Everything to Know About “Stranger Things” Season 5 (Including Premiere Date, Cast and Plot)

It’s almost time to head back to Hawkins.

The highly anticipated fifth and final season of Stranger Things draws closer, with the countdown on for the Nov. 26 premiere on Netflix. The upcoming installment of the sci-fi action series will be its last, as creators Matt and Ross Duffer previously confirmed in a letter to fans in February 2022.

“Seven years ago, we planned out the complete story arc for Stranger Things. At the time, we predicted the story would last four to five seasons,” they wrote at the time. “It proved too large to tell in four, but – as you’ll soon see for yourselves – we are now hurling toward our finale.”

Speaking to Variety in January 2025 about the series coming to an end, Finn Wolfhard, who plays Mike Wheeler, compared it to saying goodbye to his childhood.

“Everyone had a long journey and shared it together,” he said. “My whole childhood was there. It was sort of the Toy Story 3 moment of leaving your toys behind. It was really special.”

Now that Stranger Things is running up that hill to its final season, the cast and creators have teased what’s in store, including episode titles and premiere dates.

Here’s everything we know about Stranger Things season 5.

Which cast members are returning for Stranger Things season 5?

In January 2024, Netflix announced that the show had begun production for the final season, sharing a cast photo and confirming who was coming back.

Returning main cast members include Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Noah Schnapp, Sadie Sink, Joe Keery and Maya Hawke.

The cast picture also included Brett Gelman, Priah Ferguson, Cara Buono, Amybeth McNulty and Jamie Campbell Bower, the latter who joined the cast in season 4 as the show’s villain, Vecna.

Hawke told PEOPLE in June 2024 that filming the final season had been “heartbreaking” for her, even though she was a relatively recent addition to the cast.

“I mean, it’s the end of a really long journey. Longer for some of my castmates, even, than me. It’s really sentimental,” she said. “We shoot for a long time, so it’s reinvigorating [to bring] the joy and finding it everyday and making it new. It’s a really fun thing to do.”

Who is joining the cast of Stranger Things season 5?

In June 2023, Netflix announced that Linda Hamilton will join the cast of Stranger Things for the fifth and final season.

That said, the Duffer Brothers revealed in August 2022 that they were trying their best not to add new characters into the new season, and to be mindful about wrapping up the stories for the current players.

“We’re doing our best to resist [adding new characters] for Season 5,” Matt told IndieWire. “We’re trying not to do that so we can focus on the OG characters, I guess.”

Ross added, “We’ve got a great cast of characters here, and actors, and any moment we’re spending with a new character, we’re taking time away from one of the other actors.”

In addition to Hamilton, Nell Fisher, Jake Connelly and Alex Breaux have also been added to the fifth season’s cast.

What will Stranger Things season 5 be about?

In the fifth season, the Hawkins heroes are on the hunt for Vecna, who “has vanished — his whereabouts and plans unknown.”

“Complicating their mission, the government has placed the town under military quarantine and intensified its hunt for Eleven, forcing her back into hiding,” reads the official plot synopsis. “As the anniversary of Will’s disappearance approaches, so does a heavy, familiar dread. The final battle is looming — and with it, a darkness more powerful and more deadly than anything they’ve faced before. To end this nightmare, they’ll need everyone — the full party — standing together, one last time.”

The Duffer brothers have teased their endgame for the show in previous interviews, and it sounds emotional. In a conversation with TheWrap, Ross revealed that Netflix executives became emotional over their plans for season 5.

“We do have an outline for Season 5 and we pitched it to Netflix and they really responded well to it,” he said. “I mean, it was hard. It’s the end of the story. I saw executives crying who I’ve never seen cry before and it was wild.”

In May 2022, Harbour told Variety that he knows how the series ends and “it’s quite moving and quite beautiful.” Two years later, the actor described the series finale as the “best episode they’ve ever done” while appearing on the Happy Sad Confused podcast in October 2024.

“The end of this episode, when we were reading it — just us reading it — about halfway through, people started crying,” he said. “Then, about the last 20 minutes, it was just uncontrollably crying, waves of different people.”

More recently, in January 2025, Matt said in a press release that the upcoming season will be “intense from beginning to end,” but Ross added that it’s “also going to feel familiar.”

“This season is the biggest it’s ever been in scale, but everyone’s back together in Hawkins, interacting the same way they were in Season 1,” he said.

When will Stranger Things season 5 be set?

The show’s creators previously announced that season 5 will feature a time jump to more accurately portray their young stars who have grown up before viewers’ eyes during the show’s run.

