National Girlfriends Day falls on 1 August every year, and it belongs to female friendship: the sisters, best friends, mothers, colleagues and neighbours a woman would call first. It is an American observance with no official standing — no proclamation, no day off, and no agreed founder. Three separate people or pairs have claimed to have invented it, and none of the claims can be documented.

What National Girlfriends Day is

National Girlfriends Day is observed on 1 August, mainly in the United States, as a day for the friendships women have with other women. That includes friends in the ordinary sense, and it also, by long custom on this particular day, includes family: sisters, mothers, grandmothers and daughters. Colleagues, teachers, coaches and neighbours get folded in too. The unifying idea is not blood or proximity but the specific kind of relationship where someone is the person you call when something happens.

The name is the confusing part. Written as National Girlfriends Day, plural, it means female friends. Written as National Girlfriend Day, singular, the same 1 August date gets used by people celebrating a romantic partner, and retail marketing has cheerfully served both readings for years. Neither version has any authority behind it, so neither can overrule the other; most calendars that list the day describe it as being about platonic friendship between women.

Who invented it, and why nobody can prove it

The honest answer is that nobody knows. Three origin stories circulate, all of them repeated confidently and none of them backed by a document anyone can point to. The oldest credits Kathleen Laing and Elizabeth Butterfield, whose 2002 book Girlfriends Getaway championed the weekend trip that turns friends into sisters; the day attached to their book is usually given as 20 September, not 1 August. The second credits a website proprietor known as Mistress Susan, said to have started celebrating in 2003 or 2004. The third credits Allie Savarino Kline and Sally Rodgers, who marked it from 2006 on their now-defunct site Sisterwoman.com.

None of that is verifiable, and the versions contradict each other on the date as well as the year. What can be said is what the record shows: no act of Congress, no presidential proclamation, no state resolution and no international body has ever established 1 August as National Girlfriends Day. It settled onto that date through calendar websites and social media during the 2010s, which is how most modern American national days acquire their place.

Why women’s friendship gets its own date

The case for the day is not that women need permission to like each other. It is that adult friendship is the only close relationship with no scaffolding around it. Marriages have anniversaries, families have birthdays and holidays, jobs have reviews and leaving parties. Friendship has nothing — no ceremony that marks it starting, no date that marks it continuing — which is why it is the first thing to quietly lapse when someone moves city, changes job or has a child.

There is also a research argument, though it should be stated carefully. In 2000 the psychologist Shelley Taylor and colleagues at UCLA published a paper in Psychological Review proposing that the classic fight-or-flight account of stress fits women poorly, and that a pattern they called tend-and-befriend — protecting others, and turning towards a social network — describes the female stress response better. It is an influential model rather than settled fact, but it puts a serious question behind an unserious-looking date.

The friendship days it gets confused with

August is crowded. Friendship Day, the Hallmark-descended one marked in the United States and India, falls on the first Sunday in August — 2 August in 2026, the day after this one. National Sisters Day, founded in 1996, shares that same Sunday. The United Nations International Day of Friendship is 30 July, two days earlier, and is the only observance in this group with a formal designation behind it. National Best Friends Day sits back in June, on the 8th.

Two more are worth separating out. Galentine’s Day, on 13 February, was invented for a 2010 episode of Parks and Recreation and escaped into real life; it is a party-shaped tradition with a fictional origin and a firm date. National Women’s Friendship Day, started by the Kappa Delta sorority in 1999, falls on the third Sunday in September and has since expanded into a whole month. None of these replace each other.

How the day actually gets marked

In practice this is a low-ceremony day. Most of it happens on phones: a photograph of a friendship posted with a caption, a group chat that suddenly wakes up, a message to someone who has not been messaged in months. Where people do meet, the shape is familiar — a meal, a spa afternoon, a film, a long walk, a weekend away booked because the date gave someone the excuse to suggest it.

Restaurants, salons, bars and online retailers run promotions and giveaways around it, which is a fair part of why the day survives at all. And some couples do use 1 August for each other, treating it as National Girlfriend Day in the romantic sense. That reading is a minority one, but it is not a mistake anybody is in a position to correct.

National Girlfriends Day Dates

This year National Girlfriends Day is celebrated on Saturday, Aug 01, 2026

Year	Date	Day
2026	Aug 01	Saturday
2027	Aug 01	Sunday
2028	Aug 01	Tuesday
2029	Aug 01	Wednesday
2030	Aug 01	Thursday
2031	Aug 01	Friday

How to mark National Girlfriends Day

None of this needs a date in the calendar, which is exactly why it does not happen. Pick one and finish it before 1 August is over.