About this site

One page that answers one question properly: when is the next UK bank holiday, and what are all the others.

Where the dates come from

Nothing on this site is typed in by hand from another calendar. Every date is computed from the rules that actually define it:

• Easter — Good Friday and Easter Monday are derived from Easter Sunday using the Meeus/Jones/Butcher Gregorian algorithm, which is exact for any Gregorian year.
• Fixed dates — New Year's Day, 2 January, St Patrick's Day, the Battle of the Boyne, St Andrew's Day, Christmas Day and Boxing Day sit on their own dates.
• Monday rules — the early May holiday is the first Monday in May, the spring holiday the last Monday in May, and the summer holiday the last Monday in August, except in Scotland where it is the first.
• Substitute days — when a holiday lands on a weekend, the next free weekday is given in lieu, stepping past any date another holiday already holds.
• One-off holidays — a jubilee, a coronation, a state funeral. These are declared by proclamation and cannot be derived from anything, so each is recorded explicitly as a dated event.

How they are checked

Computing dates correctly is easy to get almost right, which is the dangerous kind of wrong. So the site does not trust its own arithmetic. Before it is allowed to build, the engine is diffed against the gov.uk bank holidays feed — the statutory list — for every year from 2019 to 2028 across all 3 nations. That is 280 dates. If a single one disagrees on its date, its name or whether it is a substitute day, the build stops and nothing ships.

That check caught a real error while this site was being built. Scotland's New Year pair and England's Christmas pair substitute by different conventions, and the first version of the engine applied one rule to both. It produced the right answer for nine years out of ten and the wrong one for 2023. Without the diff it would have shipped.

What this site does not claim

Dates are confirmed against the statutory feed through 2028. Beyond that the same rules are applied and the results will hold — unless a one-off holiday is declared, which is exactly the thing no calendar can foresee. Four have been declared since 2019.

Local holidays are not bank holidays and are not listed here. Scottish local authorities set their own; a Glasgow or Edinburgh trades holiday is a genuine day off for many people without being a bank holiday anywhere in law.

The employment guidance on the home page is general information, not legal advice. Bank holiday entitlement comes from your contract, not from the holiday existing. For your own position, read the contract and then gov.uk or ACAS.

How the site pays for itself

Advertising. There is no paywall, no newsletter, no account and no tracking beyond what is described in the privacy policy. Ads do not appear on the contact or policy pages.

Corrections

If a date here disagrees with gov.uk, gov.uk is right and this site has a bug worth knowing about. Tell us and it will be fixed.