US Holidays

What this tool shows

This is a calendar of United States holidays for any year you pick. It covers two different things that often get lumped together: the eleven federal holidays, on which federal offices, banks and the bond market close and most federal employees are paid without working; and the widely-marked observances such as Halloween, Valentine's Day and Mother's Day, which are ordinary working days no matter how many people celebrate them. The Type column keeps the two apart, and the "Federal only" switch hides the observances entirely when what you are actually planning is time off.

Why a holiday sometimes has two dates

A federal holiday keeps its calendar date, but the day off moves when that date lands on a weekend. Under 5 U.S.C. § 6103(b), a federal holiday falling on a Saturday is observed the preceding Friday, and one falling on a Sunday is observed the following Monday. The Observed column shows that second date whenever it differs, and leaves a dash when the holiday falls on a weekday and nothing moves.

2027 is an unusually busy year for this: Juneteenth falls on Saturday 19 June and is observed Friday the 18th; Independence Day falls on Sunday 4 July and is observed Monday the 5th; Christmas falls on Saturday 25 December and is observed Friday the 24th; and because 1 January 2028 is a Saturday, New Year's Day is observed on Friday 31 December 2027. That last one is the case most holiday lists get wrong — the closure happens in the previous calendar year, so it appears both at the end of 2027 and on its own date in 2028.

Only the fixed-date federal holidays can shift. The ones defined as a weekday — Thanksgiving (the fourth Thursday of November), Memorial Day (the last Monday of May), Labor Day, Columbus Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Presidents' Day — are already on a Monday or Thursday by construction and never move. Observances never shift either: nobody reschedules Halloween because it fell on a Sunday.

How the dates are worked out

Nothing here is a hard-coded table of dates that goes stale. Every holiday is stored as a rule and the date is derived for whichever year you select, which is why the year selector works for any year from 2000 to 2100. Christmas is a fixed date. Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday of November — not the last, which is a different day in years when November has five Thursdays. Memorial Day is the last Monday of May, not the fourth. Easter is computed with the Gregorian computus and can land anywhere between 22 March and 25 April, and Good Friday is derived from it as Easter minus two days. Black Friday is derived as the day after Thanksgiving rather than as "the fourth Friday of November", because when 1 November falls on a Friday those are two different dates a week apart.

Adding them to your calendar

Download .ics gives you a standard iCalendar file that imports into Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook and anything else that speaks RFC 5545. Each holiday becomes an all-day event marked as free rather than busy, so it will not make you look unavailable to anyone checking your schedule. The events carry stable identifiers, which means re-importing a later download updates the existing entries instead of leaving you with two of every holiday. The file follows whatever is on screen — flip "Federal only" on before downloading and you get just the eleven days that close the banks.

The eleven federal holidays

New Year's Day (1 January), Martin Luther King Jr. Day (third Monday of January), Presidents' Day (third Monday of February), Memorial Day (last Monday of May), Juneteenth (19 June), Independence Day (4 July), Labor Day (first Monday of September), Columbus Day (second Monday of October), Veterans Day (11 November), Thanksgiving (fourth Thursday of November) and Christmas Day (25 December). Juneteenth is the most recent addition, made a federal holiday in 2021.

Federal holidays are not national holidays in the sense that some countries have them. They bind federal employees and the District of Columbia; states set their own, and private employers are under no obligation to give any of them off. Columbus Day in particular is observed inconsistently — a number of states and cities mark Indigenous Peoples' Day on the same date instead, and several do not observe the day at all.

Every holiday name in the table links to a live countdown page showing exactly how long until it comes round again, along with its date for the next eight years.