National Taco Day sits on a Tuesday, which is the night the taco already had a claim on. Go and get some while the tortillas are still warm, and do not be precious about how you eat them.
The earliest documented National Taco Day was named by the National Taco Week Council, a body formed by the San Antonio Social Civic Organization with the Mexican Food Institute. Its announcement, entered in the Congressional Record on April 30, 1968, put the day on May 3 each year; the October date now observed has no located origin record of its own.
National Taco Day moves around the calendar because a fast-food company asked it to. In September 2024 Taco Bell announced that the private registrar of national days had agreed to lift the holiday off October 4 and give it the first Tuesday of October instead, permanently.
The oddest of the day's dates is the earliest one. A San Antonio council put National Taco Day on May 3 and said why in writing: May 3 was the birthday of the congressman who carried its announcement into the federal record.
That congressman was Henry B. Gonzalez, born in San Antonio on May 3, 1916. In the remarks he filed that day he noted that colleagues who knew the corn tortilla had yet to taste one properly cooked, filled and molded into a taco. Nothing located in the record connects his day to the October one.
DEALS & OFFERS
National Taco Day ran on October 7. Here’s who celebrated with offers this year.
San Antonio staked the claim first. In 1967 Mayor W. W. McAllister proclaimed the week of April 30 to May 7 as Taco Week in the city, on the grounds that San Antonio "is known as the originator of Mexican Food in the United States."
The proclamation was not modest about the food either. The taco, it said, "now stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the hamburger and hot dog in popularity."
The push came from a body called the National Taco Week Council, formed by a San Antonio civic group together with the Mexican Food Institute. In 1968 the council set April 28 to May 4 as National Taco Week and said it would sponsor the week throughout the United States and foreign countries.
Representative Henry B. Gonzalez of Texas carried it into the federal record. On April 30, 1968 he filed the council's announcement in the Extensions of Remarks and urged colleagues to come to San Antonio and "discover the true delights of Mexican food."
What became of the May date is not documented in any source located. By the autumn of 2009 an October 4 National Taco Day was circulating widely enough for Del Taco to build a giveaway around it.
The chain's press release is careful to claim nothing. It calls October 4 a day that "is designated as National Taco Day," and never says who designated it.
In September 2024 Taco Bell announced that National Day Calendar had approved a permanent change of date. National Taco Day would leave October 4 and take the first Tuesday of October instead, starting that year with Tuesday, October 1.
The stated aim was to land the holiday on a Taco Tuesday every year. It has done so since, and in 2025 the day fell on Tuesday, October 7.
TIMELINE
GOOD TO KNOW
The Real Academia Española lists the maize tortilla rolled around a filling and the wad of rag, tow or sand used to tamp the charge in a blast hole as numbered senses of one word, taco. It gives the word's origin as uncertain.
Glen Bell's authorized biography says he invented it in the 1950s. A form for frying tortillas into tacos was patented in 1950 by Juvencio Maldonado of New York, on an application he filed in July 1947.
The council's 1968 announcement reports that Senator Ralph W. Yarborough of Texas had written a letter the year before saying he would eat "lots of Tacos" during National Taco Week.
Between 2000 and 2024 the old fixed date landed on a Tuesday exactly four times: 2005, 2011, 2016 and 2022. The release announcing the move cited exactly that.
Del Taco's 2009 announcement opened by tracing the taco "to the Aztecs around 3000 BC." The historian Jeffrey M. Pilcher puts the first references in any archive or dictionary at the end of the 1800s.
A taco is the highest form of a tortilla.
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
The founders' own words sit in a federal volume, printed whole.
The council's announcement was printed complete in the Congressional Record rather than summarized, so its exact wording is still readable. That is why the day's first date, and the reason given for choosing it, can be quoted instead of guessed at.
No federal instrument names this day: a term search of the Federal Register returns nothing across the whole span its index covers. The 2024 change was requested by a restaurant company and approved by a private calendar registrar.
The group that fixed the first date described itself as a nonprofit, nonpolitical civic organization promoting Latin American history and culture in San Antonio. It ran the campaign with a body called the Mexican Food Institute, which sold memberships for four dollars a year.
GOOD TO KNOW
the first Tuesday in October since 2024, kept mainly through restaurant offers
a separate Día del Taco on March 31, reported to have started with a 2007 campaign built around an event at the Estadio Azteca
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Test your knowledge
No. It is an unofficial observance rather than a public holiday, so offices, banks and schools stay open on it.
COLOPHON
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