HolidayTally

Methodology

HolidayTally publishes public holidays, working days and working hours for 105 jurisdictions in 36 countries. The 16 in the English-speaking world are England and Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland, Australia (national), New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, Canada (federal), Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec, New Zealand and the United States (federal). The 89 in Europe cover the 26 other member states of the European Union (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden) and Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, plus Switzerland through its cantons. Germany is covered nationwide and for each of its 16 states, Spain nationwide and for each of its 17 autonomous communities, France for the mainland and for Alsace-Moselle, and Switzerland for each of its 26 cantons. This page explains how every number on the site is calculated, so that you can check it against the official source.

Holiday dates are calculated with the open-source Python library holidays (python-holidays), pinned to a fixed version for each build. For each jurisdiction we count the holidays the library places in its "public" category. Canada (federal) is the one exception: there we count the "government" category, which holds the 10 general holidays of the Canada Labour Code (New Year's Day, Good Friday, Victoria Day, Canada Day, Labour Day, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Thanksgiving, Remembrance Day, Christmas Day and Boxing Day). The Canada Labour Code covers federally regulated workplaces; provincial pages follow the provincial lists.

Holidays that only some employers or sectors observe, such as bank holidays, optional holidays or regional days, are never counted as non-working days. When the data includes them, they appear in a separate list headed "also observed by some", with their own count, so that you can add them yourself if they apply to you; the Brisbane show day in Queensland is one of them. Regional days that the data does not include, such as the anniversary days of New Zealand's regions or the local days that replace Melbourne Cup Day in parts of Victoria, are described in the text of each page instead.

A working day is any day from Monday to Friday that is not a counted holiday. Saturdays and Sundays are not working days, with one exception: in Hungary, a Saturday that the government makes a working day by decree is counted as one (see "Working Saturdays and swapped days" below). When a holiday falls on a weekend and the law or the official calendar moves it to a weekday (a substitute day, also called an observed day or a day "in lieu"), we count the weekday and label it as observed. When a holiday falls on a weekend and nothing replaces it, it does not reduce the number of working days. An observed day can fall in a different calendar year from the holiday itself: in the United States, New Year's Day 2028 falls on a Saturday and is observed on Friday 31 December 2027, so that Friday counts as a non-working day in 2027 and appears on both year pages.

Ireland has no statutory substitute days. A public holiday that falls on a Saturday or Sunday is not moved to the following weekday, so the next Monday stays a working day in our counts. In 2027, for example, Christmas Day falls on a Saturday and St Stephen's Day on a Sunday, and 27 December 2027 counts as a working day. What an employee receives for a public holiday that falls on a weekend is set by the Organisation of Working Time Act 1997; Citizens Information explains the rule.

Canada follows two rules. Under the Canada Labour Code, when New Year's Day, Canada Day, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Remembrance Day, Christmas Day or Boxing Day falls on a Saturday or Sunday that is not a scheduled work day, the employee gets a paid day off on the scheduled work day immediately before or after it. The Canada (federal) pages count the work day after and label it as observed: in 2027 Christmas Day falls on a Saturday and Boxing Day on a Sunday, so Monday 27 and Tuesday 28 December 2027 count as non-working days. In Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec a holiday on a weekend is not moved to a fixed weekday, and what the employee gets depends on the province: in Ontario, a substitute day off arranged for each employee, or holiday pay alone if the employee agrees in writing; in British Columbia, statutory holiday pay; in Quebec, an indemnity or a compensatory day off; in Alberta, an employee who does not normally work that day, and does not work it, gets neither holiday pay nor a day off in lieu. Those pages therefore count no substitute weekday. The moves fixed by law are counted everywhere: Canada Day moves to 2 July when 1 July is a Sunday, and in Quebec the Fête nationale moves to 25 June when 24 June is a Sunday.

Europe follows the same principle, the law of each country, with a rule for what happens when a holiday falls on a weekend. In most of Europe nothing is moved: Austria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden and Switzerland have no statutory substitute days, so a public holiday on a Saturday or Sunday stays where it is and the following Monday remains a working day, as in Ireland. Bulgaria and Latvia do move some holidays: in Bulgaria the first working day after a holiday that falls on a weekend is a day off, and in Latvia the following Monday is a holiday when 4 May or 18 November falls on a weekend; those days are counted and labelled as observed. Greece can move Labour Day (1 May) by ministerial decision, announced year by year. In Spain, some autonomous communities move a Sunday holiday to the Monday by decree, published each year in the official gazette; we follow the published calendar. In Belgium, Luxembourg and Poland the employee is entitled to another day off for a holiday on a weekend, but the date is set by the employer or an agreement and not by law, so these pages subtract no replacement day: if yours falls in the period, count one working day fewer. In Malta a holiday on a weekend adds a day to the annual leave instead of moving. Each country page states its own rule.

