So Long 2025, Hello 2026

BY THE NUMBERS

By The Numbers, a look at what’s in the news . . . by the numbers. These are just numbers, not suggestions that they mean more or less than what they are. We do not suggest that one number is connected to another. These are simply facts with no extraneous details, bias or slanted reporting. To borrow (and perhaps mangle a bit) a quote from legendary fictional detective Joe Friday, it’s just the numbers, ma’am!

Are you counting down, just chomping at the bit for the ball to drop Wednesday night? Or are you going to ring in the new year with a long winter’s nap? No matter what you think and how you plan, we will say so long to the old year and ring in the new. So with that in mind, here’s a look at the whole process. . .  by the numbers!

589 bulbs

That’s how many lightbulbs are in the Times Square ball to make up the number 2026!

142,000,000

U.S. travelers over the holiday.

55%

Just over half of us say we’re going to celebrate the new year with family and friends.

8%

Sadly. 8 percent of us will end up in the ER on New Year’s Eve because we overdid the celebrating.

31.536,000

Before we tell you what this one is – got a good guess? If you said that’s how many minutes there will be in 2026, that’s a great guess. It’s wrong, but it was close. That’s how many seconds. Of course that means there are 525,600 minutes . . . and 8,760 hours. (yeah, we know we didn’t have to share that – but trust us, if we didn’t, there would have been emails . . . )

360,000,000

It is estimated that in the U.S. there will be 360 million glasses of the bubbly consumed. Be careful if you are one of those. We refer you to the 8 percent statistic just above.

1.5 tons

You know when the ball drops and everyone shouts Happy New Year? Well, they’ll be about 3,000 pounds of confetti dropped then.

50 tons

All that confetti, those silly Planet Fitness hats and all the rest of the trash that falls to the street in Times Square on New Year’s Eve amounts to about 50 tonos of clean up. Thanks to New York City’s sanitation crews, it’s all handled in a few hours!