Is Costco Gas Open on Holidays? A Full Holiday Hours Schedule

Costco closes its US fuel stations on exactly seven days a year, and opens them on every other one. The seven are New Year’s Day, Easter Sunday, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day — the same list Costco publishes as its warehouse holiday closures. There is no separate fuel-station calendar. When the warehouse is dark, the canopy is dark with it, along with the pharmacy, the optical counter and the tire bay.

That single sentence answers most of the question, but it hides the part that actually catches people out. On every other day of the year the pumps are the most generous thing on the property — across the 570 US stations in today’s feed, every one of them opens before the warehouse and closes after it, a median of 5½ hours of extra trading a day. So the pumps behave like a separate business right up until the moment they don’t.

The seven days the pumps do not open

Costco is unusual in this. Most fuel retailers treat holidays as peak trading; a supermarket forecourt or a highway travel plaza will happily sell you a tank on Thanksgiving morning. Costco treats the fuel station as part of the warehouse, so it inherits the warehouse’s day off. The next occurrence of each closure, and the one after, computed from the rules rather than typed in:

Two of those move around the calendar in ways worth internalising. Easter is set by the computus rather than a fixed date, which is why it is the only one of the seven that can land in either March or April — and being always a Sunday, it is also the closure most likely to be mistaken for “Costco is shut because it’s Sunday.” It isn’t; Costco trades every other Sunday of the year.

Independence Day is the other one, and it closes on the calendar date rather than the federal observed day. In 2026 the Fourth landed on a Saturday: Costco shut on the Fourth itself and reopened on Sunday the 5th, while federal offices and banks took Friday the 3rd. Plan around the federal calendar and you will find the gate down on the wrong day. The next one is Sunday, July 4, 2027.

The timing is deliberately awkward for drivers. AAA counted 72.2 million Americans travelling over the July 4th week, 61.4 million of them by road — 85 percent of the total — against a national average of $3.84 a gallon. On the single heaviest driving weekend of the year, the cheapest canopy in most towns is the one that isn’t open.

Every other day, the pumps outlast the warehouse

This is the rule that answers the “is Costco gas open when Costco is closed?” version of the question, and the answer is genuinely both. On an ordinary day, yes, by hours. On one of the seven, no, not for a minute.

The size of that everyday gap is worth seeing. Of the 570 US stations publishing both sets of weekday hours, 570 open the pumps before the warehouse doors and 570 keep them open after the doors shut — the same station on both counts, every time, with no exceptions in either direction. The modal opening is 6 AM at 495 sites and the modal close is 10 PM at 566 — a weekday window of 16 hours, against a warehouse day of roughly ten and a half. 75 stations start even earlier than 6 AM; the earliest we track is Costco La Mesa, where the pumps are live at 4:30 AM.

One thing this table does not capture, and which people reasonably assume it should: Costco added earlier shopping hours for Executive members at many warehouses from mid-2025. That is a warehouse-floor privilege. The fuel station has never had tiers — the pumps have always been the early door, and they open for every membership level at the same minute.

On the holidays it does open, the weekday is what matters

Costco works straight through Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Presidents’ Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Cinco de Mayo, Mother’s and Father’s Day, Juneteenth, Halloween, Columbus Day, Veterans Day, Black Friday, Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. On all of them the pumps run their normal schedule for that day of the week, which means the useful question is not “what are the holiday hours?” but “what day does it land on this year?”

That distinction is worth real time. Sunday is the short day across the whole US estate — every one of the 570 stations we can compare runs a shorter Sunday than a weekday, by a median of 2½ hours. Saturday sits in between. A Monday-dated holiday such as Presidents’ Day gets the full 16 hours; the same holiday on a Sunday gets the shortest day Costco sells.

Two footnotes on that list. Good Friday and Juneteenth are days many warehouses drop to a weekend-style early close even though they trade normally in every other respect, so the pumps can shut earlier than the weekday row suggests. And Black Friday is the reverse trap: Costco does not open early for it, so the queue that forms at 6 AM is competing for the same window as any other Friday.

The eves, and the countries that keep their own calendar

Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve are the days Costco trades but not on its usual clock, and the pumps get cut alongside the doors without matching them — which is exactly how people get caught out. Costco publishes eve-day hours per warehouse rather than nationally; the one place it writes them into a single table is the Canadian Business Centre holiday calendar, which cuts both eves to 7 AM – 5 PM, and Costco Mexico’s festive schedule ran its gasolineras 6:00 to 18:00 on both 24 and 31 December — a pump day that normally ends near 10 PM, finishing at six. Go in the morning: a closure the next day pushes two days of demand into one shortened one, which is the same thing that makes the Wednesday before Thanksgiving the worst queue of the year.

Outside the US the seven do not apply. Canada keeps a longer list — Family Day, Victoria Day, Canada Day and an October Thanksgiving among them, with Quebec open on several of the days the other provinces close. Costco’s UK forecourts shut on Easter Sunday, Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s Day even though the Sunday Trading Act 1994 exempts petrol filling stations from the very closures it forces on the warehouse behind them — the clearest proof anywhere that these pumps close by policy, not by law. Australia follows state trading law warehouse by warehouse, and Mexico closes for 1 January. Wherever you are, Costco’s own warehouse finder shows any adjusted holiday hours and closures with the gas station on its own line — and what it cannot tell you, whether the trip is worth making at all, is on today’s price board, rebuilt every morning.