Philippines Holiday Calendar

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Philippines 2026 regular holiday guide

Last reviewed 2026-09-23 · Maintained by the site operator

Philippine holidays distinguish regular holidays from special non-working days. Common dates include New Year’s Day, People Power anniversary, Holy Week observances, Araw ng Kagitingan, Independence Day, National Heroes Day, All Saints’ Day, Bonifacio Day, Christmas, and Rizal Day. Christmas through New Year is a major family and retail season.

In Manila and Cebu, Holy Week slows many offices. BPO teams usually plan coverage rather than a full shutdown. Weather risks in storm season can compound holiday travel disruption.

Pay rules depend on holiday classification and company policy — confirm with HR and DOLE guidance.

Planning tips

Philippines 2026 public holiday table

This 2026 view lists 15 public holiday dates for Philippines. The earliest entry is 2026-01-01 (New Year's Day, Thu) and the latest is 2026-12-31 (New Year's Eve). The table below is fully readable without JavaScript.

DateWeekdayHoliday
2026-01-01 Thu New Year's Day
2026-02-25 Wed EDSA People Power Anniversary
2026-04-02 Thu Maundy Thursday
2026-04-03 Fri Good Friday
2026-04-09 Thu Day of Valor
2026-05-01 Fri Labour Day
2026-06-12 Fri Independence Day
2026-08-31 Mon National Heroes Day
2026-11-01 Sun All Saints' Day
2026-11-02 Mon All Souls' Day
2026-11-30 Mon Bonifacio Day
2026-12-08 Tue Immaculate Conception
2026-12-25 Fri Christmas Day
2026-12-30 Wed Rizal Day
2026-12-31 Thu New Year's Eve

Note: Compiled from public notices for planning. Confirm critical dates with official sources.

Why the category of a holiday matters more than the date

The Philippine calendar sorts its days off into classes, and payroll depends on which class a date belongs to. Regular holidays are the higher tier: qualified employees are paid for the day even if they do not work, and working on one attracts a premium rate. Special non-working days operate on a different default, commonly described locally as 'no work, no pay', meaning the day is unpaid unless a company policy, employment contract or collective agreement provides otherwise, and the premium for working is lower than on a regular holiday.

There is a third variant, the special working day, which is a commemoration with no change to pay or attendance at all. It looks like a holiday in news coverage and is not one in practice.

The Department of Labor and Employment issues a pay-rules advisory each year setting out the multipliers for every combination: worked or not worked, overtime, a holiday landing on an employee's rest day, and two holidays coinciding on the same date. Read the current year's advisory rather than relying on memory, because the categories assigned to individual dates do move between years.

The calendar is a proclamation, not a fixed statute

Nationwide holidays are declared by the President through a proclamation, normally issued during the preceding year so that employers can roster and families can book. That gives the calendar a useful degree of advance certainty, but it is a different kind of certainty from a fixed statutory list. A given commemoration can be a regular holiday in one year, a special non-working day in another, and in some years not a day off at all.

Additions after publication are routine. The President can declare an extra special non-working day at short notice for a major national event, a state or papal visit, or a nationwide election. Local government units separately declare city and provincial holidays for charter days and patronal feasts, valid only within their jurisdiction, which is why a national list will not always tell you whether offices in Cebu, Davao or a particular Metro Manila city are open.

Legislation also allows certain commemorative holidays to be moved to the nearest Monday to create long weekends, an approach discussed locally as holiday economics. Whether a specific date is moved in a specific year is decided in the proclamation, so it cannot be worked out from the calendar alone.

The 2026 dates and how they fall

Two features stand out in 2026: a Holy Week at the start of April, and a dense run of dates across November and December.

Holy Week, the week the country actually stops

Semana Santa is the largest annual shutdown after Christmas. In 2026 Maundy Thursday falls on 2 April and Good Friday on 3 April. Black Saturday, 4 April, is frequently declared a special non-working day, which is worth confirming against the proclamation because it changes whether the break runs three days or four.

The closure is deeper than on an ordinary holiday. Malls, offices, banks and government agencies shut on Thursday and Friday, public transport thins out, and Metro Manila becomes genuinely quiet. The movement happens earlier: from Wednesday afternoon, provincial bus terminals, ferry ports and airports hit one of their busiest points of the year as workers based in the capital travel home.

Observance has distinct local forms. Visita Iglesia is the practice of visiting seven churches to pray on Maundy Thursday. Pabasa is the chanted reading of the Passion narrative, which can run continuously for many hours in a neighbourhood chapel or a temporary shelter built for it. Senakulo are staged passion plays performed outdoors. In parts of Pampanga, penitents flagellate themselves in the street and crucifixion re-enactments take place, which draw crowds and are not endorsed by the Church.

