United Kingdom Public Holidays

The devolved nations' extra holidays reflect genuinely separate legislative decisions rather than a single UK-wide holiday law — Scotland's local authorities can even set slightly different bank holiday dates from one council area to another for certain local holidays, a level of local variation not seen in England and Wales.

The UK's fixed-date public holidays are comparatively few by international standards, with much of the calendar instead made up of movable "bank holidays" — a term with a specifically British origin, referring to a 19th-century law that closed banks (and by extension most other businesses) on certain days.

England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland don't share an identical holiday calendar — Scotland observes St. Andrew's Day and a different early-year holiday structure, and Northern Ireland observes St. Patrick's Day and the Battle of the Boyne anniversary (the Twelfth of July) as public holidays not shared with the rest of the UK, a genuine and sometimes overlooked regional difference.

Christmas Day and Boxing Day are both statutory holidays, with Boxing Day's own name tracing to a disputed set of historical explanations rather than one settled origin story.

Unlike several other Commonwealth countries, the UK observes only a small, genuinely fixed set of bank holidays year-round outside of the movable Easter-linked ones (Good Friday and Easter Monday), which are computed separately as movable dates rather than appearing in this page's fixed table.

The early May and late May/August bank holidays were introduced comparatively recently (the modern early May bank holiday dates only to 1978), a reminder that even a country's "traditional" holiday calendar has genuinely changed within living memory rather than being fixed since time immemorial.

Unlike many countries, the UK doesn't treat its national day (there isn't one shared UK-wide civic national holiday equivalent to July 4th or Bastille Day) as a public holiday at all — the closest equivalents are the individual nations' own patron saint days, and even those aren't uniformly full bank holidays across all four nations of the UK.

UK bank holidays are, strictly speaking, about which days banks and certain financial institutions must close rather than a direct legal entitlement to paid time off for every worker — most employment contracts do provide bank holidays as paid leave, but that's a matter of contract and custom rather than automatic statutory right the way some other countries codify it.

The August bank holiday falls on a different weekend in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland (last Monday of August) than in Scotland (first Monday of August), a further specific date-level divergence beyond the broader devolved-nations variation already described.

The UK's monarch has the power to proclaim an additional one-off bank holiday for a specific national occasion (a coronation or a significant royal jubilee, for instance), meaning the standard annual list on this page can occasionally be supplemented by an extra date declared for a particular year only.

England and Wales' fixed statutory bank holiday count sits comparatively low by Western European standards, a point of frequent public discussion in the UK, though the actual number of paid days off most UK employees receive is typically higher once statutory minimum annual leave (separate from bank holidays) is factored in.

The UK government periodically reviews proposals for new bank holidays (a proposed "Brexit Day" holiday and various other suggestions have been publicly debated in recent years without being adopted), showing that the current list, while stable, isn't treated as permanently closed to further change.

Good Friday, Easter Monday, and the early/spring/summer Bank Holidays are movable and computed separately.

Source: UK Government (gov.uk) bank holiday list, as of 2026-07-12.