There is no deadline. Waiting longer costs you nothing, and the party is not less valid in March than it would have been in January.
Home at Dusk From £15.99 Taking a gift on the night? Home at Dusk is a stone house with the lamps lit and smoke from the chimney.
The two schools of thought
One camp waits until the house genuinely feels lived in: furniture placed, boxes gone, the spare room no longer a warehouse. Guests see the finished thing, and you are not apologising in every room. The other camp deliberately books it early and uses the date as a deadline, because a fixed evening in three weeks unpacks a house faster than good intentions ever have. Both work. Which one you are depends entirely on whether a deadline motivates you or ruins your month.
What actually constrains the date
Three practical things, and none of them is etiquette. Whether there is somewhere for people to sit. Whether the kitchen can produce food and drink for the number you have in mind. And, if the garden or a particular room is the reason you bought the place, whether it looks like itself yet, because a garden in February is a different argument for the house than the same garden in June.
Weekends, invitations and the neighbours
A Saturday afternoon or early evening suits most people, because most guests have no work the next morning and families with small children can come and go. Two to three weeks of notice is plenty for a relaxed party, and a little more around Christmas, when diaries fill up fast. If you will be loud or late, knock next door first, or slip an invitation through their door. In England and Wales the Noise Act 1996 lets the council act on noise from a home during "night hours", which the Act defines as 11pm to 7am, so that is a sensible time to bring the music down.
Where the word comes from
It is older than the modern flat-share suggests. the Online Etymology Dictionary dates housewarming to the 1570s, defining it as a "celebration of the entry of a family into a new home", from house plus a verbal noun from warm. The occasion has outlasted four and a half centuries of housing, so a fortnight either way is unlikely to be the thing that breaks it.
This opens the housewarming. Next to it, housewarming party ideas covers the evening itself, housewarming etiquette covers what guests owe you and you owe them, and how much to spend answers the question your guests are quietly asking each other. If somebody asks what to bring, housewarming gifts is the page to send them.
The 1570s date and the definition quoted from the Online Etymology Dictionary, read 3 September 2026. The night hours from section 2(6) of the Noise Act 1996 on legislation.gov.uk, read 22 October 2026.