When Is Christmas?

Because the date is fixed, everything on this page comes down to recognition rather than computation. Thirty calendars all write the same day, but they write it under six different names, and a page that only looked for “Christmas Day” would quietly lose Sweden (Christmas Day (Juldagen)), the United Kingdom in 2027 (Christmas Day (substitute day)), Malaysia’s replacement day, Macau’s compensatory rest day, Korea’s Substitute Holiday (Christmas) and the observed rows of the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Every date in the tables above is read out of each country’s own list under one of those names, which is also how three look-alikes stay out: Christmas Eve, Indonesia’s cuti bersama bridge day and Hong Kong’s statutory “Winter Solstice or Christmas Day”, a day the employer may pick in the second half of December that is not 25 December at all.

The absences matter as much as the coverage, because they are the answer to the question people actually type. Christmas is not a public holiday in China, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia, and in no year we publish for any of them does that calendar close on 25 December. Taiwan is the trap in the middle: 25 December is a public holiday there — every year, without exception — but it is Constitution Day, not Christmas, and because Taiwan arranges its holidays by annual calendar, the Constitution Day block slides off the 25th as the weekend demands: 25 to 27 December in 2026, 24 to 26 December in 2027, 23 to 25 December in 2028. That is why Taiwan is not a row in the tables above; a “you work that day” row would be a false statement about a day off.

Three consecutive days close the year in the Western calendars, and each of them is a different legal object. 24 December is gazetted as Christmas Eve in exactly two of the calendars on this page, in every published year: Macau and the Philippines. Indonesia’s annual joint decree has put a cuti bersama bridge day on 24 December in 2026 and 2027 (and on 26 December in 2025), and the United States observes Christmas on Friday 24 December for federal employees in 2027 — but nowhere else is the eve a holiday, which is why the German and French pages on this site answer “no, 24 December is a working day”. 25 December is the festival itself and the subject of the tables above. And 26 December is a second holiday with four different names: Boxing Day (our labels for the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and Germany), Second Christmas Day or the Second Day of Christmas (the Netherlands, Sweden), St. Stephen’s Day (Austria, Italy) and Saint Stephen’s Day (Ireland), and the Day of Goodwill (South Africa).

Nine of those calendars — Austria, Germany, Ghana, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Nigeria, South Africa and Sweden — carry the second day in every year we publish, because they never move a holiday off its own date. The Commonwealth countries do move it: when 26 December falls on a weekend, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Kenya transfer it, and Ghana adds an observed Boxing Day as well, which is why 2026 ends with a Monday 28 December in London, Sydney, Ottawa, Wellington and Accra. Hong Kong is the odd one out, because its second day is not named after a saint at all: the General Holidays Ordinance calls it, precisely, “the first weekday after Christmas Day” — Monday 27 December in 2027. On the other side of the season, four calendars extend the Christmas cycle into January with Epiphany on the 6th: Austria, Italy, Spain and Sweden. The Julian-calendar Christmas kept by some Orthodox churches on 7 January is not on any of our lists at all, so it is not on this page; Ghana closes on 7 January, but that is Constitution Day.

The date is fixed, the weekday is not. In the years this page publishes, 25 December is a Thursday in 2025, a Friday in 2026, a Saturday in 2027 and a Monday in 2028 — and 2027 is the one that breaks the calendars, because a fixed holiday on a Saturday buys nothing in a five-day working week unless the law says otherwise. In that year, twenty-six of the thirty calendars keep 25 December itself, four move the day off to Monday 27 December (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, all of whose only Christmas row for 2027 is the substitute), and four add a second day beside it: the United States on Friday 24 December, and Macau, Malaysia and South Korea on Monday 27 December. The other twenty-two get nothing back at all. That is a real difference of one working day, and it is the single most useful thing the year-by-year tables above show.

For anyone coordinating offices across hemispheres, the binding constraint is the union of the closures, and in December that union is wider than the festival. London, Sydney, Ottawa and Wellington lose Monday 27 December 2027 as well as the weekend before it, while Frankfurt, Paris, Amsterdam, Madrid, Stockholm and Singapore are open that Monday — their workers simply having spent Christmas on the Saturday. The long window to plan around is 24 to 28 December: Macau and the Philippines take the 24th, most of Europe and the Commonwealth take the 25th and the 26th in the years when they fall on weekdays, and the substitute days pile onto the Monday or Tuesday after. Every date in the tables above is taken from that country’s own official list, and each country page lets you import the same days as ICS or CSV.