Bulgaria public holidays

What this value means

ORTHODOX, NOT WESTERN, EASTER - THIS IS THE MAIN TRAP. Bulgaria follows the Orthodox (Julian-computus) Pascha, which in 2026 falls on SUNDAY 12 APRIL - a full week after Western/Gregorian Easter (5 April 2026, the date used in the German and Czech files). чл. 154 КТ makes FOUR consecutive days official holidays: Разпети петък (Good Friday, 10 April 2026), Велика събота (Holy Saturday, 11 April), and the Sunday and Monday designated for Easter in that year (12 and 13 April). Do NOT copy the 3/6 April dates from a Western-Easter country. ROLL-FORWARD RULE: under чл. 154, ал. 2 КТ, when an official holiday - WITH THE EXPRESS EXCEPTION OF THE EASTER HOLIDAYS - coincides with a Saturday and/or Sunday, the first, or the first two, following working days are non-attendance days. Applying that to 2026 gives three substitute days, all confirmed by the Labour Inspectorate: 24 May falls on a Sunday, so Monday 25 May is off; 6 September falls on a Sunday, so Monday 7 September is off; 26 December falls on a Saturday, so Monday 28 December is off. 24 and 25 December 2026 fall on Thursday and Friday and generate no substitute. The Easter carve-out means the Saturday and Sunday of Easter (11 and 12 April 2026) generate NO compensating weekday. EURO-CHANGEOVER ONE-OFF: 2 January 2026 (Friday) is included because the Council of Ministers declared 31 December 2025 and 2 January 2026 one-off non-attendance days to give banks and business systems time to complete the euro changeover, making 5 January 2026 the first working day of the year. It is a Council of Ministers decision, not a чл. 154 holiday, and does not recur. DELIBERATELY EXCLUDED: 1 November - Ден на народните будители (Day of the People's Awakeners) is listed in чл. 154, ал. 1 but is a non-attendance day ONLY for educational establishments (неприсъствен за всички учебни заведения), not a general day off for employees; in 2026 it also falls on a Sunday, and because it is a school-only day it triggers no substitute. Also excluded: professional and commemorative days that are not non-working. PAY RULE (useful context, not a date): work performed on an official holiday is paid at not less than DOUBLE the agreed rate under чл. 264 КТ, and if it is also overtime a further increase applies; work on a substitute non-attendance day is treated differently, with the increase applying only to the overtime element. ACCESS: gli.government.bg (the Labour Inspectorate) is reachable over TLS at that exact hostname, but the postedworkers.gli.government.bg subdomain presents a certificate that does not cover it and fails verification; lex.bg (which hosts the consolidated Кодекс на труда) returns HTTP 403 to automated fetching, so the Labour Code text could not be read verbatim and the article list above is reconstructed from the Labour Inspectorate and gazette material. 2027 EXTENSION (2026-07-30): fixed dates plus ORTHODOX-Easter days for Pascha 2 May 2027. Substitute days (4 May for Labour Day on Saturday; 27-28 Dec for Christmas days on the weekend) are computed from Labour Code art. 154(2) (automatic since 2017: first one/two working days after a weekend holiday are non-working; the Easter holidays themselves are exempt from substitution). The 2026 one-off euro-introduction day (2 Jan 2026) does not recur. Re-verify near-year for any one-off declarations.

Get it programmatically

curl https://euroref.dev/v1/bg/public-holidays
# Free.
# History:    curl https://euroref.dev/v1/bg/public-holidays/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://euroref.dev/provenance/bg/public-holidays

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