Summer at Tobay Beach is not ending on Labor Day this year. The Town of Oyster Bay announced this week that it will keep its flagship ocean beach open on weekends through the end of September, lifeguards and all, giving residents three extra weekends of sand and surf after the season officially closes.

The dates to put on the refrigerator

Tobay's regular daily season runs through Labor Day, September 7. After that, the beach will reopen with lifeguards on duty on three more weekends:

Saturday and Sunday, September 12 and 13. Saturday and Sunday, September 19 and 20. Saturday and Sunday, September 26 and 27.

Beach stickers from the 2026 season will be honored, so there is nothing new to buy and no separate pass to arrange. If your car got you onto the sand in July, it will get you on in September.

The extension applies to Tobay specifically. The town's other beaches, from Beekman in Oyster Bay hamlet on down, wind down on the usual Labor Day schedule, which makes the flagship the one place in town where the season genuinely keeps going.

Why September is the sleeper month

Anyone who swims here knows the secret the calendar hides: the ocean off Long Island is at its warmest in late August and early September, long after the crowds have thinned. The town is leaning into that. Supervisor Joseph Saladino said the extension is meant to let families hold onto summer a little longer rather than surrendering it to the school year, and the practical case is easy to make. The water is warm, the light is softer, the parking lots are emptier, and the beach you idled in an entry line to reach on the Fourth of July is suddenly wide open.

Tobay sits on Ocean Parkway about four miles east of Jones Beach, and daytime access is reserved for Town of Oyster Bay residents with a beach sticker. That residents-only rule, a sore point in July, becomes a quiet luxury in September when the sticker on your windshield buys you an uncrowded ocean beach that most of Long Island cannot drive into.

Two of the beach's biggest days land inside the extension

The extended weekends are not just for swimming. Two of the most popular events on Tobay's calendar fall inside the new window.

On Sunday, September 13, the town's free Waterfront Festival returns to the Tobay Marina, the family day of music, food and water activities that has become an end-of-season tradition. If the weather does not cooperate, the rain date is September 20.

On Sunday, September 27, the beach hosts the Long Island Fall Classic car show, closing out the month with chrome on the boardwalk-side lots. Either one turns a beach day into a full afternoon, and both now come with the option of a swim while you are there.

What this actually changes

Most ocean beaches on Long Island effectively shut after Labor Day. The sand stays public at many of them, but the lifeguards leave, the concessions close and swimming becomes officially off limits or genuinely risky. September swimmers are usually left choosing between a guarded pool and an unguarded ocean.

An extended lifeguard season changes that math. It means a family can plan a real beach day, with supervised swimming, for a Saturday in late September. It means the summer's last swim happens on a day you chose rather than the day the schedule chose for you.

So do not winterize the beach bag just yet. School may start, the sun may set earlier, but for three more weekends the lifeguard chairs at Tobay will be occupied, the ocean will still be holding its August warmth, and the season gets to end the way it should: with your feet in the water, not with a date on a calendar.