Patriot Day Flag Etiquette, and the Half That Gets Left Out

Patriot Day 2026 falls on a Friday, September 11, and it is the twenty fifth anniversary. Most Patriot Day flag guides say the same three things: fly at half-staff, here is how to do it, here is what to buy. That is accurate as far as it goes. It also stops halfway through the instruction.

The Flag Code’s own procedure for half-staff has a return built into it. You raise the flag to the peak first, then lower it. Before you take it down at the end of the day, you raise it to the peak again. The flag does not simply go down and stay down. Neither does Patriot Day.

What Patriot Day actually asks

Patriot Day was created by a joint resolution signed on December 18, 2001, three months and a week after the attacks. It is codified at 36 U.S.C. § 144, and it is short. Subsection (a) is one sentence: September 11 is Patriot Day. Subsection (b) asks the President to issue a proclamation each year calling on three things.

• State and local governments and the people of the United States, to observe the day with appropriate programs and activities.
• Federal departments and agencies, and interested organizations and individuals, to display the flag at half-staff.
• All the people of the United States, to observe a moment of silence.

Three things worth knowing about that text, because they get repeated wrong.

Patriot Day is not a federal holiday. The eleven legal public holidays are listed at 5 U.S.C. § 6103, and September 11 is not among them. Offices open, mail runs, schools hold class. It is an observance, which is a different category.

The statute names no time for the moment of silence. The 8:46 a.m. Eastern time that circulates every year is real, but it comes from presidential proclamations and from the ceremony at the 9/11 Memorial, not from the law. This year’s proclamation, signed on September 9, does not call for a moment of silence at all. Its one operative direction is that federal departments and agencies display the flag at half-staff in honor of the 2,977 people killed.

Patriot Day is not in the Flag Code. This one surprises people. Search 4 U.S.C. Chapter 1 for “Patriot Day” or “September 11” and you will not find either. The only two annual half-staff days written into the Flag Code are Memorial Day and Peace Officers Memorial Day. Every September 11, the half-staff observance exists because a President asked for it that year, one year at a time.

We find that worth sitting with. A quarter century on, the lowering of the flag on Patriot Day is still a renewed decision rather than an automatic one. It has to be asked for, and it has to be answered.

How to fly the flag on Patriot Day, September 11

Patriot Day flag display uses the general half-staff procedure, not a special one. The mechanics come from 4 U.S.C. § 7(m), and the wording is precise:

The flag, when flown at half-staff, should be first hoisted to the peak for an instant and then lowered to the half-staff position. The flag should be again raised to the peak before it is lowered for the day.

Half-staff has a definition in the same subsection: the position of the flag when it is one-half the distance between the top and bottom of the staff. Not a few inches down. Halfway.

So the sequence on a halyard pole is:

1. Hoist briskly all the way to the peak. Hold for a moment.
2. Lower slowly to half-staff, and leave it there for the day.
3. At the end of the day, raise it briskly to the peak again.
4. Lower it slowly and retire it for the night.

Half-staff runs the full day, not until noon. The noon rule people remember belongs to Memorial Day, and the Flag Code applies it to Memorial Day alone: half-staff until noon only, then raised to the top of the staff. No such restoration applies on Patriot Day. The flag stays at half-staff for as long as it is displayed, which by the custom in 4 U.S.C. § 6 is sunrise to sunset unless the flag is properly lighted.

If you fly other flags on the same pole or in the same group, they come down too. A state flag, a service flag, or a company flag should not fly above a U.S. flag at half-staff, and on a single halyard the U.S. flag stays at the top of the group. Our post on flag etiquette and proper display covers the multi-flag cases.

One honest note about all of this. The display provisions of the Flag Code carry no penalty and no enforcement. The Congressional Research Service describes them as advisory. They are the country’s agreed etiquette, written into federal statute, not a rule anyone will cite you for breaking. That is worth knowing precisely because it puts the choice back on the person raising the flag.

If your flag cannot be lowered

Most homes fly a flag from an angled bracket on the porch or the door frame. There is no halyard, and there is no half-staff position. This is the most common Patriot Day flag question we get, and it deserves a straight answer.

The widely followed practice is to attach a black mourning streamer or ribbon at the top of the staff, the same width as a stripe, running roughly the length of the flag. It is a graceful solution and it reads clearly to anyone who sees it.

It is also custom, not law. We looked. The words “mourning,” “streamer,” “ribbon” and “crepe” appear nowhere in the Flag Code. No federal source prescribes the practice. Every authority we could find asserting it is a flag retailer or a hobbyist site, which is to say people like us. We would rather tell you that than let you repeat it as statute to a neighbor.

