Christmas and New Year stock management for pubs: the 2026 dates, order timing and the January dead stock trap

Christmas 2026 falls kindly for pubs. Christmas Day is a Friday, the Boxing Day bank holiday moves to Monday the 28th, and New Year's Day is another Friday, so the fortnight holds two long unbroken runs. Last time the calendar held a run like that, Christmas week sales in pubs came in 4.8% up on the year while restaurants went backwards. The stock job is not "buy more". It is covering two stretches of thin or missing deliveries inside one fortnight, by day rather than by week, without buying stock that is still on the shelf in February with tinsel on the pump clip.

I have run a wet-led pub through enough Decembers to know the two classic failures. Running the star product dry on the one night that pays for January, and the opposite, a cellar still digesting December's optimism at Valentine's. Both are planning failures, not luck. The dates and the day-by-day numbers below are the plan.

The 2026 dates that matter

Date	What it is	What the data says
Friday 18 December	Mad Friday, the last full working Friday	+21% on drinks in 2023, the biggest day of the run
Thursday 24 December	Christmas Eve	Only +3% in 2023. Big name, ordinary day in most locals
Friday 25 December	Christmas Day, bank holiday	+10% in 2023, and it is lunchtime trade, short and sharp
Saturday 26 – Monday 28 December	Boxing Day, then the substitute bank holiday Monday	Boxing Day was up just 0.1% in 2023, near enough flat
Thursday 31 December	New Year’s Eve	Big, but note the spirits warning below
Friday 1 January 2027	New Year’s Day, bank holiday	Start of the January cliff

The day figures are CGA's Daily Drinks Tracker for Christmas 2023, the last year with a full public day-by-day split, so treat them as shape rather than gospel. The shape is the point. The fortnight is not uniformly busy. It is two or three enormous days wrapped in ordinary ones, and stock plans that smear one uplift across fourteen days get both halves wrong.

What actually sells more

Same tracker, final two weeks of the year: beer up 12% and 13%, cider up 12% both weeks, wine up 8% and 7%, soft drinks up 4% and 5%. The one that surprises people is spirits, up 3% in the penultimate week and then down 11% in the final one. The Christmas party trade drinks its cocktails before the 25th. Loading spirits for New Year's Eve on Christmas-party logic is how you end up with a shelf of flavoured gin in January.

Last Christmas confirmed the venue-level pattern: CGA's Hospitality Business Tracker had pubs up 4.8% like-for-like in Christmas week 2025 against 1.2% across all managed hospitality, with restaurants down 1.1% and bar groups down 15.5%. People come back to pubs at Christmas. Stock for your own history, not for the sector's headline, but the wind is at your back.

Order timing: plan the gap, not the volume

Wholesalers and breweries publish Christmas order cut-offs and revised delivery schedules from late November. The detail changes every year and by supplier, so the useful discipline is structural. Find your true last delivery date before Christmas and your first confirmed one after New Year, and treat everything between as a siege. That stretch can run the best part of a week, twice. Your par levels for the fortnight are set by that gap plus the day-by-day uplifts above, per line, not by adding a cheerful percentage to everything.

Do the arithmetic per line, and here is the shape of it, my numbers, illustrative. A pub doing 800 pints in a normal week planning +5% across the week would add 40 pints. But if the whole uplift lands on two days, Mad Friday and Christmas Day, those days individually need 20% more than their usual take, while Boxing Day needs nothing. Forty pints spread thin is both too much and too little at once.

Cask: the timetable doesn't do Christmas

Cask discipline is where festive optimism gets expensive, because the clock keeps running through the holidays. Fourteen days of best-before from delivery, two days from venting to tapping, empty within three days once on sale, and a firkin is 72 pints. A festive special vented Christmas Eve, into a Boxing Day the data says is flat, can be past its best before it is half sold. If your normal cask rate of sale would not clear a firkin in three days, the festive guest belongs in the plan only for the days that clear it, or not at all. The full routine is in the cellar management basics guide and the ordering method in the beer festival cask planning guide transfers straight across.

The January cliff, and the dead stock you're about to buy

January drops off a ledge, and the ledge has a name in the data: spirits already fading in the final December week, then Dry January on top. Low and no-alcohol is the one line that runs against the tide, and the low and no stock guide covers stocking it without guessing. For everything else the rule that saves the most money is blunt. Buy nothing Christmas-branded, short-dated or novelty that cannot sell at full price in a normal January week. Every December cellar decision should pass the "will this still sell on the 15th of January" test, and the ones that fail become the stock in the dead stock guide, marked down or written off, which is margin you gave away in November.

Two quiet jobs for the week between

First, a count. The 28th to the 30th is the natural window, trade is soft, the cellar is at its most confused, and a count there catches December's damage while the reasons are still fresh, sets the New Year baseline, and if your accounting year ends on 31 December it doubles as the year-end valuation. Second, a thirty-second insurance check in November before the stock arrives. A December cellar is your most valuable of the year, your sum insured should reflect peak stock rather than average, and some policies, AXA's standard stock wording among them, already add an automatic 30% uplift for November and December while others need a phone call. The stock insurance guide covers what a claim on that cellar would actually need.

Where software earns its keep here

The whole plan above runs on knowing your real rate of sale by line and by day, which is exactly what a weekly count builds. StockTap's reports show what each line did last week and the week before, spot checks keep the big days visible without a full count, and the order guide flags which lines won't cover the delivery gap at their current rate. Fourteen days of guessing is how Decembers go wrong. Free trial, no card, and two counts before Mad Friday is enough history to plan from.