How we check market schedules

For every market on the site we record the days it stands and the hours it keeps, the day it opens for the season, and the day it closes for the year. A market that runs twice a week gets both days. A market that adds Wednesdays in July gets that noted next to its hours. A market that moves indoors in November gets its winter run listed separately, with the winter address, because that is a different market day for anyone carrying a basket.

A handful of markets never close at all. Those say year-round, and that is the whole answer.

Every listing carries one line at the bottom, and it is the most important line on the page: Confirmed with the market, August 2026. A market earns that line only when someone here has read this season's schedule on a page that is live right now, and matched it against the listing here — days, hours, opening day, closing day.

The page we read is one of these, in roughly this order of preference:

• the market's own website, where this season's dates are usually posted first;
• an announcement from the organizer who runs several markets around one metro, when the individual markets don't keep their own pages;
• the city or parks department page for a market that stands on public ground;
• local coverage, when a newspaper or neighborhood outlet is the only place this year's opening day was actually printed.

Whichever it was, the confirmed line names it, and every market links back to at least one of the pages we read — including the markets we could not confirm. If you want to see for yourself, the way there is always one click from the listing.

Schedules move every spring: a new opening day, a new closing day, sometimes a different parking lot. So the site gets checked again before each season starts, and the month on the confirmed line tells you how fresh a schedule is. An old month isn't a trick — it's a reason to check the market's own page.

Sometimes we find the market but not this season's schedule. The website hasn't been touched since two summers ago, the last announcement was in April, nobody ever posted a closing day. When that happens we say so plainly: check before you go.

Treat those markets as a lead, not a promise. The days and hours shown are the best we could find, and they are worth a look at the market's own page or a quick call before you drive across town. What we will not do is dress an old schedule up as a current one — a market that can't be confirmed says it can't be confirmed, and keeps saying it until someone here can check.

Knowing a market runs Saturdays 8 am to 1 pm is no help at all in March. Most outdoor markets keep a season — often something like May through October — and the edges of that season move every year. A market that closed for the year on October 11 is still, in every listing that only names a weekday, "a Saturday market." It is also a wasted trip on October 18.

That's why every market here carries an opening day and a closing day alongside its weekday, and why the season span is shown as plainly as the hours. When a market hasn't posted this year's exact dates yet, we say the window it usually keeps and stop there rather than inventing an opening day.

See which markets are open today.

The site starts where the checking is done, one metro at a time, and grows as more markets are confirmed:

• Denver, Colorado
• Minneapolis, Minnesota
• Portland, Oregon
• Austin, Texas
• Seattle, Washington