October 2026 calendar printable, with five Thursdays and a Saturday Halloween

The generator below is already on October 2026. Change anything you like, then print it or download a Letter or A4 PDF. The numbers in the text are computed from the same engine that draws the grid, so they cannot drift away from what you are looking at.

The same month, two different sheet heights

Here is the fact worth knowing before you print. October 2026 has 31 days and begins on a Thursday. With a Sunday-start week that occupies 5 rows. With a Monday start it is also 5. With a Saturday start it becomes 6 — the 1st slides into a later column, the 31st spills past the thirty-fifth cell, and the grid grows a whole extra row.

Six rows instead of five is not a cosmetic difference. The sheet height does not change, so every row loses about a sixth of its depth: roughly 1.7 inches down to about 1.4 on portrait Letter. That is the difference between three comfortable lines of handwriting in a day box and two. If you use a Saturday-start week and want the taller boxes back, either switch to landscape or accept the shorter rows knowingly — which is the whole point of printing the number rather than letting you discover it at the printer.

Five Thursdays, five Fridays, five Saturdays

A 31-day month is four whole weeks plus three days, so exactly three weekdays occur five times and the other four occur four times. Because October 2026 starts on a Thursday and ends on a Saturday, the three are Thursday, Friday and Saturday — 5 of each. That gives 5 Saturdays against 4 Sundays, which is why the month has 9 weekend days and only 22 weekdays despite being one of the long months. Anyone printing this as a shift rota or a payroll sheet wants that number before they start, not after.

The month runs across ISO weeks 40 to 44 of 2026. Week 40 is shared with the end of September and week 44 runs into November, which is normal: ISO weeks belong to the year, not to the month, and only ever line up with a month boundary by accident.

Columbus Day, and the name that depends on your state

The federal holiday this month is Columbus Day, the second Monday in October, which in 2026 is Monday, October 12, 2026. Because it is defined by weekday position it always lands on a Monday, so there is no observed-day shift to reason about. What does vary is the name: a number of states and cities observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day on the same date instead, and some observe both. The federal statute still says Columbus Day, so that is the label the grid prints; the date is the same either way.

Halloween is on Saturday, October 31, 2026 — the last day of the month, on a weekend, which happens roughly two years in seven. It is an observance rather than a holiday, so it sits in the separate layer you can switch on and off above. That separation is deliberate: nobody gets a day off for Halloween, and a calendar that prints it in the same weight as a federal holiday is telling its reader something untrue.

Printing this month

With the default Sunday start this is a 5-row sheet and prints comfortably on portrait Letter or A4 at 100% scale. If you want the notes column down the right edge for a month with this many weekend days, turn it on above before you print. And if you are printing several months at once, check each one’s row count first — November needs six rows on a Monday start, so a set printed with mixed geometries will not have matching box heights. The printing guide explains the paper, scale and margin settings that cause the rest of the trouble.