“Ideally, we’d have shot [seasons 4 and 5] back to back, but there was just no feasible way to do that,” Ross told TVLine. “So these are all discussions we’re going to have with our writers when we start the room up.”

In November 2024, Netflix’s first season 5 teaser revealed that the show will be set in the fall of 1987 — a less significant time jump than fans were expecting, considering season 4 was set in the spring of 1986.

How many episodes will Stranger Things season 5 have?

In the Duffer brothers’ interview with TheWrap, they teased that season 5 won’t be as lengthy as season 4, which clocks in at about 13 hours long.

“I don’t think it’ll be as long,” Matt said. “The final few is going to be more like a Return of the Jedi in that … they’re going from the beginning. There’s going to be less ramp up. And I think people will understand what I’m talking about when they see the end of this season. It’s like, we’re just going.”

Matt’s initial predictions ultimately proved to be true. In November 2024, Tudum announced that season 5 will consist of eight episodes. A teaser confirmed the episode titles for season 5, including:

• Episode 1: “The Crawl”
• Episode 2: “The Vanishing of …”
• Episode 3: “The Turnbow Trap”
• Episode 4: “Sorcerer”
• Episode 5: “Shock Jock”
• Episode 6: “Escape From Camazotz”
• Episode 7: “The Bridge”
• Episode 8: “The Rightside Up.”

In an October 2025 Instagram post, Ross shared the runtime for the first four episodes.

The season premiere will run for one hour and eight minutes, with episode 2 clocking in at 54 minutes. Episode 3’s runtime is one hour and 6 minutes, and the fourth episode is one hour and 23 minutes.

When did Stranger Things season 5 film?

In August 2022, the Stranger Things writers’ room X account teased that they were getting started on the script for season 5 as they posted “Day 1” alongside a photo of a whiteboard with the text “Stranger Things 5.”

Though filming was originally scheduled to begin in the summer of 2023, it was postponed due to the writer’s strike.

In January 2024, Netflix announced that production had officially begun, sharing a black-and-white photo of the entire cast. Nearly a year later, filming wrapped in December 2024, and multiple members of the cast shared their thoughts on social media.

Alongside photos of the cast through the years, Wolfhard wrote in an Instagram post, “We just wrapped Stranger Things Season 5. I’m still in shock. We shot it for a year and I’ll miss all of my friends and our characters terribly.”

When will Stranger Things season 5 premiere?

Season 5’s eight episodes will be released on Netflix in three volumes.

The first four episodes will drop on Nov. 26, followed by three episodes on Christmas Day, and the series finale on New Year’s Eve. Each volume will premiere at 8 p.m. ET.

According to Tudum, the final episode will also be screened in select theaters across the United States and Canada, at the same time it premieres on Netflix. The screenings will run through the next day, Jan. 1, 2026.

In honor of Stranger Things Day on Nov. 6, the streamer released the first five minutes of the season 5 premiere.

Will there be any Stranger Things spinoffs?

While season 5 is the end of Stranger Things, it’s not the end of the franchise. The horrors of Hawkins came alive on the stage with Stranger Things: The First Shadow. The play debuted on London’s West End in December 2024, before transferring to Broadway in April 2025.

In November 2025, Netflix announced a new animated spinoff, Stranger Things: Tales From ’85, which is set to debut in 2026. The Duffer Brothers will produce the series, which will take place between seasons 2 and 3.

“Welcome back to Hawkins in the stark winter of 1985, where the original characters must fight new monsters and unravel a paranormal mystery terrorizing their town,” reads the official description.

Matt added in an announcement revealing the spinoff, “The idea was kind of to evoke a feeling of an ’80s cartoon.”

The Duffer brothers previously teased a potential spinoff idea in 2022. “There’s a version of it developing in parallel [to season 5], but they would never shoot it parallel,” Ross told Variety. “I think actually we’re going to start delving into that soon, as we’re winding down and finishing these visual effects, Matt and I are going to start getting into it.”

Though they have kept tight-lipped about the plot of the spinoff, Stranger Things star Wolfhard is already in on the secret after he correctly guessed what the new series would be. “Finn Wolfhard, he wasn’t spitballing, he just went, ‘I think this would be a cool spin-off,’ ” Ross recounted. “And we were like, ‘How in the world…”

In October 2025, the Duffer Brothers gave an update on the series, teasing that there would be a “connective tissue” between Stranger Things and the spinoff.

“You’re starting with new characters — it’s like clean slate. You’re not tied up into any knots. There’s something refreshing about it,” Matt told Variety.