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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:

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

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4 Answers 4

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Just came across Azure open dataset:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/open-datasets/catalog/public-holidays/

Worldwide public holiday data sourced from PyPI holidays package and Wikipedia, covering 38 countries or regions from 1970 to 2099.
Each row indicates the holiday info for a specific date, country or region, and whether most people have paid time off.

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  • Thanks that is exactly what i had been looking for!
    – Auberon Vacher
    Commented Nov 29, 2020 at 17:35
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    I tested that dataset, it is far away from being complete.
    – ozw1z5rd
    Commented Jun 7, 2021 at 13:57
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You can use the Nager.Date project its supports over 100 countries (US, DE, FR, RU, UK, ...). The project is open source and available on GitHub.

Some data sources are available

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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:

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    What is the license?
    – Nicolas Raoul ♦
    Commented May 26, 2014 at 4:15
  • @NicolasRaoul I'm not sure. So, of course, this may not be truly open.
    – Thomas
    Commented May 26, 2014 at 7:07
  • Calendars? That's is a great idea!
    – ozw1z5rd
    Commented Jun 7, 2021 at 14:02
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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 ;-)

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    Olivier, thanks for your insights. I happen to not share your point of view: as mentionned in my question, the Olson DB is a good counter example that it could exist. And the lack of existence is not a proof the impossibility of such an existence since a DB for timezone including changes exists...
    – Auberon Vacher
    Commented Jan 31, 2016 at 19:18
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    With that kind of argument, one could predict that Wikipedia cannot exist... Yet it exists! Because came along crowdsourcing :) And maintaining public holiday data sets is a good fit for crowdsourcing.
    – Denis Arnaud
    Commented Oct 24, 2018 at 11:20
  • I'm not saying it's impossible that someone with the required competency in all of the world's calendar systems, with knowledge of the public holidays legislation of of all countries, and with an efficient system of alerts when holidays change, will one day decide to spend all his/her time updating such an online database for free. But, over the past 20 years, I have seen dozens of such projects start with great pomp and never get beyond the alpha or beta stage. Wikipedia gives good background on the holidays, but it rarely lists a specific date except for western calendar holidays.
    – Olivier Beltrami
    Commented Oct 25, 2018 at 12:57
  • @DenisArnaud The accepted solution (vacanza's python-holidays plus Wikipedia) in total has seen about 300 contributors, about 4000 edits and commits from 2014 to 2024. And yet the quality of the data is, put very mildly, not production ready: Comparing Copp&Clark's June 2024 to the dataset, there's 19 holidays reported that didn't happen, and 25 holidays missing that did happen.
    – hroptatyr
    Commented Jun 24 at 14:13
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    @hroptatyr Almost 10 years after my initial post, I feel that all its points have stood the test of time.
    – Olivier Beltrami
    Commented Jun 25 at 15:20

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