two anchors. The Sunday and Monday are the Special Group samba-school parades at the Sambadrome, which is what most people mean by “Carnaval”. The Friday through Tuesday is the street-bloco period, which is what most people actually spend their time doing.

Why the date moves, in one paragraph

Carnaval is pinned to Easter, and Easter is not a fixed date. It is the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox, calculated by an ecclesiastical formula (the computus) rather than by observation. Carnaval Tuesday — Shrove Tuesday, Mardi Gras, terça-feira de Carnaval — falls exactly 47 days before Easter Sunday, which makes it the last day before Lent begins on Ash Wednesday.

That 47-day offset is constant, so once you know Easter you know Carnaval. The practical consequence is a wide window: Carnaval Tuesday can fall as early as 3 February and as late as 9 March. Anyone who tells you Carnaval is “always in February” is wrong roughly one year in five.

Nothing about the Brazilian calendar changes this. Carnaval is not scheduled by the city, the samba schools or the tourist board — they schedule around it. Which is why you can book flights for a Carnaval nine years out with total confidence in the dates, and no confidence at all in the parade line-up.

Early February or March? It changes the trip more than you would think

An early-February Carnaval lands in the hottest, most humid part of the Rio year, and it overlaps the end of the Brazilian school holidays — so the city is full of domestic holidaymakers as well as Carnaval visitors, beaches are at their busiest, and accommodation is priced at the annual peak for two reasons at once. Expect 35 °C and up, afternoon thunderstorms, and blocos that genuinely require a hydration plan.

A March Carnaval — 2030 and 2033 in the table above — sits past the school-holiday peak and a little further into the transition towards the wetter autumn months. It is marginally less brutally hot, the domestic crowd is smaller, and the city feels slightly less saturated. It also compresses the gap to Easter, which matters if you were planning to combine the two.

Either way the weather is summer weather, not a reason to pick a year. The month guides carry the real differences: Rio in February and Rio in March cover heat, rainfall and crowds for each, and Rio weather by month has the full year side by side.

The calendar quirks worth knowing

2028 is the one to tell people about: Carnaval Tuesday falls on Tue 29 February — the leap day. It is the only leap-day Carnaval in this century's early decades, and Rio will make a great deal of it.

2030 and 2033 push Carnaval into March entirely, with 2030 starting on 1 Mar and 2033's Carnaval Tuesday landing on 1 Mar. If you have a mental model of “Carnaval is mid-February”, those two years will catch you out.

At the other end, 2027 and 2032 are early-February Carnavals, finishing before the middle of the month. An early Carnaval means your booking window opens earlier too: the accommodation that matters is gone twelve months out either way, but an early date compresses the planning runway by three or four weeks.

What is actually closed — and why Carnaval is not a public holiday

This surprises almost everyone: Carnaval Monday and Tuesday are not national public holidays in Brazil. They are ponto facultativo — optional days off for federal public servants — and Ash Wednesday is conventionally a half-day, with work resuming at lunchtime. Many states and municipalities, Rio included, declare their own holidays or shutdowns, and in practice the city stops. But the legal status explains the things that stay open and the ones that close without warning.

What this means on the ground: banks and public offices shut Monday and Tuesday and reopen Wednesday afternoon. Supermarkets, pharmacies and most restaurants in the Zona Sul stay open on reduced hours. Museums and smaller attractions close unpredictably — check each one rather than assuming. Public transport runs an altered timetable with metro extensions on parade nights. Our Rio public holidays guide covers the full closure pattern, and Carnaval transport covers the altered services.

One more date to put in the diary: the Desfile das Campeãs, the Champions’ Parade, is held on the Saturday after Carnaval — the final column in the table. The top-placed schools parade again, tickets are cheaper than the main nights, the Sambadrome is less crowded, and the city has calmed down. It is our standard recommendation for anyone who wants the parade without the full week, and it is covered in the Sambadrome guide.

Carnaval is longer than five days — the pre-Carnaval calendar

The official five days are the smallest useful definition. Street blocos in Rio begin weeks earlier: the big pre-Carnaval weekends start in January, build through the two weekends before the official period, and continue into the weekend after Ash Wednesday. For some visitors that is the better trip — the same blocos, the same bands, a fraction of the crowd and a third of the room rate.

If your dates are flexible and your priority is street parties rather than the Sambadrome, look at the weekend immediately before the official Friday. Our pre-Carnaval guide explains how that calendar works, and the bloco directory lets you filter by day and zone once the programme is published.

The thing not to do is book the official five days and assume the street programme is fixed. Bloco routes and times are authorised late — often only weeks before — and they change. Book the dates; keep the daily plan loose.

When to book, given a date you already know

Because the dates are knowable years in advance and the supply is not, Carnaval is the one trip in Rio where booking early is not optional. Accommodation in Copacabana, Ipanema and Botafogo for the official five nights prices at a multiple of its normal rate and the better-value places go roughly nine to twelve months out. Minimum-stay requirements of four or five nights are standard, and so are non-refundable prepayments.

Sambadrome tickets follow a different clock. They go on sale in stages, through official channels and authorised resellers, generally from the second half of the preceding year, with the best sectors and the boxes moving first. Flights into GIG are the least urgent of the three, but the domestic connections from São Paulo and the Northeast sell out hard.

The sequence we recommend is: fix the dates from the table, book a cancellable room immediately, then decide on parade tickets, then flights. The where to stay for Carnaval guide covers the neighbourhood trade-offs, and the Carnaval budget guide covers what the five days actually cost.