Public holidays

Below you will find all the statutory public holidays — the days on which the country as a whole, or in some cases only part of it, does not work. Click a holiday to see its date in the coming years, the day of the week it falls on and the essentials worth knowing. On public holidays most shops are closed and public services run a reduced timetable.

Statutory public holidays

Public holidays are the days on which most people do not go to work, most shops keep shorter hours and public offices work to a reduced service. Some of them fall on a fixed date every year — New Year's Day and Christmas Day, for instance — while others depend on the date of Easter and therefore move: Good Friday and Easter Monday shift by as much as a month from one year to the next. A third group is tied to a weekday rather than a date, such as the holidays that always fall on the first or the last Monday of a month. Two things are worth checking for any given holiday: whether it moves to the next working day when it falls at a weekend, and whether it applies nationwide or only in part of the country.