Holidays Calendar - Public Holidays Around the World

Key features

• 138 countries: Every continent is covered, with public, religious, civic and cultural observances bundled into one list per country.
• Three rolling years: Current year plus the next two. The window auto-advances at midnight on January 1st - no manual update needed.
• Live time-left countdown: Every upcoming holiday shows the exact number of days remaining. Past holidays are grayed out but kept on the page for reference.
• Weekday on every row: Each date shows the day of the week so you can spot long weekends and plan trips accordingly.
• Searchable country picker: Type a few letters in the dropdown search field to jump straight to a country - no scrolling through 138 options.
• Religious and movable feasts handled: Catholic Easter, Orthodox Easter, Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, Diwali, Lunar New Year, Vesak and many more are computed correctly per year.
• Saved locally: Your last country and year selection are remembered in localStorage, so the same view is waiting for you next time.
• Works offline: Once the page is loaded, the calendar runs entirely in your browser. The dataset is small enough to cache.
• Dark, light & 6 color themes: Matches the rest of stopwatch-online.com - dark, light, red, teal, blue, purple, green, slate.

How to use the holidays calendar

Step 1: Pick a country

Click the country field at the top of the card. A scrollable list of 138 countries appears with a small search box at the top. Either scroll or type a few letters and the list filters to matching countries. Click a row to select it - the table refreshes immediately with that country's holidays.

Step 2: Pick a year

Three year tabs sit just above the table. The first tab is always the current year, the next two are upcoming. Tap a tab to switch the table to that year. As soon as the current year ends, the tabs roll forward automatically so the calendar is always one click away from the next three years of holidays.

Step 3: Read the table

Each row shows three things: the date in a friendly format like 1 May Friday, the holiday name in plain English, and the time left in days. Holidays that have already passed in the active year are grayed out and labeled "Passed" in the time-left column - their dates and weekdays remain visible so you can still use the table as a reference.

How the dates are calculated

Most holidays are simple: New Year's Day is January 1st, Christmas Day is December 25th. But a meaningful chunk of the world's holidays are movable - they shift dates every year because they're tied to lunar or religious calendars. Our calendar handles them all:

• Catholic Easter: Computed using the standard Gauss algorithm from Computus, which gives the Gregorian date of Easter Sunday for any year. Good Friday, Easter Monday, Ascension Day, Pentecost and Corpus Christi are all derived as offsets from that single date.
• Orthodox Easter: Computed via the Julian-calendar version of Computus, then converted to Gregorian (currently +13 days). Used for Greece, Russia, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Egypt's Sham El-Nessim and several other countries.
• Islamic holidays: Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, Ashura, Islamic New Year and the Prophet's Birthday are computed by mapping their Hijri-calendar dates (e.g. 1 Shawwal for Eid al-Fitr) to Gregorian using astronomical conversion. Real-world dates may shift by ±1 day depending on local moon-sighting.
• Lunar New Year: Chinese, Korean (Seollal), Vietnamese (Tết), Tibetan and Mongolian New Years are all anchored to the Chinese lunar calendar. Dates are pre-tabulated for 2026-2029.
• Hindu and Buddhist feasts: Diwali, Holi, Vesak, Ganesh Chaturthi and many others are computed from Indian lunisolar calendars. Dates are pre-tabulated per year.
• Floating weekday rules: US Thanksgiving (4th Thursday of November), UK Spring Bank Holiday (last Monday of May), Japan's Coming of Age Day (2nd Monday of January) and dozens of others are computed from weekday-in-month rules.

When a holidays calendar is useful

Travel planning

Before booking flights, hotels or museum tickets, check the destination's holidays calendar. A "great deal" on a hotel might turn out to be the day half the city is closed for a public holiday - or, on the flip side, the day everything is festive and worth witnessing.

Remote and international teams

If your team is spread across multiple countries, a quick scan of each country's holidays prevents the classic "why isn't anyone replying?" moment. Pair this with our world clock and you have a full picture of who's working, who's asleep and who's on a national holiday.

Long weekends and trip planning

The weekday column is the secret weapon. A holiday that lands on a Thursday or Tuesday almost always becomes a four-day weekend in practice - take one day of vacation, get four days off. Scanning the table for those patterns is the fastest way to plan a year of getaways.

School and academic calendars

Parents juggling school holidays across countries (e.g. expat families, divorced parents in different countries) can compare three years at a glance to spot when both calendars line up.

HR and payroll

Small companies that don't have a payroll provider's holiday calendar baked in can use this page to set leave policies, observed-day rules and overtime pay schedules.

Marketing campaigns and editorial calendars

Many marketing moments hinge on holidays - Black Friday, Lunar New Year, Eid al-Fitr, Diwali, Mother's Day. Knowing the exact date in each market several months ahead is the foundation of any reasonable content calendar.

Different kinds of holidays explained

• Public holiday: A day on which government offices, banks and most businesses are legally allowed (or required) to close. Christmas Day, New Year's Day, Independence Day.
• Bank holiday: A UK/Ireland term for a public holiday, originally tied to days when banks would not clear cheques. Practically synonymous with "public holiday" in those countries.
• Religious holiday: Tied to a religious calendar. Easter, Diwali, Eid al-Fitr, Vesak. Some are also public holidays; others are observed culturally without official closure.
• Civic / national holiday: Commemorates an event in the country's history. Independence Day, Bastille Day, Republic Day.
• Observance: A day with cultural or social significance but no official day off. Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Halloween, Black Friday in the US.
• Movable feast: A holiday whose date changes every year. Most religious feasts and weekday-anchored holidays fall into this group.

Our calendar bundles all of these into one list per country, so you don't have to remember whether something is "official" or "cultural" - if it's worth knowing about, it's there.

Tips & tricks

• Long-weekend hunt: Sort visually by the weekday column. Any holiday on Thursday or Tuesday is a candidate for stretching into a four-day weekend.
• Compare neighbors: Open two browser tabs - one for each country - to instantly compare overlapping public holidays. Useful when planning cross-border travel or scheduling shared meetings.
• Set the year ahead. The far year is always two years out from today. Use it to plan major events (weddings, anniversaries) far in advance.
• Bookmark the page. Your country and year are saved in localStorage, so a single click from a bookmark drops you straight back where you were.
• Holidays are localized: The same calendar moment can be called different things in different countries (e.g. "Independence Day" varies by date and meaning). Always check the country tab, not just the holiday name.

Frequently asked questions