Australian public holidays, state by state

The seven holidays observed everywhere, and everything built on top

Australia has no single national public holiday list. Public holidays are created by state and territory legislation and proclamation, and what people call “national” holidays are simply the ones that all eight jurisdictions happen to declare. There are seven of them: New Year’s Day, Australia Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Anzac Day, Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

Four of those seven sit on fixed calendar dates — 1 January, 26 January, 25 April and 25 December, with Boxing Day on 26 December. The other two move with Easter. Everything else on an Australian calendar is added by an individual jurisdiction, and those additions are the reason a holiday planner built for Sydney is wrong in Perth.

The practical consequence is that “is Monday a public holiday?” has no answer until you name a place. If you are counting a deadline rather than planning a long weekend, the mechanics of that count are covered separately in our guide to how business days are counted.

Which jurisdictions observe what

The table below lists the holidays OzCalc generates, the rule that fixes each date, and where each one applies. Read it as the tool’s own model rather than as a legal list: it captures the main state and territory holidays and the dating rules behind them, and it deliberately leaves out local and part-day holidays.

Three patterns in that table are worth pulling out. Labour Day is the clearest example of a holiday that is universal in name and fragmented in practice: four different dates spread from early March to early October, with Western Australia in March and its neighbours in May or October. Tasmania calls its March holiday Eight Hours Day and the Northern Territory calls its May holiday May Day. The King’s Birthday splits three ways, with most jurisdictions on the second Monday in June, Western Australia in late September and Queensland in early October. And the Easter weekend is not uniform either — Good Friday and Easter Monday are observed everywhere, while Easter Saturday and Easter Sunday are listed for only some jurisdictions.

The single-jurisdiction holidays are the ones that catch out interstate scheduling. Melbourne Cup Day is a Victorian holiday, not a national one. Canberra Day and Reconciliation Day are ACT-only. Western Australia Day is WA-only, Picnic Day is Northern Territory-only, and Adelaide Cup Day is South Australian.

Substitute days: what happens when a holiday lands on a weekend

A public holiday that falls on a Saturday or Sunday would otherwise be worth nothing to anyone already not working, so jurisdictions generally declare an additional weekday holiday instead. OzCalc implements this for the fixed-date holidays, and the logic is worth spelling out because it explains some odd-looking December calendars.

New Year’s Day and Australia Day

For 1 January and 26 January, the rule is a simple shift to the following Monday: a Saturday date moves forward two days, a Sunday date moves forward one. Importantly, the original date stays a public holiday in the dataset and the Monday is added alongside it as an additional holiday, which is how these are normally gazetted. When the date already falls on a weekday, no extra day is generated at all.

Falls on Saturday  →  additional holiday on the Monday (date + 2)
Falls on Sunday    →  additional holiday on the Monday (date + 1)
Falls on a weekday →  no additional holiday

Christmas Day and Boxing Day

Christmas is more involved because two holidays sit next to each other and either or both can be swallowed by a weekend. The calendar handles three distinct cases, and 25 December is always the day that decides which one applies.

Why Easter moves, and how the date is worked out

Every other Australian public holiday is anchored either to a calendar date or to an ordinal weekday in a month. Easter is anchored to neither, which is why Good Friday can be in March one year and late April the next.

The rule is inherited from the ecclesiastical calendar: Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the first full moon falling on or after the March equinox, with 21 March used as the fixed notional equinox and the full moon taken from a tabulated ecclesiastical lunar cycle rather than from astronomical observation. Because that combines a lunar month of roughly 29.5 days with a seven-day week, the date can land anywhere in a 35-day window from 22 March to 25 April.

OzCalc does not store Easter dates in a table. It computes them with the Anonymous Gregorian algorithm, a standard closed-form method that takes a year and returns the month and day of Easter Sunday using only integer arithmetic on the year’s position in the 19-year lunar cycle and the Gregorian century corrections. The three surrounding holidays are then derived by simple offsets.

