Zurich, Switzerland public holidays 2026

2026 at a glance

• National Day falls on Saturday 1 August and is not moved; Saint Stephen's Day falls on Saturday 26 December and is not moved, because Switzerland has no statutory substitute days.
• In 2026, public holidays fall on 7 weekdays in Zurich, two fewer than in 2025.

Switzerland has no statutory substitute days: a public holiday that falls on a Saturday or Sunday is not moved to a weekday. Only 1 August is a federal holiday; each canton's law makes some other days equal to a Sunday, and these counts include exactly those. Further cantonal rest days, days kept only in some areas and days that many employers give off by custom are listed but not counted.

Public holidays in 2026

9 dates are counted as non-working in Zurich in 2026; 7 of them fall on a weekday.

Working days and hours by month

Working days are Monday to Friday minus the counted holidays. Hours are shown for a 7.5-hour and an 8-hour working day.

• Jan 21 working days in January, 1 holiday
• Feb 20 working days in February
• Mar 22 working days in March
• Apr 20 working days in April, 2 holidays
• May 18 working days in May, 3 holidays
• Jun 22 working days in June
• Jul 23 working days in July
• Aug 21 working days in August, 1 holiday
• Sep 22 working days in September
• Oct 22 working days in October
• Nov 21 working days in November
• Dec 22 working days in December, 2 holidays

Compare with the rest of Switzerland

Long weekends in 2026

Runs of three or more days off in a row without taking leave.

• 4 days Friday 3 April 2026 to Monday 6 April 2026
• 3 days Friday 1 May 2026 to Sunday 3 May 2026
• 3 days Saturday 23 May 2026 to Monday 25 May 2026
• 3 days Friday 25 December 2026 to Sunday 27 December 2026

Best days to take leave in 2026

The longest single break for each number of leave days, built around a public holiday.

Leave plans for the whole year

Non-overlapping breaks that give the most days off for a given number of leave days.

Try any budget from 1 to 30 days in the leave planner

Countdown

The days to the next holiday appear here when JavaScript is on.

The working days left this month and this year appear here when JavaScript is on.

Count working days between two dates

Calendar and data downloads

The subscription works in Google Calendar, Outlook and Apple Calendar. The CSV file also lists the days observed by some.

About public holidays in Zurich

The canton of Zurich lists its public holidays on its labour-protection page, which states that nine legal holidays apply and that they are equated with Sundays under the federal Labour Act: New Year's Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Labour Day on 1 May, Ascension Day, Whit Monday, the federal holiday on 1 August, Christmas Day and St Stephen's Day on 26 December. The SECO table of Swiss holidays (December 2024) gives the same nine. Those are the days this page counts as non-working days, and nothing else is counted.

Zurich is one of the few German-speaking cantons that treats 1 May as a legal holiday. Several neighbours do not: Zug has no 1 May holiday in its cantonal list, and St Gallen's rest-day law does not name it either. Zurich also has no holiday for All Saints' Day, the Assumption or the Immaculate Conception, which are Catholic observances kept in Zug, Uri and Ticino. Next to the Ticino calendar the Zurich list is short, and the only saint's day on it is St Stephen's.

Four well-known days are deliberately outside the count. The canton's page names Berchtold's Day on 2 January, Shrove Monday, Sechseläuten and the Knabenschiessen as local, non-statutory holidays. Sechseläuten is the spring festival of the city's guilds, held on a Monday in April, and the Knabenschiessen is a shooting competition for young people held in September. Whether an employee in the city of Zurich has the day or the afternoon off depends on the employment contract, the staff regulations or a collective agreement, and working on these days needs no permit. Many city employers do give the time, so a person in the city may have two or three more days off than the legal list suggests, but the canton does not require it.

For the figures: in 2026 seven of the nine counted dates fall on a weekday, which leaves 254 working days, because 1 August and St Stephen's Day are Saturdays. In 2027 only five do, since 1 May and Christmas Day are Saturdays while 1 August and St Stephen's Day are Sundays, so the total rises to 256.

Zurich has no rule that moves a holiday when it falls on a weekend. The federal holiday falls on Saturday 1 August 2026 and on Sunday 1 August 2027; in neither year does a weekday replace it. Good Friday and Easter Monday follow Easter, so Good Friday is 3 April in 2026 and 26 March in 2027, with Easter Monday on 6 April and 29 March.

The Federal Day of Thanksgiving, Repentance and Prayer, the Bettag, is always on the third Sunday in September. Zurich does not add a Monday after it, unlike Vaud, so the day brings no weekday off here. Easter Sunday and Whit Sunday also fall on Sundays and do not alter the working-day figures.

Source and last check

Dates are calculated with the python-holidays library 0.108 and checked against the official sources below. Last checked: 15 November 2026.

Sources

• https://www.zh.ch/de/wirtschaft-arbeit/arbeitsbedingungen/arbeitsssicherheit-gesundheitsschutz/arbeits-ruhezeiten/feiertage.html
• https://www.seco.admin.ch/dam/de/sd-web/x5LtHPJdNis5/Anhang-Feiertage-Schweiz-Auszug-ArG-ArGV1-5-SECO-SB-2024-DE.pdf

How the counts are made