December is the next round, and the colleges are published

Fall Commencement is Thursday 10 and Friday 11 December 2026, all three ceremonies at the Bernard Reed Green Coliseum, 118 College Dr.

When	Ceremony	Who
Thu 10 Dec, 5:00 p.m.	Graduate	All doctoral, specialist and master’s students
Fri 11 Dec, 9:00 a.m.	Undergraduate	Business and Economic Development; Education and Human Sciences
Fri 11 Dec, 2:00 p.m.	Undergraduate	Arts and Sciences; Nursing and Health Professions

That college split is the part worth acting on, and it is published rather than inferred. The two Friday ceremonies are five hours apart. A family with a nursing graduate and a business graduate is not choosing between two ceremonies, it is attending both, and it is in Hattiesburg from breakfast until the middle of the afternoon.

A family with a master’s candidate on the Thursday and an undergraduate on the Friday has an easier decision and a more expensive one: that is two nights, and there is nothing to weigh up.

Spring 2027 ends in a different city

This is the thing this page exists to tell you.

When	Ceremony	Where
Thu 13 May, 5:00 p.m.	Graduate	Reed Green Coliseum, Hattiesburg
Fri 14 May, 9:00 a.m.	Undergraduate	Reed Green Coliseum, Hattiesburg
Fri 14 May, 2:00 p.m.	Undergraduate	Reed Green Coliseum, Hattiesburg
Sat 15 May, 2:00 p.m.	All Coast-based undergraduate and graduate students	Mississippi Coast Coliseum, Biloxi

Southern Miss is not only a Hattiesburg university. Its Gulf Park campus graduates on the coast, and in spring 2027 that ceremony is on its own day, in Biloxi, roughly seventy miles and an hour and a quarter from the Hattiesburg campus.

If your graduate is Coast-based, Hattiesburg is the wrong town for that weekend and the Hattiesburg hotel arithmetic on our graduation hotels page does not apply to you. Biloxi is a casino coast with far deeper inventory and completely different pricing behaviour.

The awkward case is a family with graduates on both campuses. That is a Thursday-to-Saturday trip covering two cities seventy miles apart, and the sensible shape is usually Hattiesburg for the Thursday and Friday, then the coast for the Saturday night, rather than driving the corridor twice.

The college split for the two Friday ceremonies in May is not published yet. December’s is, so expect it to appear; do not assume it will match December’s.

No tickets, and no guest limit

Southern Miss is unusually clear here, and it is good news:

Tickets will NOT be required for entry into Reed Green Coliseum for the Fall 2026 commencement ceremonies. Students are permitted to invite any number of guests.

That removes the constraint that dominates planning at most universities this size. Bring who you like.

Two qualifications, both real. The statement is scoped to Fall 2026 in as many words, so it is a fact about December rather than a standing policy, and it is worth re-reading before May. And it says nothing about seating capacity: no tickets means no cap on who may come, not a guarantee that a party of twelve sits together. Ceremonies are streamed live for anyone who stays home.

What your graduate has to do, and the deadline that bites

This one is about the graduate rather than the guests, but it decides whether there is a ceremony to attend at all.

Fall 2026 candidates could reserve a commencement seat free of charge through 31 October 2026. Requests from 1 to 29 November carry a $100 late seating fee. After 29 November, Southern Miss states plainly that requests “will not be honored and those students will not be allowed to participate in the Fall 2026 commencement ceremony.”

The university’s two pages disagree on the closing date. The pre-graduation page gives 29 November. The registrar’s academic calendar gives 16 November as the last day to reserve at the $100 fee. We are not going to resolve a contradiction the university owns, so work to the earlier date and you are safe under either reading.

Getting in

Southern Miss publishes less guest-facing detail than most universities on this site, so this section is short on purpose. What is published:

• Prohibited items, from the commencement policy: air horns or noisemakers of any kind, alcohol, balloons, banners or posters, e-cigarettes or tobacco of any kind, weapons or sharp objects.
• Guests are asked to hold applause so every graduate’s name can be heard, which is a request rather than a rule but tells you the tone of the room.
• A live stream runs for anyone who cannot travel.

Not published anywhere we could open: a door-opening time, a bag policy, an expected ceremony length, and any guest seating capacity for the Coliseum. Those are genuine gaps rather than things we did not look for.

A parking notice that is not about December

Worth flagging, because the university’s own commencement page will mislead you here.

That page carries a line about parking lots being unavailable on the Thursday and Friday. Follow it to the parking page it links and the disruption is scoped to “Southern Miss baseball games scheduled for Thursday, May 14th and Friday, May 15th”, and the map it offers is a PDF named for spring 2026. Baseball in December is the tell: that notice was written for an already-held spring round and has not been rewritten.

What does appear durable, because it is tied to building work rather than to a fixture list, is the Reed Green Coliseum renovation and the accessible-parking access it changes. As a general statement about commencement at Southern Miss, rather than a December fact:

• M.K. Turk Circle is reserved exclusively for accessible parking, with a valid permit or placard required, and the renovations mean access is via 4th Street only.
• Kay James Drive is also accessible-parking only, reached exclusively from Montague Boulevard.
• Traffic around M.K. Turk Circle is restricted from 20 minutes before each ceremony, and the flow is reversed for about 45 minutes afterwards.
• Shuttle carts assist guests with mobility needs.

Treat all of that as the shape of the thing rather than as December’s plan, and check the parking page again once Southern Miss issues a December version.

What the two university pages disagree about

Southern Miss’s commencement page publishes both Friday ceremonies in full, with times and named colleges. Southern Miss’s own registrar academic calendar, for the same Friday, reads:

Friday, Dec 11   TBA

We are recording that rather than quietly picking a winner. In this case the commencement page is both more specific and more recently maintained, and the calendar entry reads as a placeholder nobody went back to update rather than a competing claim. Book against the commencement page. But if you see the calendar first and conclude Friday is unsettled, that is the university’s doing, not yours.

What we checked, and what we could not

Every date, time, venue and college assignment above was read directly from Southern Miss’s own commencement page and its Fall 2026 and Spring 2027 academic calendars on 18 August 2026. Every day of the week was checked independently against the calendar: 10 December 2026 is a Thursday, 11 December a Friday, 13 May 2027 a Thursday, 14 May a Friday and 15 May a Saturday.

No December ceremony is published for the Coast. Spring has one; the fall calendar names none. We are recording that as unpublished rather than absent, because the fall calendar’s Friday entry is itself a TBA, and a page that cannot state its own Friday is not a page we would read an absence off.

We have not measured hotel availability for either round, and the honest reason is that a single reading four months out is not a measurement. What the arithmetic and the distances say is on the graduation hotels page.