Public holidays by country

How to use Public Holidays by Country

Choose the country, and the year if you are planning ahead. Scan the dates against whatever you are scheduling. Check the days either side — a holiday on a Thursday tends to take Friday with it. If the country has regional holidays, check the specific region rather than the national list.

Not all holidays behave the same way

The word covers several quite different things, and treating them alike is how plans go wrong. Fixed-date holidays fall on the same calendar date every year and move around the week. Moveable holidays land on a particular weekday, or follow a religious calendar that does not align with the civil one.

Regional holidays apply in one part of a country and not the rest. Observed holidays shift to the nearest working day when the real date falls on a weekend. Bridge days are not holidays at all, but the office is empty anyway. A holiday is a day when the shops are shut and the deadline you set is not.

Planning around them

The thing to check is not the single day but the shape around it. A holiday in the middle of a week costs one day; a holiday adjacent to a weekend often costs three or four, because people take the gap between as leave. Whole industries slow to a crawl for a week or two around the biggest national holidays, and a project plan that ignores this is optimistic in a way that will be discovered late.

Working across several countries, the sensible move is to lay all the relevant holiday lists next to each other before committing to dates, rather than after. It takes a few minutes and prevents the special kind of meeting where half the participants are unreachable and nobody knows why.

What a list cannot tell you

A holiday list tells you which days are official. It does not tell you which days are quiet, and those are different sets. Some official holidays barely dent normal business; some ordinary days before a major festival are effectively closed. Local knowledge beats a list here — if you have a contact in the country, one question to them is worth more than the calendar.

Rules also change. Governments add, move and remove public holidays, and one-off national days appear for particular occasions. For dates far in the future, treat the listing as the current arrangement rather than a guarantee.