Public holidays 2027 for teams across countries

If your team, your clients or your suppliers are in more than one country, public holidays are a plain source of delays. A deadline lands on a day when half the team is away, a payment misses its bank day, a launch collides with a festival. The fix is not clever. It is a list of the holidays in each country, put next to your plan before the dates are fixed. This guide shows how to use one, with a worked example for March 2027.

What can go wrong

• A deadline on a holiday. You promise delivery on a date that is a public holiday for the person who must do it.
• A bridge day. In some countries a holiday on a Thursday means many people take the Friday off too. The list will not tell you this, but you can ask.
• Different weekends. A day off in one country is a working day in another.
• A moved date. A holiday follows a lunar calendar, or is shifted by an announcement, and the date you planned around changes.
• A regional holiday. A holiday applies only in one state or region, and your colleague lives there.

Each of these is small, and none shows up unless you look.

National and regional holidays

A national public holiday applies across a country. Many countries also have holidays that apply only in part of the country, such as a state, province or region. A good list keeps them apart. Use the national list for planning in general, and consult the regional list for the places where your people actually are.

Lists also use different words for kinds of holiday: public, bank, government, optional or half-day. A day that is a "bank holiday" means banks close, and it may not be a day off for everyone. A half-day holiday costs half a working day. Read the type before you count.

Weekends differ

Most countries use Saturday and Sunday. A number do not. Several Middle Eastern and some other countries have a Friday and Saturday weekend, a few use Friday alone, and some work differently by region or employer. This matters when you count lost working days. A holiday on a weekend day costs nothing.

Here is a worked example for March 2027, which has 23 weekdays when the weekend is Saturday and Sunday and also 23 working days when it is Friday and Saturday. The list below comes from the holiday data in our package for five countries, and the weekend for each is as listed.

So a team spread over these five places has 21, 20, 22, 19 and 23 working days that month: Germany 23 less 2, Denmark 23 less 3, Japan 23 less 1, Saudi Arabia 23 less 4 and the United States 23. If you wanted a joint deliverable at the end of March, the Saudi colleague has 4 fewer days than the American one. That is a fact you would want in January, not on 8 March.

Note the example for Eid: such holidays follow the lunar calendar, and the exact day can be set by an official announcement. Treat the dates as a plan and confirm them as they approach.

Dates that move

Easter-based holidays move every year. Easter Sunday 2027 is 28 March, so Good Friday is 26 March and Easter Monday 29 March. Holidays tied to the lunar calendar, such as Eid, Ramadan-related days and some Asian festivals, shift earlier by about ten or eleven days each year against the solar calendar, and their exact day may depend on moon sighting or an announcement. A few holidays are decided by law for one year only. This is why any list needs a line like "confirm important dates with the official source before you commit", and why you should look again closer to the date.

Put holidays into your calendar

Calendar files in the iCalendar format, defined in RFC 5545, carry events from one program to another. A file with a country's holidays imports into Google Calendar, Outlook and Apple Calendar. Three habits help:

1. Use a separate calendar. Import into a new calendar named, for example, "Germany holidays 2027". You can then switch it on or off, or delete it, without touching your own events.
2. Mark events as free. An all-day holiday that blocks your calendar will stop colleagues from booking meetings; one marked "free" will not.
3. Check for repeats. Events with a stable identifier are updated, not duplicated, when you import the same file again in most calendar apps.

A team planner

For regular planning, a month view with countries in rows and days in columns is the most useful format. Holidays are coloured, and a final column counts the working days lost. It answers at a glance, "Who is away in the week of 22 March?" It must use each country's weekend to count the loss correctly, and should let you change that weekend to match your team, because private employers often differ from the national pattern.

Using the data in other tools

If you run payroll, a shop or an application, you may want holidays as data. A CSV file can go to a spreadsheet, a database or a payroll tool. JSON suits developers. Whichever format you use, keep the two-letter country code, which ISO 3166 defines, so that holidays match the right country, and note the type of each holiday.

Limits of any holiday list

A list compiled from open data is a planning aid. It is not a legal source. Rules about holiday pay, work on public holidays and substitute days differ by country and by contract, and they are for the government's labour rules and your contract to decide. For legal or payroll decisions, use the official government source.

Tool that fits

World Public Holidays 2027 & 2028 (Excel plus data files, EUR 12, paid once) lists national public holidays for 245 countries and territories in both years, including bank, government, optional and half-day holidays where a country has them, in 7,530 rows with filters, and 2,231 regional holidays on a separate sheet. A Team planner lets you choose up to 10 countries and a month and shows who is off, with working days lost counted from each country's weekend, which you can edit on the Weekends sheet. Holiday names appear in English and, where available, the local language. The package also has CSV and JSON copies and 490 calendar files, one for each country and year, with instructions for Google Calendar and Outlook. The data is compiled from an open-source library and packaged by us, and we spot-checked dates by hand for Denmark, the US, Germany, Iran and Japan. Dates of moveable and religious holidays can change, so confirm important dates with the official source. It is a planning aid, not legal or payroll advice. It works in Excel 2016 and later, Google Sheets and LibreOffice, with no macros.

Questions people ask

Sources

1. RFC 5545, Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification (iCalendar), the format of .ics calendar files
2. ISO 3166, Country codes (the two-letter codes used to identify countries)
3. Open World Holidays Framework (the open-source holidays library from which the data in the package was compiled)

We checked each source on 17 October 2026. If a fact here is out of date, tell us at hello@hiddenway.info.

Keep reading

• Social media content calendar for 2027: plan a year of posts
• Excel Gantt chart with dependencies: how dates follow tasks
• Monthly profit and loss in Excel for a small business
• More in Small business tools