This site is an independently edited static reference. It is not a government gazette and it is not legal, payroll or immigration advice. The dates are compiled so a traveller or a remote team can see, without JavaScript, which public-holiday names attach to which dates in which territory. When a government later changes a bridge day, the page should change; until then we would rather show a gap than a guess.
Primary public sources, by market
- Mainland China — the State Council regulation on festival holidays for statutory length; the General Office circular for the year’s leave windows and makeup days, as published on gov.cn.
- Hong Kong — the General Holidays Ordinance and the Labour Department / gov.hk list.
- Macau — the Labour Affairs Bureau mandatory-holiday list.
- Taiwan — the Directorate-General of Personnel Administration holiday calendar.
- Japan — the Act on National Holidays; equinox dates confirmed by the Cabinet Office. Company Obon and year-end shutdowns are not national holidays and are not painted as such here.
- South Korea — the regulations on public holidays of government offices, including substitute public holidays.
- Singapore — the Ministry of Manpower public-holiday list, including weekend substitutes.
- Thailand — Cabinet-announced public holidays, including optional bridge days.
- Vietnam — the Labour Code and government notices; plant downtime is a company fact, not a gazette fact.
- Indonesia — government decisions on religious holidays and decrees on collective leave.
- Philippines — presidential proclamations distinguishing regular holidays from special non-working days.
- United States — federal statute and the OPM federal holiday table. States and private employers differ.
- United Kingdom — GOV.UK bank-holiday tables. England and Wales are the default view; Scotland and Northern Ireland add local days.
What we will not invent
Islamic dates that still depend on a moon sighting or a late ministerial confirmation stay unmarked as final until that confirmation exists. Thai Cabinet bridge days and Indonesian collective-leave decrees are the same. Folk “next year China calendars” published before the General Office circular are treated as unofficial. Vesak, Buddha’s Birthday and the equinoxes are overwritten by the year’s official list when it appears.
Two territories can share a Gregorian date and not share a holiday. Each record is stored as date + territory + name so that 4 May 2026 is Labour Day in China, Greenery Day in Japan, the Early May bank holiday in England and Coronation Day in Thailand — four lines, not one slash-joined string. If you saw merged names on an older page, that was a data defect and it has been split.
Out of scope
- State, provincial or municipal holidays except where they are the only practical federal analogue
- Company PTO, shutdown weeks and flexible-hours policies
- School calendars and half-day market sessions
- A maintained 2024/2025 archive; the working view is 2026
Corrections: email soulbeetroot@gmail.com with the territory, language edition, the date you believe is wrong, and a link to the official notice. We aim to check and patch the static HTML within a few business days. More about the operator is on the About page.
How a page is built
A country URL in English or Simplified Chinese is assembled from four layers: the 2026 date table filtered to that territory, a short orientation taken from the shared content file, a long original essay that exists only for that territory and language, and a compare note that names the neighbours a reader of that page actually has to reconcile. Traditional Chinese and Japanese get a single hub plus policy pages so we do not republish the same thin shell thirteen more times. Guide articles are written twice — once in Chinese, once in English — and are not a translation memory dump.
When we change a date we regenerate the static HTML and the sitemap. There is no database and no user-generated copy. If a crawler sees JavaScript-only calendars and empty article tags, it is looking at an old deploy. The current generator embeds the table and the essay in the HTML.
We would rather publish thirteen deep pages and two language-specific guide sets than fifty-two cloned country URLs. That choice is editorial, not a growth hack. If you need a jurisdiction we do not cover, write to us with the official list; we will not invent a fourteenth country from a tourism brochure.