About this site

What we publish

Exact dates for US federal holidays, state holidays and popular observances — each one with the rule that determines the date, not just a number to copy. Knowing that Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday of November is more useful than knowing it falls on November 26 in 2026, because the rule works in every year.

The site is deliberately narrow. It answers one question — what day is it, and why — for a list of holidays that Americans actually search for. It does not try to be a general calendar, a greeting-card shop or a travel guide.

How dates are verified

Federal holiday dates come from the statutory list in 5 U.S.C. § 6103 and the Office of Personnel Management's published schedule. Observances set by weekday rather than by date — Thanksgiving, Mother's Day, Memorial Day, Arbor Day — are calculated from those rules and cross-checked against official sources.

Every page carries the date it was last verified against those sources, so you can tell how current a page is at a glance. Where a rule has a statutory basis, we cite the statute; where it rests on a proclamation or an agency schedule, we say which one.

One discipline is worth stating plainly: when a search result and our own calculation disagree, we go back to the rule and recompute rather than copying the number we saw first. Search summaries regularly get weekday arithmetic wrong, and a date that has been copied across a dozen websites is not the same thing as a date that has been checked.

Holidays that follow a lunar calendar

A handful of observances cannot be calculated from the Gregorian calendar at all. Diwali tracks the new moon of the Hindu month of Kartik, and its date has to be read from a published Panchang rather than computed. For those we cite the almanac and note where local observance may differ by a day.

This is also why those pages are written differently: they give the date with a stated margin rather than presenting it as a fixed fact, because the underlying calendar genuinely does not align with the one most readers use to plan.

State and local rules

State holiday calendars are set by state statute or by a governor's proclamation, and they change more often than the federal list. Colorado replaced Columbus Day with Cabrini Day in 2020; several states have moved to Indigenous Peoples' Day. Where a state adds or substitutes a holiday, we say so and point to that state's own published schedule.

Two things trip people up repeatedly, and both are worth knowing before you read any individual page. A state holiday closes state government — offices, courts, often schools — while private employers are not bound by it at all, since the Fair Labor Standards Act requires no paid holidays in the private sector. And banks generally follow the federal calendar rather than their own state's, which is why a branch will open on a state-only holiday and shut on a federal one.

How to read a page

Each holiday page is built the same way, so once you know the layout you can find any date in a few seconds:

• The date line — the exact date, the day of the week, and the rule that produced it
• The year table — the same holiday across a run of years, so you can plan ahead rather than re-checking every twelve months
• observed vs. actual — where a holiday falling on a weekend shifts to a Friday or Monday, both dates are given
• official sources — the statute, agency schedule or almanac the page was checked against, linked at the bottom
• the verified date — when the page was last re-checked against those sources

Who this is for

Mostly, it is for people planning something specific. Travellers working out whether a museum will be shut. Parents reading a school calendar that lists a holiday without a date. Office managers setting a payroll calendar for the year ahead. Teachers planning around a long weekend. Anyone who has found two websites giving two different dates for the same holiday and wants to know which one is right.

It is also for the smaller group who need the rule rather than the date — anyone building a schedule, a contract or a system that has to keep working after this year's calendar is obsolete.

How the site is funded

The site is free to read and is funded by advertising. Pages may carry ads served by Google AdSense.

Advertising has no effect on the dates published here. We do not sell placement inside editorial content, we do not accept payment to add a holiday or change a date, and no advertiser has any input into what gets published. If a page ever looks like an exception to that, it is a mistake and we would rather hear about it.

Corrections

If you find a date that is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. Accuracy matters more here than speed, and a visible correction is more useful to the next reader than a quietly edited page.

The most useful correction includes the page address, the date you think is wrong, and the official source you are comparing against. A large share of apparent disagreements turn out to be a state rule being compared against a federal one, and having the source in front of us settles those quickly.

What we are not

We are not a government agency and we do not set policy. Nothing here is legal advice about leave entitlement, holiday pay or opening hours — those are set by your employer, your state or the specific organisation you are dealing with.

For anything that depends on a particular employer's policy, a specific school district's calendar, or a branch's opening hours, the authoritative answer is always that organisation's own published schedule. This site is a fast way to get the date, not a substitute for it.

Last updated September 26, 2026.