If you want the streamer, we make a mourning bow and a five stripe mourning fan for exactly this. If you would rather simply fly the flag as you always do, the Flag Code does not say otherwise, and no one should tell you that you got it wrong.

The half of Patriot Day that gets left out

Here is the part almost every Patriot Day flag guide skips.

In 2009, Congress gave September 11 a second federal identity. The Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, signed April 21, 2009, put the September 11th National Day of Service and Remembrance on federal footing at 42 U.S.C. § 12653(k). It authorizes AmeriCorps, formally the Corporation for National and Community Service, to organize observances and to fund community organizations running service projects tied to the day. Presidential proclamations through 2023 named both observances together: Patriot Day and National Day of Service and Remembrance.

Which means Patriot Day, taken whole, asks for two motions rather than one. Lower the flag. Then do something.

That pairing was not an accident of drafting. It came from the families and the survivor organizations, who wanted the anniversary to hold more than grief. The half-staff flag marks the loss. The service half answers the question the loss leaves behind, which is what now.

We are not going to tell anyone what that should look like. A blood drive, a fire department fundraiser, an hour at a food bank, a check to a first responder fund, a phone call to someone who lost somebody. The statute leaves it open on purpose. It is worth noticing that the law asks for it at all, and that the flag you raise back to the peak at the end of the day is the same flag you lowered in the morning.

A toll that is still growing

2,977 people were killed on September 11, 2001. The 9/11 Memorial breaks it down by site: 2,753 in New York, 184 at the Pentagon, and 40 aboard United Flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The Pentagon figure includes 59 people aboard American Airlines Flight 77 and 125 inside the building. The Memorial commemorates 2,983 names in total, adding the six people killed in the February 26, 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

441 first responders died that day, from more than thirty agencies. 343 were FDNY. 37 were Port Authority police. 23 were NYPD.

Twenty five years later, the count has not stopped. The FDNY reports that more than 400 of its members have since died of World Trade Center related illness. That is more than the department lost on the day itself. There is no single official federal tally of deaths from 9/11 related illness, because the World Trade Center Health Program does not track cause of death for its members; the program had 141,515 people enrolled as of the end of 2025.

For the twenty fifth anniversary, the 9/11 Memorial has added a seventh moment of silence to its ceremony, observed at the end of the reading of the names, for those who have died of 9/11 related health effects. The Memorial says it will be a permanent part of the commemoration from now on.

We wrote something similar about December 7 in A Day of Infamy. We mention it here because it changes what the flag is doing on the pole. A flag at half-staff usually marks something finished. On Patriot Day it does not. It marks something that is still taking people, in fire houses and precincts and neighborhoods, every year.

Four flags that came through that day

This is the part we can speak to as flag makers, and it is the part that almost never appears in a Patriot Day flag guide.

The Ground Zero flag

The flag three firefighters raised in Thomas E. Franklin’s photograph came off a yacht. The Star of America was moored at the North Cove Marina beside the World Trade Center, and the flag belonged to its owners, Shirley Dreifus and the late Spiros Kopelakis. It is a small flag, measured by the museum that holds it at 33.5 by 60 inches. The firefighters were Dan McWilliams and George Johnson of Ladder 157 and Billy Eisengrein of Rescue 2.

It disappeared that same evening. A larger flag, 5 by 8 feet, was preserved and honored in its place; it flew on Navy ships bound for Afghanistan and hung at Yankee Stadium before anyone realized the substitution. The mistake came to light in March 2002 when the owners tried to donate their flag and found the one on display was too big to be theirs.

On November 4, 2014, a man walked into a fire station in Everett, Washington with a flag in a shopping bag and left before anyone got his full name. It took a forensic investigation to prove what it was. A Washington State Patrol scientist matched the particulate embedded in the fabric to World Trade Center debris. An investigator matched the handmade halyard, rope wrapped in black electrical tape, to Franklin’s high resolution photographs. A woman who had worked aboard the Star of America recognized the tape as her late husband’s work. It was donated to the 9/11 Memorial Museum in 2016.

The Pentagon flag

This one is local to us. On September 12, 2001, soldiers and firefighters working the recovery unfurled a garrison flag from the Pentagon roof and hung it down the west wall beside the impact point, so that it was there when the President arrived. It measured 20 by 38 feet, the largest size the military flies, and it belonged to the U.S. Army Band at Fort Myer, a few minutes up the road from our shop.

It hung for a month, lit at night while the recovery went on, and came down soot stained and torn on October 11. The Old Guard folded it with full honors on the helipad. The commander of the Army Military District of Washington said at the time that the flag would never be flown again. It belongs to the Army Center of Military History.

