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When is the next solar eclipse?
The next total, annular and partial solar eclipses, and why the question almost always means "from where I am" — which has a very different answer.
The next total solar eclipse anywhere on Earth is on 2 August 2027, with 6m 23s of totality at the point of greatest eclipse. The next annular one is on 6 February 2027.
That is the answer to the question as asked, and it is almost never the answer somebody wants. An eclipse is total along a track a couple of hundred kilometres wide and thousands long; the rest of the hemisphere sees a partial eclipse or nothing at all. "When is the next eclipse" nearly always means "when will something happen in my sky", and those two dates can be decades apart.
The question with a place in it
Any given spot on Earth sees a partial eclipse of some depth every couple of years, and a total one about once every 375 years on average. That average hides an enormous variance: the tracks are not distributed politely, so some places get two inside a decade and others go a millennium without one.
The right way to ask is with a location. Every city page on this site lists every eclipse that reaches it over the next fifty years, with how much of the Sun each one covers, and a page for each of the ones worth reading about.
What counts as "the next one"
Three different events all get called a solar eclipse, and a list that mixes them without saying which is which is misleading:
| Kind | What you see | How often, worldwide |
|---|---|---|
| Total | The Sun disappears; the corona is visible | ~66 per century |
| Annular | A ring of Sun remains around the Moon | ~74 per century |
| Partial | A bite out of the Sun, never more | ~84 per century |
Only the first is worth rearranging a life around. An annular eclipse is a beautiful and strange thing to watch through a filter, but it never gets dark and the Sun is never safe to look at. A partial eclipse at 90% is, to the unaided eye, an ordinary afternoon.
Why the date on this site may differ by a few seconds
Every instant here is computed rather than looked up, from analytic ephemeris series for the Sun and Moon. Compared against the published canon the dates agree exactly and the times agree to within a second or two — a difference that is not error on either side but the unavoidable uncertainty in how fast the Earth will be turning on the day. That is worth a page of its own: see why two sources give different times.
Related
Updated 25 August 2026. The dates and durations on this page are recomputed with every weekly rebuild.