Working Saturdays and swapped days. Some governments make a Saturday a working day in exchange for a bridge day, a weekday between a holiday and a weekend that becomes a day off. Hungary does this by a yearly decree that applies to employers with the general Monday-to-Friday schedule. For Hungary the bridge days are counted as non-working days and the Saturdays worked in exchange are counted as working days, so a month with a swapped Saturday has one more working day than the usual weekday count, and the year page lists each swap. Latvia also swaps days, but the order binds state institutions only and is a recommendation for private employers. For Latvia the bridge day is listed under "also observed by some" with the date of the Saturday worked, the Saturday stays a day of rest and nothing is counted. Bulgaria's government can instead declare a one-off non-attendance day for every employer, as it did for 2 January 2026; that day is counted. When the decree for a later year is not published yet, the page says so and the count may change by a day.

Which holidays are counted in Europe. We count what the law makes a public holiday in the whole country or, for Germany, Spain, Switzerland and France, in the whole region the page is about. Customary days and days off under collective agreements or custom, such as Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve in several countries, Midsummer Eve in Sweden or Good Friday in the Netherlands, are listed under "also observed by some" and are not counted. Holidays that apply only to part of a region (a district, municipalities with a Catholic tradition or members of a particular church, as with Assumption Day in Bavaria) are listed with a label and not counted. Local holidays are left out entirely: the two local holidays every Spanish town sets, the patron saint's day in Italian towns, municipal holidays in Portugal and communal holidays in Swiss cantons are not in any total, so a year in a place with a local holiday has one or two working days fewer than shown. Half days, such as Christmas Eve in Greece and Iceland or the shorter working day before some Estonian holidays, are listed under "shorter working days" and count as full working days. Days with no legal effect, such as school holidays, are not shown.

Swiss cantons. Switzerland has one federal holiday, 1 August; each canton sets the others. For each canton we count the holidays valid across the whole canton under cantonal law. Days that apply to only part of a canton, or only to a religion, are listed and not counted. There is no page for Switzerland as a whole, because a count on four shared days would not apply to any employee; the Switzerland page compares the 26 cantons instead.

Orthodox Easter. Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece and Romania date Easter by the Orthodox calendar, which often differs from the Western date by one to five weeks. Their Easter holidays follow the Orthodox date, and the Orthodox Easter page lists it for 2026 to 2035. The other countries use the Western date, and Good Friday, Easter Monday, Ascension Day, Whit Monday and Corpus Christi are counted from it. Holiday names on European pages are written in British English, whatever spelling the underlying data uses, so that one holiday has one name on every page (for example Whit Monday and not Pentecost Monday).

Working hours for each month are the number of working days multiplied by 7.5 hours and by 8 hours, the two most common full-time working days. Both figures are shown. They do not account for part-time contracts, shifts, flexible hours or leave.

Some dates are not yet confirmed by the government that sets them. Years beyond the last one an official source publishes, and holidays that are announced each year (such as the Friday before the AFL Grand Final in Victoria and, from 2028, Show Day in Western Australia) before their announcement, are calculated from the rule that has applied so far. They carry the label "provisional – calculated from the rule" on the pages and in the calendar downloads, and they are still counted. Each one is replaced by the official date once it is published.

Each page covers a window of years computed from the date the site is built: the current year and the next two, plus the previous year until 31 March, for anyone closing payroll or accounts. Pages for earlier years stay online as an archive but are left out of the sitemap. The first year covered is 2026. For many European countries only the next few years are fixed in advance and the rest follow the rule that has applied so far (the Spanish communities and Greece's Labour Day are announced year by year), so later dates carry the provisional label described above. Countdowns such as "days to the next holiday" and "working days left" are calculated in your browser when you open the page, never at build time.

Every build is cross-checked against official sources before it is published. For the three UK jurisdictions, every counted date is compared with the official gov.uk bank holidays data for each year that gov.uk publishes; any difference stops the build and the previous version stays online. For the other jurisdictions, the dates published on official government pages for 2026 to 2028 are recorded in the site's test suite and compared with the calculated dates on every build. Where an official source and the library disagree, the official source is followed and the correction is recorded with its source. Each year page shows the date its data was last checked. The site is rebuilt every month.

HolidayTally is an independent site, not a government source. If a date matters for pay, contracts or legal deadlines, confirm it with the official source below or with your employer. If you find a difference between our pages and an official source, please write to hello@holidaytally.com with the page, the date and a link to the source.

Data licence: the holiday data we publish, including the CSV files and the iCalendar feeds, is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). You may reuse it, commercially too, as long as you credit HolidayTally with a link to https://holidaytally.com.

Sources