Zurich, Switzerland public holidays 2028

2028 at a glance

• New Year's Day falls on Saturday 1 January and is not moved, because Switzerland has no statutory substitute days.
• All 2028 dates are provisional – calculated from the rule, because official dates are published only through 2027.
• In 2028, public holidays fall on 8 weekdays in Zurich, three more than in 2027.

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 2028

9 dates are counted as non-working in Zurich in 2028; 8 of them fall on a weekday.

• provisional calculated from the rule

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 21 working days in February
• Mar 23 working days in March
• Apr 18 working days in April, 2 holidays
• May 21 working days in May, 2 holidays
• Jun 21 working days in June, 1 holiday
• Jul 21 working days in July
• Aug 22 working days in August, 1 holiday
• Sep 21 working days in September
• Oct 22 working days in October
• Nov 22 working days in November
• Dec 19 working days in December, 2 holidays

Compare with the rest of Switzerland

Long weekends in 2028

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

• 4 days Friday 14 April 2028 to Monday 17 April 2028
• 3 days Saturday 29 April 2028 to Monday 1 May 2028
• 3 days Saturday 3 June 2028 to Monday 5 June 2028
• 4 days Saturday 23 December 2028 to Tuesday 26 December 2028
• 3 days Saturday 30 December 2028 to Monday 1 January 2029

Best days to take leave in 2028

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