On Good Friday, Catholics abstain from meat, many restaurants close, and some local governments restrict alcohol sales. Easter Sunday on 5 April returns the country to normal, then the inbound traffic flow occupies another day or two. Treat the whole first week of April as unavailable for anything time-critical.

Undas: the first days of November

All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day are known together as Undas, and they are among the most socially significant days of the Filipino year. Families return to cemeteries to clean graves, light candles, bring flowers, and then stay for hours: food is brought, tarpaulins are strung up for shade, relatives who rarely meet sit and talk, and some families arrive the night before and stay through.

In 2026 the pair falls on Sunday 1 November and Monday 2 November, forming a three-day stretch from Saturday 31 October. The outbound travel surge concentrates on 30 and 31 October, with extra provincial bus trips added, higher volumes at airports and seaports, and traffic management around major cemeteries. Many cemeteries prohibit alcohol, bladed items and large sound systems on these days.

Do not conflate the 31st with the two days that follow. Halloween in the Philippines is largely a commercial and school-level affair of costumes and mall events. The culturally weighty part is the cemetery visit, and it determines which direction the traffic moves.

A Christmas season measured in months

Filipinos refer to the 'ber months', meaning September through December, and the point of the phrase is that the season starts as soon as the month name ends in ber. Radio stations begin playing Christmas music, malls change over their decorations, and office parties start being planned long before December arrives.

The concentrated religious part runs from 16 to 24 December with Simbang Gabi, a series of nine dawn Masses also known as Misa de Gallo. Churches fill before sunrise and stalls outside sell seasonal rice cakes such as bibingka and puto bumbong. On the evening of the 24th, Noche Buena is the family meal held around midnight, and godparents give aguinaldo, a gift or cash, to their godchildren.

Employers have a hard deadline embedded in this period. Thirteenth month pay is legally mandated and must be settled on or before 24 December, which makes the first half of December the heaviest cash-flow point of the Philippine year and a peak period for retail and remittances.

The back end of December is effectively one continuous block. Christmas Day is Friday 25 December, Rizal Day is Wednesday 30 December and the Last Day of the Year is Thursday 31 December, leaving only Monday 28 and Tuesday 29 as working days, and most companies run those on skeleton staff. New Year's Eve is Media Noche: another midnight family meal, heavy fireworks, tin horns called torotot, round fruits laid out for luck, and children jumping at midnight.

The dates that carry the national story

The EDSA People Power Anniversary on 25 February commemorates the days in February 1986 when crowds gathered along EDSA in Metro Manila and the Marcos government fell. Its holiday status has been one of the most frequently revised items on the calendar in recent years, moving between special non-working day, working commemoration and other treatments, so confirm it in the proclamation for the year you are planning.

Araw ng Kagitingan on 9 April marks the fall of Bataan in 1942 and the death march that followed, with the principal ceremony held at the shrine on Mount Samat in Bataan. Independence Day on 12 June returns to the 1898 declaration at Kawit in Cavite; in 2026 it lands on a Friday and produces a long weekend.

National Heroes Day is the movable one. It falls on the last Monday of August, which in 2026 is 31 August, and foreign teams working from a fixed-date assumption get this wrong regularly. Bonifacio Day on 30 November honours the birth of Andres Bonifacio, founder of the revolutionary Katipunan, and is tied to its date rather than to a Monday, though in 2026 it happens to be a Monday anyway. Rizal Day on 30 December marks the 1896 execution of Jose Rizal at what is now Rizal Park in Manila, where wreath-laying takes place.

The Feast of the Immaculate Conception on 8 December, a Tuesday in 2026, is a comparatively recent nationwide addition and sits alongside the civic commemorations as a reminder of how closely Catholic observance and national narrative are woven into this calendar.

The two Islamic holidays that cannot be printed in advance

Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha are both nationwide holidays in the Philippines, applying across the country rather than only in Muslim-majority areas. They are absent from the fixed table on this page for a structural reason: their dates depend on lunar observation and are only settled when the President issues a separate proclamation.

The sequence runs from Islamic religious authorities and the national body for Muslim Filipino affairs, which recommend the date after the moon is confirmed, to the proclamation itself. That often happens only days ahead, sometimes very close to the day, so calendars printed early in the year can do no more than mark the observance as pending.

The Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao also keeps its own regional observances and declarations. If any part of your operation sits there, the national list alone will not describe the working year accurately.

What closes, what does not, and the outsourcing exception

Government agencies, courts and public schools close on holidays. Bank branches close and central bank clearing is suspended, so interbank and cross-border transfers settle only after the break. With the December cluster, a payment initiated late in the month can sit for several days, which matters for year-end obligations.

