UK Bank Holidays

About Bank Holiday Guide

This site exists because finding straightforward information about UK bank holidays — when they are, which regions observe them, how to actually use them around your annual leave — is harder than it should be.

gov.uk has the dates, accurately and exhaustively, but no tools and no planning view. The other bank holiday calendars on the web are slow, plastered with ads, often missing regional variation, and rarely thinking about the question users actually want answered: "given my leave allowance and where I live, how can I get the most days off this year?"

So we built this.

What this site does

Bank Holiday Guide is a fast, ad-free reference for UK bank holidays across England & Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. It covers:

  • Every bank holiday for the current year and three years ahead
  • Regional differences — Scotland's 2nd January, St Andrew's Day and (in 2026 only) the World Cup bank holiday; Northern Ireland's St Patrick's Day and Battle of the Boyne
  • Substitute day rules when a holiday falls at a weekend
  • Per-holiday pages with dates across multiple years
  • The Leave Optimiser — a free tool that maps your annual leave around bank holidays to give you the longest possible consecutive runs of days off

Every date on the site comes directly from the official gov.uk dataset and is rebuilt regularly so the figures stay current.

How we keep the dates current

The site rebuilds on a regular schedule, pulling the latest data from the gov.uk bank holidays JSON feed. New years are typically added to that feed in autumn of the preceding year, so by the time you're searching "bank holidays 2027" in late 2026, the data is already live here.

If gov.uk publishes a one-off bank holiday (like the World Cup bank holiday Scotland received for 2026, or the State Funeral bank holiday in 2022), the next rebuild picks it up automatically.

Built for speed

This site loads in under a second on a 3G connection. It weighs less than most images on the alternative bank holiday calendars. There are no tracking cookies, no advertising, no newsletter pop-ups, and no cookie banner because there's nothing to consent to.

The whole site is built on Astro and deployed on Cloudflare's edge network. Every page is static HTML with minimal JavaScript — only the countdown timer and the Leave Optimiser require any client-side code, and they're both tiny.

The Leave Optimiser

The Leave Optimiser is the tool we wish existed when we were planning our own holidays. Pick a region, a year, and how many days of annual leave you have. The tool calculates the best placement of those days around bank holidays to give you the longest consecutive runs of days off — typically multiplying your usable holiday by 50% or more compared to randomly-placed leave.

Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server. You can bookmark the URL to share your plan or come back to it.

A Supra Digital project

Bank Holiday Guide is built and maintained by Supra Digital, a small web development agency in Hertfordshire. It's one of a portfolio of UK reference sites we run on the same principles: fast, accurate, ad-free, no clutter, free to use.

You can see what else we do at supradigital.co.uk.

Spotted an error?

The dates come directly from gov.uk, so if a date here is wrong it's almost certainly because the gov.uk feed hasn't been updated yet — or because our build hasn't picked up the latest data. Either way, please let us know: email us at hello@supradigital.co.uk and we'll investigate immediately.

For content issues (a misleading FAQ, an unclear explanation, a missing per-holiday detail), same email — corrections usually go live the same day.

Sources

All dates are compiled from the official gov.uk bank holidays page and its accompanying JSON feed at https://www.gov.uk/bank-holidays.json. The data is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0, which permits commercial reuse with attribution.

Last comprehensive verification: 18 May 2026.

This site is editorially independent. It accepts no advertising, no affiliate links, and no paid placements. If that ever changes, this page will say so first.

See our methodology for the detail on how we compile, verify, and update the data.