Thirteen holidays, ten usable ones. Pascha (April 12) is a Sunday by definition, the Dormition (August 15) and the Second Day of Christmas (December 26) are Saturdays, and Greek law has no substitute-day mechanism, so those three add nothing to a Monday-to-Friday year. The remaining ten are what the calendar actually gives you: 1 January (Thu), 6 January (Tue), Clean Monday, 25 March, Good Friday, Easter Monday, 1 May (Fri), Whit Monday, 28 October (Wed) and Christmas Day. August is the painful month — the biggest summer holiday of the Greek year lands on a Saturday and stays there.

There is also no make-up work in the other direction. Greece has nothing like the Asian practice of turning a Saturday into a working day to pay for a long break: the 2026 calendar has no make-up workdays at all, and this page publishes an empty list rather than omitting the field. Whichever way you look at it, the Greek year only ever gives days off and never takes them back — which is exactly why the weekday and weekend spread of the thirteen dates is the number worth checking before you book anything.

Greece lives on a hybrid calendar. Fixed feasts — Christmas on December 25, the Epiphany on January 6, the Dormition on August 15 — follow the Gregorian calendar the Greek state adopted in 1923, so on those dates Athens, London and Berlin agree. Pascha does not: the Orthodox churches compute it from the Julian paschalion, tied to the Julian date of the vernal equinox (currently 13 April) and to their own paschal full moon, and they keep their own answer even when it matches the Gregorian one. In 2026 the two systems disagree by exactly a week — Gregorian Easter April 5, Orthodox Pascha April 12 — and in 2027 they split by five weeks, before coinciding again on April 16, 2028.

The practical rule: never copy an Easter-derived date from one country to another. Greece’s four movable holidays are Clean Monday (Pascha minus 48), Good Friday (minus 2), Pascha itself and Whit Monday (plus 50), and the offsets make the arithmetic checkable — Clean Monday and Whit Monday must be Mondays, Good Friday must be a Friday. For 2026 that yields February 23, April 10, April 12 and June 1, all confirmed against two independent sources, while the other nine dates are fixed on the calendar and need no computation. That is why this page and the ICS, CSV and PDF files behind its download buttons can carry 2026 through 2028 as confirmed rather than provisional data.

Nine of the thirteen dates are compulsory closure days for all businesses: 1 and 6 January, 25 March, Easter Monday, 1 May, 15 August, 28 October, and 25 and 26 December. That list is gathered in Article 60 of Law 4808/2021, with 1 May added by Article 14 of Law 4468/2017 and 26 December by Article 42 of Law 4554/2018. The other four — Clean Monday, Good Friday, Pascha Sunday and Whit Monday — are general days of rest inherited from the 1980 framework: state offices, banks and schools stop and retail usually follows, but a private employee’s pay runs through the applicable collective agreement rather than Article 60.

The same article that created the 1 May closure also created Greece’s only transfer rule, and it is worth knowing why 2026 does not need it. Article 14 of Law 4468/2017 lets the Labour Minister move the 1 May holiday by decision when that date coincides with a Sunday, a day of Holy Week or Easter Monday; every other holiday that lands on a weekend is simply spent there, because the transfer provisions of the old legislation were repealed by Article 7 of Law 1400/1983. In 2026 the rule lies idle — Pascha is April 12, so 1 May is a clean Friday well clear of Holy Week — and the year’s cost comes from the opposite direction: 15 August and 26 December, both compulsory closure dates, fall on Saturdays.