The NRL season opens in the first week of March, and the AFL season follows in the second half of the month. 1 March 2026 falls inside the opening rounds of both national football codes, at the same point on the calendar where Melbourne's Moomba festival runs across the Victorian Labour Day long weekend each year.
Retail, hospitality, healthcare and emergency services rosters regularly schedule staff to work on Sundays as part of standard shift patterns that do not follow the Monday-to-Friday week. 1 March 2026 falls on Sunday, a working day for these shift-based industries even though it sits outside the standard working-day count above.
The week number shown for 1 March 2026 counts full weeks from the start of 2026, a figure used in payroll cycles, rostering and any planning done in weekly or fortnightly blocks rather than by calendar month. Businesses running fortnightly pay runs rely on this figure to track which of the two alternating pay weeks a date falls in.