United States public holidays 2026

This page lists public holidays for the United States for the current data year, using a country feed so the dates, names, and types stay aligned with a published holiday table. A “public holiday” on a data feed is not the same as a law that forces every private employer in America to pay time-and-a-half or to close. In real life, you have at least three layers: federal government closure rules (for federal employees and many related services), state and local government school and court calendars, and your own contract or employee handbook. When you plan travel, court filings, or school, always treat this list as a fast map, then confirm the institution you care about.

Many U.S. dates move on a weekday rule. Memorial Day is the last Monday in May, Labor Day is the first Monday in September, and Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday in November. That is why people search for “Memorial Day 2026” or “Thanksgiving 2026” with a year: the month-day on the wall calendar changes even when the weekday pattern is stable. If you are comparing to a country that uses fixed month-days for everything, the U.S. system can look chaotic; it is simply a different design that encodes “third Monday” into law and culture instead of “January 15 every year.”

Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are not U.S. federal public holidays in the sense that the whole country takes a government Monday off. They are widely observed on Sundays, with retail and family traditions, but they do not automatically make the next Monday a paid public-sector closure. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the same class: huge economic and cultural events, not federal three-day flags for all workers. If you see a long weekend, it is usually because a Monday federal holiday, a school district choice, or your own PTO lined up with the weekend—not because Mother’s Day itself created a Monday holiday.

The long-weekend column on this page is a planning hint, not legal advice. A Monday federal holiday often creates a Saturday–Monday long weekend for people on a Monday–Friday schedule, but emergency services, retail, hospitals, and gig work do not turn off. When a holiday falls on a weekend, the United States sometimes observes a substitute weekday for federal employees, but the pattern depends on the specific law and the specific year; your state’s K–12 calendar can still look different from your payroll calendar.

If you export these dates, use the subscribe and print tools elsewhere on AnyCalendar. If you work across borders, add your own country’s table next to this one; U.S. “federal” does not control non-U.S. offices. If something on this list disagrees with an official .gov PDF for the same year, trust the .gov source for your legal use case and treat this page as a convenience layer that should be updated on the next data refresh.