Good Friday    = Easter Sunday − 2 days
Easter Saturday = Easter Sunday − 1 day
Easter Monday  = Easter Sunday + 1 day

The practical benefit of computing rather than storing is that the calendar works for any year you ask for without someone having to maintain a list. Easter Sunday falls on 5 April in 2026, 28 March in 2027 and 16 April in 2028 — a swing of nearly three weeks across three consecutive years, and a good reason not to reuse last year’s roster template.

How many holidays each jurisdiction actually gets

Counting public holidays is less straightforward than it sounds, because a holiday that falls on a weekend appears on the list without costing anyone a working day. The table separates the two figures for 2026, a year in which Anzac Day and Boxing Day both fall on a Saturday and the Easter weekend absorbs two more listed holidays.

The ACT tops the list because it adds Canberra Day and Reconciliation Day to a set that already includes Easter Saturday, Easter Sunday and Labour Day. Tasmania has the shortest list, partly because it observes neither Easter Saturday nor Easter Sunday in this dataset. But notice how little the working-day column varies: eight to eleven weekdays across the whole country, because a jurisdiction with more listed holidays often has more of them absorbed by weekends. Comparing headline holiday counts between states tells you less than it appears to.

The workdays per year calculator produces the last column for any jurisdiction and year, which is the figure to use when converting an annual salary to a day rate or budgeting contractor days.

What a public holiday actually changes

Public holidays are not only a scheduling matter. They alter three separate things, and each has its own authority.

• Pay and attendance. Employees generally have a right to be absent on a public holiday, and an employer can only request work on one where the request is reasonable. Rates for hours actually worked come from the relevant award, enterprise agreement or contract rather than from a single national figure.
• Leave. A public holiday that falls within a period of annual leave is normally not deducted from the leave balance, which is why a two-week break over Easter uses fewer leave days than one in February.
• Counted deadlines. Public holidays are excluded from business-day counts, so a notice period or settlement date shifts when one falls inside the span.
• Trading hours and penalty arrangements. Restricted trading rules on certain days are set by state legislation and differ markedly between jurisdictions.

The Fair Work Ombudsman is the reference point for the employment side of all of this, covering the public holiday entitlement itself, how it interacts with annual leave, and the pay rules that sit on top. A calendar tells you which day; it cannot tell you what someone is owed for working it.

What the OzCalc holiday calendar models, and where to check

The public holiday calendar takes a year and a jurisdiction and lists the holidays it generates for that combination, using exactly the rules described above: the seven shared holidays, the state and territory additions, weekend substitutes for the fixed-date holidays, and Easter computed from the year. The same holiday set drives the business days calculator, so a date excluded from one is excluded from the other.

Where it stops is just as important, and none of these are oversights that a better dataset would fix — they are genuinely local decisions.

1. Regional show days and other local holidays are declared district by district and are not included. A single state can have several, on different dates in different towns.
2. Part-day holidays, such as an evening declared a holiday on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve, are not modelled. They affect pay and trading hours without removing a working day.
3. One-off days proclaimed for a particular event are not predictable from a dating rule and will not appear.
4. Victoria's Friday before the AFL Grand Final is only included for years the government has announced (2026 so far), because its date follows the AFL schedule and not a calendar rule.
5. A few dates are generated from a simplified weekday rule rather than the exact statutory wording. Reconciliation Day in the ACT is tied to a date (the first Monday on or after 27 May) rather than to an ordinal Monday. Dates for 2026 to 2029 were checked against the ACT Government list, but confirm any year you rely on against the ACT source.
6. Bank holidays, which close banks and some finance-sector workplaces without being general public holidays, are treated as working days.

Treat the calendar as a well-informed default. It is generated from published dating rules rather than typed in by hand, which makes it consistent and future-proof for the main holidays, and it is exactly the right tool for planning a trip, estimating a shutdown or sanity-checking a deadline. For a payroll run, a leave calculation or a contractual date, the state or territory proclamation is what actually creates the holiday, and that is the source to confirm against. If you spot a date on the calendar that disagrees with your gazette, tell us and we will check it.

Common questions