The Pentagon still marks the morning. Each Patriot Day, a flag is unfurled down the west side of the building at 6:50 a.m.

The National 9/11 Flag

A 20 by 30.5 foot flag hung at 90 West Street, across from the towers, and was shredded by the collapse. Ironworkers took it down about a month later so it would not deteriorate further, and it sat in storage for seven years.

In 2008 it went to Greensburg, Kansas, a town an EF5 tornado had nearly erased the year before. Greensburg residents made the first stitches, patching it with fabric from flags that had survived their own disaster. Over the next three years it traveled all fifty states, and roughly 30,000 people added thread and cloth from retired American flags: wounded veterans, Columbine survivors, schoolchildren, WWII veterans aboard the USS Missouri, families at the Oklahoma City memorial. It was whole again, back to thirteen stripes, by the tenth anniversary in 2011.

As a piece of flag construction it is unlike anything else in the country. Every stripe on it is a repair, and every repair came from another flag that had finished its own service.

Seeing them

Through February 2028, the 9/11 Memorial Museum has the Ground Zero flag and the Pentagon flag on display together in Foundation Hall, in an installation called Our Flag Was Still There, alongside the flag raised over the Last Column and the flag carried on the May 2011 raid in Abbottabad. Having the New York flag and the Pentagon flag in one room is unusual, and it will not be permanent.

Patriot Day moments of silence, and the times they mark

The 9/11 Memorial marks six moments of silence during its ceremony, with a seventh added this year. Patriot Day observances elsewhere usually follow the same clock. All times Eastern.

The ceremony begins at 8:30 a.m. If you are raising a Patriot Day flag that morning, sunrise in the Washington area is just before 7:00, which leaves time to have it up and at half-staff before the first of them.

Flying a flag over the Pentagon or the memorial

Two programs are worth knowing about, and neither is widely advertised.

Flags Over the Pentagon is run by the Pentagon Force Protection Agency. You supply the flag, submit PFPA Form 55 at least five business days ahead, and include prepaid return packaging. The flag is flown on the date you request and comes back with a certificate naming the date and the person or event you are honoring. Patriot Day is on the agency’s own list of suggested dates.

The 9/11 Memorial flies flags sent to it over the Memorial plaza and returns them folded with a certificate. There is no charge beyond shipping. Many of the flags it receives have already flown somewhere else first, over a base or the Capitol or the Pentagon.

Both take a flag you already own, so if you want one for this, get it early enough to send it. Our post on how to fold the American flag covers the fold if you are presenting it afterward.

If your flag has been on the pole for a few seasons and Patriot Day is the year you notice, we repair flags and we retire them, and both are on our repair and disposal page. A frayed fly end can usually be rehemmed. Our nylon American flags and the expression of support collection, including the Honor and Remember flag and first responder flags, are here when you need them. If you are sizing a flag to a pole for the first time, start with choosing the right size flag for your flagpole.

Questions about a display or a ceremony, call us at (703) 751-2411 or write to [email protected]. We are in Alexandria, Monday through Friday, 8:30am to 5:00pm Eastern.

Common questions

Sources

• U.S. Code, 36 U.S.C. § 144, Patriot Day
• U.S. Code, 4 U.S.C. § 7, Position and manner of display and § 6, Time and occasions for display
• U.S. Code, 5 U.S.C. § 6103, Holidays
• U.S. Code, 42 U.S.C. § 12653(k), September 11th Day of Service, added by the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, Pub. L. 111-13 (April 21, 2009)
• AmeriCorps, September 11th National Day of Service and Remembrance
• Congressional Research Service, Frequently Asked Questions About Flag Law (R45945)
• The White House, Patriot Day 2026 proclamation (September 9, 2026)
• Federal Register, Patriot Day and National Day of Service and Remembrance, 2023
• 9/11 Memorial & Museum, FAQ and casualty figures, 25th anniversary commemoration, and Our Flag Was Still There
• 9/11 Memorial & Museum collection, the Ground Zero flag and the National 9/11 Flag
• Smithsonian National Museum of American History, What happened to the Pentagon flag
• U.S. Army, Pentagon flag retreats from American History Museum
• FDNY, plans to commemorate the 25th anniversary
• CDC World Trade Center Health Program, quarterly program summary (December 31, 2025)
• Pentagon Force Protection Agency, Flags Over the Pentagon
• 9/11 Memorial, flags flown over the Memorial plaza
• Seattle Times, Ground Zero flag found in Everett
• New York Says Thank You Foundation, The National 9/11 Flag