India Restricted Holidays 2026

The annual DoPT notification (O.M. F.No.12/2/2023-JCA) defines three tiers, and most confusion about Indian holidays comes from collapsing them into one. Annexure-I is the gazetted list: the office closes and nobody works. Central offices outside Delhi observe 14 of those days compulsorily — Republic Day, Independence Day, Gandhi Jayanti, Buddha Purnima, Christmas, Dussehra, Diwali, Good Friday, Guru Nanak’s Birthday, Idu’l Fitr, Idu’l Zuha, Mahavir Jayanti, Muharram and Milad-un-Nabi — and then add three more. Annexure-II is the restricted list, from which each employee personally picks two.

The three add-on days come from a fixed menu of twelve: an extra day for Dussehra, Holi, Janmashtami (Vaishnava), Ram Navami, Maha Shivratri, Ganesh Chaturthi, Makar Sankranti, Rath Yatra, Onam, Pongal, Basant Panchami, and the bundle of regional new-year festivals (Vaisakhi, Vishu, Ugadi, Gudi Padwa, Bihu, Cheti Chand, Navratra, Nauroz, Chhath Puja and Karva Chauth). The Central Government Employees Welfare Coordination Committee in each state capital chooses three, and that choice then binds every central office in the state — it cannot be changed afterwards.

This is why “how many holidays does India have” has no single answer. A central office in Chennai and one in Kolkata both get the same number of gazetted days, but not the same days — and every employee in both offices adds two personal restricted holidays on top.

The table above is Annexure-II of the O.M. dated 3 July 2025, in the order the notification prints it. The 34 entries occupy only 32 distinct dates, because January 14 carries both Makar Sankranti and Magha Bihu / Pongal, and March 3 carries both Holika Dahan and Dolyatra. Nine of those dates fall on a weekend and no substitute is given, which quietly removes them from play on a Monday-to-Friday week: Guru Ravidas’s Birthday (Sun Feb 1), Maha Shivratri (Sun Feb 15), Easter Sunday (Apr 5), Dussehra Saptami (Sun Oct 18), Naraka Chaturdasi (Sun Nov 8) and Chhath Puja (Sun Nov 15), plus Hazarat Ali’s Birthday (Sat Jan 3), Tagore’s Birthday (Sat May 9) and Parsi New Year (Sat Aug 15).

Five dates also collide with days the office is already closed, so choosing them buys nothing: Parsi New Year shares August 15 with Independence Day, Onam shares August 26 with Milad-un-Nabi, Dussehra Mahanavami shares October 20 with gazetted Dussehra, Naraka Chaturdasi shares November 8 with Diwali, and Guru Tegh Bahadur’s Martyrdom Day shares November 24 with Guru Nanak’s Birthday. Set the weekend dates and the collisions aside and exactly 20 of the 32 dates remain genuinely available as a working-day absence — still ten times the two you are allowed.

The list above is the one issued for central offices in Delhi and New Delhi. Elsewhere the state Coordination Committee may draw up its own restricted list around festivals of local importance, but it must include the nine occasions left over after that state’s three variable gazetted holidays have been chosen.

Being a restricted holiday is not a permanent status. Maha Shivratri is the clearest case: it was a gazetted holiday in 2025 (Wednesday, February 26), dropped to the restricted list for 2026 (Sunday, February 15), and stayed there for 2027 (Saturday, March 6). Ram Navami moved the other way — restricted in 2025 (April 6), gazetted for Delhi offices in 2026 (March 26). Both sit on the twelve-item optional menu, which is exactly why they can cross the line in either direction from one notification to the next.

The length of the list moves too — 34 occasions in both 2025 and 2026, then 32 in 2027 — and entries merge and split without warning. In 2025 Makar Sankranti, Magha Bihu, Pongal and Hazarat Ali’s Birthday shared a single line on January 14; in 2026 they were broken apart; in 2027 Makar Sankranti and Magha Bihu share January 14 while Pongal joins Guru Gobind Singh’s Birthday on January 15. Hazarat Ali’s Birthday appeared twice in the 2026 calendar year (January 3 and December 23) because the Islamic year is about eleven days shorter than the Gregorian one, then only once in 2027.

The practical rule: read the notification for the year you are planning, not the one you remember. A date carried over from last year’s calendar is the single most common way an Indian holiday list goes wrong — and because a gazetted day closes the office while a restricted day does not, getting the tier wrong is worse than getting the date wrong.

A restricted holiday is leave you request, not a closure you receive. The office runs normally that day, so approval depends on your department’s workload, and an unused restricted holiday neither carries forward into the next year nor converts to cash. It also sits outside your casual leave and earned leave balances.

Only central government employees are covered by the DoPT notification. Banks close on days notified under the Negotiable Instruments Act by the RBI and state governments, state government staff follow their own state list, and private employers design their own scheme — though a two-day optional-holiday policy modelled directly on the DoPT list is common in large Indian companies, precisely because it lets a religiously and regionally diverse workforce take the festival that matters to them.

Dates for the Islamic occasions on either list can shift by a day on moon sighting. The DoPT notification explicitly allows heads of department to announce the change without waiting for a formal amendment order, so confirm close to the date if you are scheduling around one.