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Law & Order: Special Victims Unit season 28: release date, cast and more

Mariska Hargitay will return as Olivia Benson as television's longest-running drama returns for a record-breaking 28th year

Guides by Avery Kaplan, Contributing writer

Published on Fri May 29 2026

The final episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit Season 27 aired on May 14th, 2026, bringing a child predator to justice and guaranteeing Captain Benson would stay in her position moving forward - but what kind of future can fans expect? NBC has already confirmed another season of Law & Order: SVU back in April 2026, and the new season will begin in Fall 2026.

Law & Order: SVU, created by Dick Wolf, is the longest continuously-running primetime drama series in American television history. (Law & Order, which SVU is a spin-off from, started nine years earlier, but went on hiatus for 11 years.) The show follows the detectives who make up the Special Victims Unit, which focuses on investigating and prosecuting sex-based crimes. SVU was the first spin-off of Law & Order, which has subsequently expanded to seven shows and a television film, along with five video games and five international adaptations.

The next season of SVU will see the return of Mariska Hargitay as Olivia Benson. Also expected to return are Ice-T as Odafin 'Fin' Tutuola and Peter Scanavino as Dominick 'Sonny' Carisi, Jr.

NBC has already confirmed that SVU Season 28 will be part of its Thursday night primetime line-up in the 2026/2027 broadcast season, with the show taking the 9pm ET/8pm Central timeslot. While NBC has yet to announce an official broadcast date for the season premiere, based on historical evidence, Law & Order: SVU Season 28 will begin in the week of September 2026, or potentially the first week of October.

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Avery Kaplan: Avery lives and writes in Southern California. She is the co-author of Double Challenge: Being LGBTQ and a Minority with her spouse, Rebecca Oliver Kaplan. Avery is Features Editor at Comics Beat, and you can also find her writing on StarTrek.com, The Gutter Review, Geek Girl Authority, and in the margins of the books in her personal library.