List of public holidays by countries?

Question

When working across country border it makes things easier to know in advance if people in a specific country are going to be on public holiday a certain day.

While some calendars application offer to import this information, is there an open list of public holidays per country (and ideally in icalendar format) available similar to what is available for time-zones (Olson DB)?

Note: I'm aware of:

• countries specific sites like opm.gov
• Also other SO thread

But looking for an international list and thought that people on Open Data may have other data sources than listed above.

Answer 1

You could probably grab Google's public calendars. All of the calendars are public, but the URLs for them don't seem to be systematically listed anywhere. You would have to go into Google Calendar to pull the list of "interesting calendars".

Here's the one for the United States in several formats:

• XML
• iCal
• Web interface

Answer 2

I personally manage a site that lists the public holidays of every country of the world, both with long-term forecasts (some of our clients license more than 20 years into the future), and quasi real-time updates, to react when a country makes a last minute change (on average there is one or two such changes, somewhere in the world, everyday).

I won't mention which site it is, to avoid being spammed-out. In any case, which site it is is not relevant to what I am about to write.

All the forecasts are handled automatically by a library of code I have developed since 1989. I have also automated the search for last-minute updates. Yet, despite these 27 years of experience and automated code, and my ability to read news in 5 languages fluently, it takes me 4-5 hours per day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, to make sure that I miss none of the daily and yearly changes to holidays and their rules, that occur all over the world.

My point ?

You will never find a reliable source of worldwide public holidays that is free. You'll find a few free sites that list the 10-15 "easy" countries. You'll find a few free sites that list more countries, but do not provide dates for non-western calendars. You'll mainly find free sites with lots of ads and cookies.

In some areas, there is still no such thing as a free lunch ;-)

Answer 3

You can use the Nager.Date project its supports over 90 countries (US, DE, FR, RU, UK, ...). The project is open source and available on GitHub.

Some data sources are available

• WebApi (Json)
• CSV download