Which Soaps Are On Which Nights? EastEnders 7.30pm, Emmerdale 8pm, Corrie 8.30pm

Short version: four soaps, three broadcasters, and no two of them run on the same number of nights. Monday is the only evening with all four. Friday has two. The weekend has none.

Which soap is on which night?

The pattern is easier to hold in your head as a count of nights rather than a grid. Coronation Street and Emmerdale go out every weekday, EastEnders takes Friday off, and Hollyoaks stops after Wednesday.

• Monday — all four, 7pm to 9pm.
• Tuesday and Wednesday — all four again, same times.
• Thursday — three: EastEnders, Emmerdale, Coronation Street, from 7.30pm.
• Friday — two: Emmerdale at 8pm, Coronation Street at 8.30pm.
• Saturday and Sunday — none, apart from the Hollyoaks omnibus.

Each soap has its own page here with the detail: Hollyoaks, EastEnders, Emmerdale and Coronation Street.

Why is Monday the busiest soap night?

Because the four start times happen to lock together without a gap. Hollyoaks runs 7pm to 7.30pm on E4, EastEnders takes 7.30pm to 8pm on BBC One, then ITV1 has Emmerdale at 8pm and Coronation Street at 8.30pm. That is two unbroken hours of soap from 7pm, using three remote-control presses and no waiting.

Tuesday and Wednesday repeat the same shape. Thursday loses the Hollyoaks half-hour and starts at 7.30pm instead, giving ninety unbroken minutes. By Friday only the ITV1 hour is left.

Can I watch before it is on television?

Yes, and this is the part of the schedule that has changed most in recent years. Every one of the four now reaches a streaming service on the morning of the day it airs:

• EastEnders — BBC iPlayer at 6am, thirteen and a half hours before BBC One shows it.
• Emmerdale — ITVX at 7am, thirteen hours early.
• Coronation Street — ITVX at 7am, thirteen and a half hours early.
• Hollyoaks — Channel 4 at 7am, twelve hours before E4.

Those lead times are ours, worked out from the published drop times and broadcast slots. They matter more than they sound: anyone avoiding spoilers has a whole working day to get through, and the soaps' own social accounts post clips from the morning drop.

Which nights have no soap at all?

Saturday and Sunday. None of the four has a regular weekend episode, which is a comparatively recent state of affairs — Coronation Street and Emmerdale both used to appear at the weekend when episode counts were higher. The Hollyoaks omnibus on Channel 4 and E4 is the one weekend fixture, and it is a repackaging of the week's three episodes rather than new material.

The weekend catch-up window, and what is worth using it on, is set out in our weekend guide.

What happens when the football takes ITV1?

Emmerdale and Coronation Street lose their slot, and the episode is usually not moved to another evening — the week simply has fewer of them. ITV1 carries midweek cup football and internationals, and those matches run from about 7.30pm to well past 10pm, which swallows the soap hour whole.

The most recent case was the Carabao Cup on 16 September, when both ITV soaps came off; we explained that one in a separate piece. BBC One moves EastEnders far less often, and when it does the episode tends to be shifted to BBC Two rather than dropped.

Whatever changes in a given week, the running list is in this week's soap line-up.

How many soap episodes are there in a week?

Seventeen, when nothing is disrupted: five each from Emmerdale and Coronation Street, four from EastEnders, three from Hollyoaks. At half an hour apiece that is eight and a half hours of new British soap a week, or a little over seventeen hours if you also count the omnibus and the repeats.

The number falls whenever ITV1 takes a night for sport, which in an average autumn happens two or three times. It does not rise again afterwards — the lost episode is written out of the schedule rather than made up later.

For the evening's other fixed points, our sister site UK Quiz On Air covers the teatime and Monday-night quizzes that sit just before the soaps.

Questions readers ask

Are all four on at the same time as each other? No. The start times are deliberately staggered at half-hour intervals from 7pm, so on a Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday you can watch all four in sequence without missing any of them.

Do the soaps stop at Christmas? No, but the schedule shifts. Christmas Day and Boxing Day episodes are placed around the day's other programming, and the usual start times are not reliable for that fortnight.

Is the ITVX drop the same episode as the 8pm broadcast? Yes, the same episode, the same cut. The only difference is that the streaming version has no advertising breaks, so it runs a few minutes shorter.

Sources

• BBC schedules, BBC One — bbc.co.uk/schedules (21 September 2026).
• ITV guide, ITV1 listings — itv.com/watch/tv-guide.
• Channel 4 and E4 programme pages for Hollyoaks — channel4.com.
• TVmaze UK schedule and episode data — api.tvmaze.com.

By the UK Soap On Air desk · Updated 21 September, 9.18am BST