Unity Day 2026: date and why people wear orange
Unity Day 2026 is on Wednesday 21 October. On that day, students, teachers, families and businesses wear and share orange to show that no child should be bullied (PACER).
What Unity Day is
It is the main event of National Bullying Prevention Month, which runs through October in the United States. Both are led by PACER's National Bullying Prevention Center, a non-profit in Minnesota founded in 2006. It held the first Unity Day in 2011.
Unity Day usually falls on the third Wednesday of October. The idea is simple: when a whole school turns orange, a student who is being bullied can see that others are on their side. PACER says one in five students report being bullied (PACER statistics).
Why orange?
PACER gives four reasons:
- Orange is a colour of October and autumn.
- It stands for safety and visibility.
- It is warm and bright, so it gets noticed.
- No other well-known cause was using it.
Easy ways to take part
- Wear orange: a T-shirt, socks, shoelaces, a hat or a wristband all count.
- Make a paper chain: each student writes a kind message on a strip of orange paper, and the strips are linked into one long chain. PACER calls this Project Connect.
- Grow a Unity Tree: a shared tree display on a wall or door that every student adds an orange message to.
- Sign a banner: PACER offers a free printable Unity Day banner for everyone to sign.
- Talk about it: hold a short class discussion on what unity means.
- Share a photo: post a picture of your orange class, team or office.
Posters, a free 20-page guide and the official T-shirt are on PACER's Unity Day page.
Not to be confused with
- Orange Shirt Day in Canada, on 30 September. It honours the children who were sent to residential schools and is not about bullying.
- Pink Shirt Day, Canada's anti-bullying day in February.
- Anti-Bullying Week in the United Kingdom, held each November.
