Unlike Congress, the Supreme Court follows a predictable annual calendar. Each term is named for the year it begins, so October Term 2025 ran from October 2025 into the summer of 2026. Knowing the calendar explains why big decisions cluster in June and why the Court's summer is not really a vacation.
This guide walks through the Court's year month by month and highlights the cases that defined the most recent term.
After each argument week, the justices meet alone in conference, speaking in order of seniority and casting tentative votes. The senior justice in the majority assigns the opinion. Drafts circulate for months, with justices sometimes changing their votes in response to majority and dissenting drafts. Orders lists announcing new grants and denials typically come out on Mondays after conferences, and opinions are released on announced days.
The most divisive cases are usually argued in the spring and take the longest to write, so many of the term's biggest rulings arrive in the final weeks of June. Justices sometimes read dissents from the bench to signal strong disagreement. At the end of the term, the Court may also order cases reargued the next term, as it did with Louisiana v. Callais in 2025. The Court then issues a final orders list sending cases back to lower courts for reconsideration.
Federal law sets the opening of the term on the first Monday in October. From October through April, the Court sits for arguments in two-week sittings, usually Monday through Wednesday, hearing two cases on many days, followed by weeks off for writing. Each side typically gets 30 minutes, and the Solicitor General argues for the federal government in most cases in which it is a party. Since 2020 the Court has streamed live audio of arguments.
Petitions for review pile up over the summer. In late September the justices hold the long conference, where they consider hundreds of petitions at once and grant review in a batch of cases to fill the early argument calendar. Each justice's law clerks, most of whom share the work through a cert pool, write memos summarizing petitions. The Court grants review in roughly 60 of the 4,000 or so petitions it receives each year.
Applications for emergency relief, such as stays of lower court orders, go first to the justice assigned to the relevant circuit, who can act alone or refer them to the full Court. These applications arrive all year, and since 2017 they have increasingly involved major government policies. In 2025 and 2026 the Court ruled on dozens of emergency applications from the federal government, often in brief unsigned orders, a practice critics call the shadow docket and supporters say is necessary to manage nationwide disputes.
The 2025 term was one of the most consequential in decades. The Court struck down the emergency tariffs in Learning Resources v. Trump in February 2026, narrowed race-conscious districting in Louisiana v. Callais in April, and on its final days overruled Humphrey's Executor in Trump v. Slaughter, shielded a Federal Reserve governor in Trump v. Cook, struck down limits on coordinated party spending in NRSC v. FEC, and held 6 to 3 in Trump v. Barbara that the 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to children born on U.S. soil, invalidating the 2025 executive order on birthright citizenship. Supporters and critics of the Court read the term differently, with some seeing an independent Court checking the executive and others seeing a major expansion of presidential power.
Follow a single case in how a Supreme Court case works, see how cases are chosen in which cases make it to the Supreme Court, or learn about emergency rulings in the shadow docket explained.