India Gazetted Holidays 2028

India operates a three-tier public holiday system. Three national holidays (Republic Day, Independence Day and Gandhi Jayanti) are mandatory for every establishment, public or private. Gazetted holidays are the Annexure-I list published each year by the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) — 17 days in recent years for central government offices in Delhi and New Delhi, widely followed by banks, PSUs and many private employers. Restricted holidays sit in Annexure-II: employees choose any two occasions from that list, and the office stays open on those days.

The dates on this page are not yet official. DoPT publishes each year’s Office Memorandum around the middle of the previous year — the 2027 list was issued on 16 July 2026 — so the 2028 circular is expected around mid-2027. Until it lands, this page follows the standing structure of the 2026 and 2027 Annexure-I lists (same 17 occasions) and dates every movable festival against two independent sources: the drikpanchang Hindu calendar for New Delhi and timeanddate’s India list. The page will be updated, and the provisional flag removed, as soon as the official notice appears.

Where 2027 was one of the weakest years in memory, 2028 is generous. All 17 entries fall on distinct calendar dates — there is no repeat of the 2027 collision between Independence Day and Milad-un-Nabi — and 13 of them land on a working day in Delhi. Only four dates are lost to the weekend: Id-ul-Fitr (Sunday, February 27, tentative), Holi (Saturday, March 11), Muharram (Sunday, June 4, tentative) and Janmashtami (Sunday, August 13). The DoPT rule is unchanged: no substitute holiday is granted when a gazetted holiday falls on a weekly off.

April opens the year’s leave planning with three long weekends in a row: Ram Navami on Monday, April 3 (Apr 1–3), Mahavir Jayanti on Friday, April 7 (Apr 7–9) and Good Friday on April 14 (Apr 14–16). None of them requires a single day of leave. May follows with Id-ul-Zuha on Friday the 5th (tentative) and Buddha Purnima on Monday the 8th — two more automatic three-day breaks, separated by just three working days.

Autumn is where a little leave goes furthest. Dussehra falls on Wednesday, September 27 and Gandhi Jayanti on Monday, October 2 — take just Thursday and Friday, September 28–29, and the two holidays merge into a six-day break. Two weeks later, Diwali on Tuesday, October 17 needs only Monday the 16th for a four-day break, and Guru Nanak Jayanti on Thursday, November 2 needs only Friday the 3rd for four more. Three leave days across the season buy fourteen days off.

Four dates on this page are tentative because they follow the Islamic lunar calendar: Id-ul-Fitr (Sunday, February 27), Id-ul-Zuha (Friday, May 5), Muharram (Sunday, June 4) and Milad-un-Nabi (Thursday, August 3). Each can shift by a day on moon sighting — some calendars already show Id-ul-Fitr on February 26, Bakrid on May 6 and Muharram on June 3. Note that the Eid and Muharram alternatives are also weekend dates, so the count of four holidays lost to the weekend holds either way; the Bakrid shift, however, would move the holiday off its Friday and break the four-day May 5–8 window.

This page deliberately lists no restricted holidays for 2028. Annexure-II is not a roll-forward list — DoPT curates it fresh each year (32 occasions in 2027, 34 in 2026), adding and dropping festivals, so projecting it would mean inventing dates. Expect the familiar anchors to return — Makar Sankranti and Pongal (both Saturday, January 15 in 2028), Raksha Bandhan (Saturday, August 5), Ganesh Chaturthi (Wednesday, August 23), Onam (Friday, September 1) and Chhath Puja (Monday, October 23) — but the official composition, and with it this page’s restricted-holiday table, will have to wait for the circular.

One gazetted slot to watch is Maha Shivaratri, which falls on Wednesday, February 23 in 2028. It was gazetted in 2025 but demoted to the restricted list in both 2026 and 2027. Which tier it lands in for 2028 is exactly the kind of call the Office Memorandum makes each year — and one reason to recheck this page once it is published.