We develop a methodology to determine which days are “equity premium events”: events with significantly elevated equity premia relative to the daily equity term structure. To do so, we use recently available daily S&P 500 option expirations and forward analogs of option-implied ex ante measures of the equity premium. We use a data-driven approach to identify events that are significantly priced without taking a stance on what those events are. A variety of individual events are associated with significantly elevated equity premia. Among macroeconomic releases, FOMC, CPI, and nonfarm payrolls have the largest abnormal equity premia, which increase substantially between June 2022 and June 2023. However, the elevated equity premia on macroeconomic release days account for a significantly smaller share of total expected returns compared to previous estimates using realized excess returns. To provide intuition for the significant variation in equity premia across announcement types and time, we propose an asset pricing framework that decomposes the equity premium for a given macroeconomic release into components due to news variance and the sensitivities of the stock market and the SDF to the news released.