Retail behaves in the opposite direction. Large mall chains trade normally on most special non-working days and often extend hours because foot traffic rises, and convenience stores barely close. The genuine mass-closure days are Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and parts of Christmas Day.

Then there is the structural feature that surprises people comparing the Philippines to its neighbours: the business process outsourcing sector works through nearly every national holiday, because it follows client calendars offshore, with holiday premiums paid to staff who are rostered. A nationwide holiday therefore does not imply your Philippine support desk is dark. Assess online service coverage and anything requiring a bank, a government office or a wet signature separately, and write holiday coverage into the contract explicitly.

A detail that catches visitors: the vehicle number coding scheme in Metro Manila is generally suspended on holidays, and with so many residents out of town the capital is easier to drive around during a long break than on an ordinary Tuesday. The congestion moves to the expressways and ports leading out of the city.

Suspensions, local declarations, and the mistakes that follow

One more mechanism closes the country without being a holiday at all. During the typhoon season, once the weather bureau raises storm signals, local governments or the national leadership suspend work and classes, and those announcements frequently land early on the morning in question. Pay rules for holidays do not apply, but the practical effect on transport, offices and schools is the same. Election days are typically declared special non-working days as well.

Cross-border planning notes

The Philippines distinguishes regular holidays from special non-working days for pay rules. Holy Week and Christmas–New Year are major gaps; BPOs often run shifts rather than full shutdowns.

Where these dates come from

Philippine dates follow presidential proclamations. Regular holidays and special non-working days pay differently.

Primary references for verification

Philippines FAQ

What is the practical difference between a regular holiday and a special non-working day?

It comes down to pay and to whether the day is compensated at all. On a regular holiday, qualified employees receive their wage even without working, and working attracts a higher premium. A special non-working day follows a no-work-no-pay default unless company policy, a contract or a collective agreement says otherwise, and the premium for working is lower. The Department of Labor and Employment publishes the exact multipliers each year, including cases where a holiday coincides with a rest day or with another holiday.

Who declares Philippine holidays, and can the list change after publication?

Nationwide holidays are declared by presidential proclamation, usually issued in the preceding year, which gives employers time to roster. The list can still change. The same commemoration may be classified differently from year to year, the President can add special non-working days at short notice for major events or elections, and local government units can declare holidays that apply only within their city or province. Before committing to a delivery date, confirm the situation in the specific city you depend on.

How long should I assume the country is closed for Holy Week 2026?

The declared days are Maundy Thursday on 2 April and Good Friday on 3 April, with Black Saturday on 4 April commonly added as a special non-working day. The functional shutdown is longer than the declared days. It begins Wednesday afternoon as the provincial exodus starts and unwinds over the day or two after Easter Sunday on 5 April. For scheduling purposes, write off the first week of April rather than trying to work around the two holidays.

Why are Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha missing from the table on this page?

Because their dates cannot be fixed in advance. Both are nationwide Philippine holidays, but each year the date depends on lunar observation: Islamic religious authorities and the national body for Muslim Filipino affairs recommend the date once the moon is confirmed, and the President then issues a proclamation, often only days beforehand. Calendars printed early in the year can only mark the observance as pending. Operations in the Bangsamoro region should also check that region's own declarations.

What should a traveller expect around Undas in 2026?

All Saints' Day falls on Sunday 1 November and All Souls' Day on Monday 2 November, so the break runs from Saturday 31 October and the outbound rush concentrates on 30 and 31 October. Book provincial buses, flights and ferries well ahead, and expect traffic management and crowd control near major cemeteries, many of which bar alcohol and bladed items. Metro Manila itself is unusually empty during these days; the congestion is on the routes out of the city.

Does thirteenth month pay interact with the holiday calendar?

It does, through timing. Thirteenth month pay is legally mandated and must be settled on or before 24 December, landing in the middle of the busiest consumption and travel period of the Philippine year. For employers this makes the first half of December the tightest cash-flow window; for the wider market it lifts retail activity, remittance volumes and domestic travel demand at the same time. If you employ staff in the Philippines, plan this alongside the December holiday cluster rather than separately.

If the Philippines is on holiday, will my outsourced team stop working?

Usually not. The business process outsourcing sector runs on client calendars rather than the domestic one, so teams are rostered through nearly every national holiday, with holiday premiums paid to those who work. A Philippine public holiday therefore does not automatically mean your support desk is closed. What does stop is anything needing a bank, a government agency, a court filing or an in-person signature, so evaluate online coverage and offline dependencies separately and state holiday coverage in the contract.

Regular vs special holiday?

Pay and work rules differ by classification under labor regulations.

Do BPOs shut down?

Often they run skeleton/shift coverage based on client contracts.

Is leave continuous until New Year?

Statutory dates are fixed, but companies often add vacation days.

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