About HolidayTake

HolidayTake started with a small annoyance: looking up a holiday date should take five seconds, yet most sites make you wade through a wall of ads to find a date that turns out to be two years stale. So we built the site we wanted to use. Every holiday here — the 11 U.S. federal holidays, the separate lists kept by all 50 states and DC, and the public holidays of Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland — is stored as the legal rule that creates it, not as a number somebody typed in. "The last Monday in May." "December 25, moved to Friday when it lands on a Saturday." From those rules the site computes the exact date for this year and next, along with the observed date, the long weekends and the live countdowns.

The rules come from the sources that actually govern the dates: 5 U.S.C. § 6103 and the Office of Personnel Management for federal holidays, each state's own statute and personnel calendar for state days, the Canada Labour Code and provincial employment-standards acts, the UK government's bank holiday list, Australia's state-by-state declarations, Employment New Zealand, and Ireland's Organisation of Working Time Act. Where a date is set each year by proclamation rather than formula — Matariki in New Zealand is a good example — we use the official announcement when one exists and mark later years as projected. Every table on the site shows when its dates were last verified, and when a reader writes in about a discrepancy, we check it against the primary source and fix it.

Around the dates sit the tools we kept wishing existed: live countdowns to every holiday and to any date on the calendar, a planner that takes your state and your leave budget and works out where a few days of PTO buy the longest break, long-weekend and bridge-day lists, calendar feeds that drop the whole year into Google Calendar or Outlook, and plain-language answers on what actually closes — post offices, banks, the stock market, state offices, schools. Two honest notes to end on. First, HolidayTake is an independent reference site with no connection to any government, and holiday observance finally depends on your employer, your state and occasionally a governor's pen, so confirm with the office that matters before booking flights or running payroll. Second, the site is free because it carries advertising through Google AdSense; ads never influence a date or a word of the content. If something looks wrong, or there's a holiday or feature you wish we covered, the contact page reaches a person who reads everything.