Grandparents' Day in the UK

When is Grandparents' Day in the UK?

Early October, on a Sunday. Age UK, which has promoted the day for years, marked it on the first Sunday of October in 2016 (2 October) and 2017 (1 October), and Age UK Norfolk marked it on Sunday 5 October in 2025.

It isn't a card-shop occasion on the scale of Mother's Day, and most grandparents won't expect anything. That's the useful part. There's no gift to get right, so the day can be spent doing something together that wouldn't otherwise happen.

Six ways to mark it that aren't another mug

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   1. One old photograph, and the names on the back

   Pick one photograph from the box nobody has sorted and ask who's in it, where it was and who took it. Write the answers in pencil on the back while you're sitting there. In 2017 Age UK marked the day by asking people to share a photo of their grandparents "along with a few words about a special memory". Doing it at the kitchen table works just as well, and the words stay with the photograph. Photographs with no names on the back are a regret that comes up again and again when people talk about what they wish they'd asked.

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   2. Cook their dish with them

   Not for them: with them, with a grandchild doing the measuring and somebody writing the method down as it's explained, including the bits that are "just a handful". In a 2016 study for Grandparents' Day, Age UK found that two in five people said a favourite time with their grandparents growing up was eating together on family occasions. A recipe written down in the grandparent's own words is worth keeping as it is.

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   3. A grandchild asks the questions

   Children make good interviewers because they ask the obvious questions adults have stopped asking: what did you have instead of a phone, what got you into trouble, what was your teacher like. Give them three questions on a card and let them ask. The free 100 questions to ask your grandparents list is sorted by topic, so a child can choose the ones they want to ask. Write down or record the answers. A child won't remember them for long.

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   4. Let them teach something

   Most grandparent visits are spent being shown things: the new phone, the school project, the app. Turn it round for an afternoon. Ask them to teach a card game, a knitting stitch, how to wire a plug, or the words to a song from their own school days. The skill matters less than having them be the one who knows.

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   5. A card that says one specific thing

   "Best Grandad in the world" is lovely and says nothing. One sentence about a particular day, like the time they took you to the pictures or the summer in the caravan, is the card that gets kept in a drawer. Age UK Norfolk has published a Grandparents' Day greeting card to personalise, if you want something to write in.

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   6. If they do the childcare, give them the day off

   In a 2017 YouGov poll for Age UK, 40% of grandparents over 50 said they had provided regular childcare for their grandchildren. If yours collect from school or cover the holidays, the most useful thing you can do on Grandparents' Day is book the afternoon so they're a guest. They don't cook, drive or wash up, and they go home before they're tired.

Start with a question about food

If you only manage one question on the day, ask about food. Nearly everyone has an answer, nobody finds it intrusive, and it leads straight to the house, the people at the table and how the money was stretched.

“Who did the cooking in your house, and what was the one thing they made better than anybody else?”

Whatever comes back is probably the start of a longer story than the afternoon has room for. If you'd like it kept beyond the day, how to record your parents' life story covers doing it yourself for nothing, and memory books for grandparents explains why the blank fill-in book usually stalls after a few pages. If they only recently became a grandparent, gifts for new grandparents is the occasion-specific version of this page.

Where StoryPrompt fits

It carries the day's one question on through the rest of the year. Every week we email the grandparent one specific question, written for a British life. They click the link, write as much or as little as they like and close the tab. There's no app and no password. Their answers collect into a typeset book you can download whenever you want, for as long as StoryPrompt runs, and the book stays downloadable after the year of questions ends. £25, paid once. Nothing renews and there's nothing to cancel.