The next total solar eclipse you can see from the United States

The last total solar eclipse over the United States was April 8, 2024. The next one with totality on American soil is March 30, 2033, in Alaska. For the contiguous 48 states the answer is August 23, 2044, when the path crosses Montana and North Dakota — and the one most people will want to travel for is August 12, 2045, with more than six minutes of totality across the southern United States.

All three dates come from NASA’s GSFC eclipse catalog, which is what every almanac and every newsroom copies from. They are predictions, not guesses, but they are quoted here rather than computed: eclipse geometry needs the Moon’s motion over decades to a precision this site’s lunar solver does not have.

The three American total eclipses

UT date	Totality in the U.S.	Duration	Magnitude	Saros	Total path (NASA)
March 30, 2033	Alaska	2m 37s	1.046	120	Eastern Russia, Alaska
August 23, 2044	Montana, North Dakota	2m 04s	1.036	126	Greenland, northern Canada, Montana, North Dakota
August 12, 2045	Southern United States	6m 06s	1.077	136	Southern U.S., Haiti, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Guyana, French Guiana, Suriname, Brazil

Magnitude here is the fraction of the Sun’s diameter covered, not its area. Above 1.0 the Moon’s disc is larger than the Sun’s, which is what makes totality possible at all.

The 2045 event is the standout. Six minutes of totality is unusually long — three times the duration of the 2044 path — and NASA’s path description puts it across the southern United States before continuing through the Caribbean into South America.

One date is not the date on your calendar

NASA dates eclipses in Universal Time. That usually matches the American calendar, but the 2044 event does not: greatest eclipse is at 01:16 UTC on August 23, which is 7:16 p.m. MDT on August 22, 2044 in Montana. A reader planning around August 23 would be a day late.

Converting the instant and expressing it in local time is the one thing this site computes. NASA publishes greatest eclipse in Terrestrial Dynamical Time; clocks run on UTC, and the two differ by delta-T — about 80 seconds in 2033 and 88 in 2044 under the same Espenak–Meeus polynomial used by the rest of the engine. Beyond the next few years delta-T is itself a prediction, so those minutes carry a few seconds of uncertainty; the local date does not.

Eclipse	Greatest (UTC)	Local time on the path
March 30, 2033	18:01	10:01 a.m. AKDT, March 30, Anchorage
August 23, 2044	01:16	7:16 p.m. MDT, August 22, Montana
August 12, 2045	17:41	1:41 p.m. EDT, August 12, eastern U.S.

Before 2044: partial and annular, not total

The gap is not empty. Several eclipses touch the United States in between, and the distinction matters because a partial or annular Sun is never safe to look at without a certified solar filter — and never gives you a corona.

• January 14, 2029 — partial over North America and Central America, magnitude 0.871.
• November 14, 2031 — hybrid, with the southern U.S. in the wide visibility region, but NASA’s central path lies over the Pacific and Panama. The American view is partial.
• June 21, 2039 — annular, path over Alaska, northern Canada and Scandinavia.
• February 5, 2046 — annular, 9m 42s, path across Hawaii, California, Oregon and Idaho.
• June 11, 2048 — annular, 4m 58s, path across the Midwest, Quebec and Ontario.

The full catalog lists all 113 eclipses from 2026 through 2050 with type, magnitude, duration and visibility, and it filters to total eclipses only.

Why an entire country waits two decades

The Moon’s umbral shadow reaches Earth as a spot roughly 100 to 260 km across. A total lunar eclipse is visible from the whole night side at once, which is why those are common; a total solar eclipse is a place you have to travel to. Any given point on Earth sees one roughly once every 375 years on average.

That is also why eclipses arrive in seasons about 173 days apart, while any particular city waits decades. The node alignment happens twice a year; the shadow lands somewhere different each time.

What to do with a date this far out

Nothing urgent, and that is worth saying plainly. A date in the 2040s is a reason to know the answer, not a reason to book anything now. Circumstances this site does not model — cloud cover, exact local path coordinates, and the precise delta-T value in that decade — will matter more as the date approaches.

If you are looking for something to observe this year instead, the moon phase tool gives the phase, illuminated fraction, distance and next four principal phases for any date you choose.

Dates, types, magnitudes, durations, saros numbers and paths are quoted from the NASA GSFC decade tables listed above. The only computed values here are the TD-to-UTC conversions and the expression of those instants in IANA time zones.