About Global Holidays Calendar

Our mission

Global Holidays Calendar publishes multilingual public-holiday calendars for countries and regions worldwide. We exist because a wrong holiday date is not a cosmetic bug — it ships into ICS, CSV, and PDF files that people import into real payroll, travel, and school calendars.

Our goal is to be the calendar you can trust: every closure date traceable to an official notice, every make-up workday explicitly verified, and every provisional year clearly labelled until the government publishes the final arrangement.

Who we are

Global Holidays Calendar is maintained by a small editorial team of calendar researchers and native-language copy editors. We cover 28 countries and regions in English, 中文, 日本語, and ไทย, with partial rollouts in Tiếng Việt, Bahasa Indonesia, and Bahasa Melayu.

We are not a generic date aggregator. Each country page is hand-built from primary government sources — State Council notices for China, Cabinet Office proclamations for Japan, Ministry of Manpower circulars for Singapore, DoPT Office Memoranda for India, OPM schedules for the United States, and comparable official publications for every market we cover.

Why official primary sources matter

Calendar farms often copy each other or infer lunar dates from neighbouring countries. We do not.

Our editorial rule is simple:

1. Find the government notice — a gazette, cabinet circular, labour-ministry announcement, or statutory instrument.
2. Cross-check with a second independent source — another official portal, a national observatory, or an established reference that cites the same notice.
3. Never infer a date — if no official notice exists, we mark the year provisional and explain what is still pending.

An empty makeupWorkdays array means we checked and confirmed there are none. Omitting the field means nobody has verified it yet — our code treats those differently, and so do we.

Make-up workdays and bridge holidays

Many countries move rest days or declare compensatory workdays when a holiday falls on a weekend. China's State Council publishes full holiday arrangements — not just the days off — and we reproduce those exactly. Japan's 振替休日 (substitute holidays) follow Cabinet Office rules. South Korea's substitute holiday law creates different patterns again.

We list make-up workdays separately from public holidays so downloaded calendar files stay accurate for HR and payroll use.

Lunar, Islamic, and observational calendars

Lunar holidays do not share a single global date. Seollal in South Korea and Spring Festival in China can fall on different civil dates when the new moon falls between their respective midnights. Islamic public holidays in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria depend on moon sighting and may shift after the initial announcement.

When a government has not yet confirmed the civil date, we set dataConfidence: 'provisional', state the basis of our estimate, and update the page the same day the official notice lands.

Accuracy commitment

We correct errors as soon as we verify an official update. If you spot a date that differs from a government notice, please use our contact page — include the official URL and we will review it within two business days.

See our full data sources page for the gazettes and ministries we cite for each country.