Ireland public holidays

What this value means

TEN public holidays in 2026. The statutory list was read verbatim on 2026-07-22. Second Schedule para 1 enumerates: (a) Christmas Day, (b) St Stephen's Day, (c) St Patrick's Day, (d) Easter Monday, the first Monday in May, the first Monday in June and the first Monday in August, (e) the last Monday in October, (f) the 1st day of January, and (g) any other day prescribed. The tenth day comes from (g): S.I. No. 50 of 2022, reg. 4 prescribes 'the first Monday in February 2023 and the first Monday in February each year thereafter', and reg. 5 disapplies that and substitutes 1 February in any year where 1 February falls on a Friday. APPLIED TO 2026: 1 February 2026 is a SUNDAY, so reg. 5 does not bite and the holiday is the first Monday in February = 2 February 2026. CITATION CORRECTION — the widely repeated claim that St Brigid's Day was created by an 'Organisation of Working Time (Amendment) Act 2023' is WRONG. There is no such amending Act behind this holiday; it was made by secondary legislation in February 2022 (S.I. No. 50 of 2022, signed 7 February 2022), an instrument whose citation title refers to Covid-19 commemoration because the same regulations also created the one-off public holiday of 18 March 2022. GOOD FRIDAY IS NOT A PUBLIC HOLIDAY IN IRELAND. This is the single most common error in Irish holiday data. Good Friday (3 April 2026) is absent from the Second Schedule; many schools, courts and some businesses close, and the sale of alcohol was formerly restricted, but there is no statutory entitlement to time off or public-holiday pay. NO MONDAYISATION — Ireland has no substitution rule. Under s. 21(1) of the 1997 Act an employee is entitled, in respect of a public holiday, to whichever ONE OF FOUR OPTIONS THE EMPLOYER DETERMINES: (a) a paid day off on that day, (b) a paid day off within a month of that day, (c) an additional day of annual leave, or (d) an additional day's pay. Under s. 21(2)-(3) the employee may ask 21 days ahead which option applies and, if the employer does not answer at least 14 days before, the entitlement defaults to a paid day off on the day itself. So a holiday falling on a weekend still generates an entitlement — but NOT an automatic right to the next working day off. This bites in 2026: St Stephen's Day, 26 December 2026, falls on a SATURDAY, and Christmas Day falls on a Friday. Nine of the ten fall on a working weekday (all six Monday holidays plus 1 Jan Thursday, 17 Mar Tuesday, 25 Dec Friday). Where an employee does not normally work on the day, the entitlement is valued at one-fifth of normal weekly pay excluding overtime, under regulation 5(2) of S.I. No. 475 of 1997 (Organisation of Working Time (Determination of Pay for Holidays) Regulations 1997); job-sharers on half hours get one-tenth under regulation 6. QUALIFICATION THRESHOLD: full-time employees qualify immediately; a part-time employee qualifies only if he or she worked at least 40 hours for that employer in the 5 weeks ending the day before the holiday (s. 21(4)). Exceptions in the Third Schedule apply to employees absent immediately before the holiday. DELIBERATE EXCLUSIONS: Good Friday; 'Church holidays' (6 January, Ascension Thursday, Corpus Christi, 15 August, 1 November, 8 December) — these appear in Second Schedule para 4 but are NOT public holidays; para 3 merely lets an employer substitute one for a public holiday on 14 days' notice, an option almost never used in practice. Also excluded are Northern Ireland's holidays (12 July, and the NI-specific handling of Easter Tuesday and 2 January) — this file covers the Republic of Ireland only; a customer doing all-island payroll needs a separate GB/NI calendar. No date on this list is provisional: six are Monday rules that resolve deterministically, three are fixed calendar dates, and Easter Monday follows the Western computus (Easter Sunday 2026 = 5 April, independently computed and cross-checked). ACCESS QUIRK: irishstatutebook.ie serves the Act only in its AS-ENACTED form — amendments are listed separately at /eli/isbc/1997_20.html and must be applied by hand; the Law Reform Commission revised-Acts site does not carry a per-section revised URL for this Act. 2027 EXTENSION (2026-07-30): dates derived from the statutory rules (Organisation of Working Time Act 1997, Second Schedule as amended by S.I. No. 1 of 2022): St Brigid's Day = first Monday of February (1 Feb 2027; the 'unless 1 Feb is a Friday' branch does not trigger); Easter Monday 29 Mar; first-Monday May/June/August and last-Monday October holidays computed. Ireland has NO automatic date-shifting: for Christmas Day (Sat) and St Stephen's Day (Sun) 2027 the employer chooses a paid day off within a month, an extra annual-leave day, or an extra day's pay - there is no legal entitlement to the next working day off. Official gov.ie 2027 page not yet published; re-verify near-year.

Get it programmatically

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

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