GTA 6 launches 19 November 2026, at midnight in each store region

Grand Theft Auto 6 comes out on Thursday 19 November 2026. It unlocks at midnight in each store region, so it doesn't open everywhere at once. It rolls around the world region by region, starting in New Zealand and finishing in Mexico nineteen hours later. We've worked out the unlock time for every store region here.

It's out on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S. There's still no announced PC version.

Every region gets its own midnight

Most global releases unlock at one worldwide instant. Everybody gets the same absolute moment, which means a different local time in every timezone. New Zealand plays at lunchtime, California plays the afternoon before, and a chunk of the world plays at four in the morning.

Rockstar's doing it the other way round. Every region gets its own midnight, so nobody has to sit up until four or wait for lunch. The catch is that somebody's always first. New Zealand starts nineteen hours before Mexico City, so the opening of the story will be all over social media before big parts of the world can play.

There's a practical side to plan for too. You don't get one enormous global spike. The load comes as a run of rolling spikes, one for each store region as its midnight comes round. That's easier on the servers and harder on anyone trying to dodge spoilers for most of a day. Our countdown page runs live against the launch in your own timezone.

The date has slipped before

This isn't the first date the game's had, and the delays have been the main story of the last two years of coverage.

What's different now is how much is public. The price is set, pre-orders opened in June, the editions are listed with what's in them, the physical version has a preload date of 12 November, and retail boxes exist. Rockstar doesn't build all of that around a date it plans to push back again.

The studio's also said out loud, which it almost never does, that nobody on the team knows the whole game. You tend to hear that sort of candour once a project's past the point of surprises.

Five weeks before Christmas

A 19 November date puts the game five weeks before Christmas, in the quarter that decides a publisher's year. It's the same window Red Dead Redemption 2 used in 2018 and the same one Grand Theft Auto V used in September 2013, and both of those cleared their first-week records inside three days.

It also lands after the console hardware refresh cycle, where you might've expected it before, so a big share of buyers will be playing on machines they bought just for this.

When a PC version might turn up

No PC version's been announced, and that fits the pattern exactly. Grand Theft Auto V came to console in September 2013 and PC in April 2015, nineteen months later. Red Dead Redemption 2 came to console in October 2018 and PC in November 2019, thirteen months later.

Neither gap was announced ahead of time. If the pattern holds, a PC release lands somewhere between late 2027 and mid 2028, and Rockstar won't say a word about it until it's close.