Public holidays by country

How to read the public holidays ranking

This list counts the national public holidays that the working-days calculator knows for each country in 2026. A country's holidays are stored as fixed calendar dates plus days defined relative to Easter Sunday, and the count is the number of those that fall in the year. Romania leads with 17, Azerbaijan has 16, Slovakia 15, and Lithuania, Slovenia, Croatia, Iceland and Kazakhstan 14 each. Estonia has 12, France 11 and Germany 9.

The bottom of the list is where the model's limits show. Israel is at 0 and Qatar at 1, Saudi Arabia at 2, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates at 3. This is not because those countries have no holidays: Jewish and Islamic holidays move with a lunar calendar and cannot be expressed as a fixed date or an Easter offset, so they are not modelled. Holidays defined as "the first Monday in May" or "the fourth Thursday in November" are not modelled either, which is why the United Kingdom shows 5 and the United States 5 rather than their full official lists. Countries with a count under 6 should be read as incomplete.

Two further caveats apply everywhere. Only national holidays are counted, so German state holidays, Swiss cantonal holidays and Australian or Canadian provincial days are excluded, and Germany's 9 is the federal minimum rather than what a worker in Bavaria gets. A holiday that falls on a weekend still counts as one holiday, even where the country gives no substitute day off, so the number of working days actually lost in 2026 can be lower than the count. The list is a fair guide for the European countries and less reliable elsewhere.

For how holidays and weekends turn into a working-days figure, see counting working days.