When is the next bank holiday?

Every UK bank holiday for 2026, 2027 and 2028, charted the way an office planner charts them — because England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland do not keep the same list, and the gaps between them are the whole point.

All three nations share six dates in 2026 and disagree on the rest. Scotland has an extra one this year that nowhere else does: a one-off World Cup bank holiday on Monday 15 June.

sub marks a substitute day: the holiday itself falls on a weekend that year, so a weekday is given in lieu. 8 in England and Wales, 10 in Scotland, 10 in Northern Ireland.

Easter is early in 2027 — Good Friday falls on 26 March, the earliest of any year on this page — which pushes a long weekend into March and leaves an unusually empty April.

sub marks a substitute day: the holiday itself falls on a weekend that year, so a weekday is given in lieu. 8 in England and Wales, 9 in Scotland, 10 in Northern Ireland.

2028 is the last year covered by the gov.uk feed, so it is the furthest ahead these dates are officially confirmed. Christmas Day falls on a Monday, so nothing moves at the end of the year.

sub marks a substitute day: the holiday itself falls on a weekend that year, so a weekday is given in lieu. 8 in England and Wales, 9 in Scotland, 10 in Northern Ireland.

A bank holiday on a Monday already gives you a three-day weekend for nothing. The question worth answering is the other one: where does spending one or two days of annual leave buy you a run that is much longer than the days you gave up? These are the dates where it does, between now and 5 September 2027 — the leave column lists exactly which days to book.

Free anyway is the run you get for spending nothing — the holiday plus any weekend or second bank holiday already attached to it. The booked days are the cheapest way to join that block to the next one. Only holidays where the leave buys more days than it costs are listed, which is why some are absent: a Tuesday holiday in an otherwise ordinary week has nothing nearby to join up to. Assumes a Monday-to-Friday week and an employer who gives bank holidays off — which, as below, the law does not require.

When a bank holiday falls on a Saturday or Sunday, you do not lose it. A weekday is given in lieu instead — normally the following Monday. The holiday's own date stops being a bank holiday that year; the substitute is the bank holiday.

The interesting case is when two holidays sit next to each other, because the second one cannot simply take a day the first already has. Christmas and Boxing Day are the example everyone meets. In 2022 Christmas Day fell on a Sunday and Boxing Day on the Monday. Boxing Day kept Monday 26 December, and Christmas Day's substitute stepped over it to Tuesday 27 December — so the substitute for the earlier holiday landed after the later one.

Scotland's New Year pair behaves differently, and this catches people out. When 1 January falls on a Sunday, both holidays shift together: in 2023 New Year's Day was observed on Monday 2 January and the 2 January holiday moved on to Tuesday 3 January — even though the 2nd was itself a perfectly good weekday. There is no single rule that produces both behaviours; they are separate conventions, and this site encodes each one explicitly rather than guessing.

Not automatically. This is the single most common misunderstanding about bank holidays in the UK, and it is worth being precise about.

There is no statutory right to take a bank holiday off work, and no statutory right to extra pay for working one. A bank holiday is a day on which banks are closed; it is not, by itself, a day on which you are entitled to stop. What you get comes from your contract of employment.

What the law does give you is 5.6 weeks of paid annual leave — 28 days for somebody working five days a week, pro rata for part-time work. Your employer is allowed to count bank holidays towards that 28, and a great many do. So a contract offering "20 days plus bank holidays" and one offering "28 days including bank holidays" are the same statutory minimum, described two ways. If yours says "plus bank holidays", the eight days are genuinely on top.

Two consequences worth knowing. First, a part-time worker who never works Mondays would lose out badly if bank holidays were counted as taken — most UK bank holidays are Mondays — so employers commonly pro-rata the bank holiday entitlement in hours rather than days. Second, one-off bank holidays like a coronation or a jubilee are not automatically an extra day off: whether you get them depends on how your contract is worded, which is why the 2023 coronation holiday reached some workplaces and not others.

General information, not legal advice. For your own situation check your contract, then gov.uk on holiday entitlement or ACAS.

Bank holidays are set by the Banking and Financial Dealings Act 1971 and by royal proclamation, and the Act treats Scotland and Northern Ireland separately. The result is three overlapping lists rather than one.

Scotland's August difference is the one that trips up anyone planning across the border: the Scottish summer bank holiday is the first Monday in August and the English and Welsh one is the last, so they sit almost four weeks apart. In 2026 that is Mon 3 Aug against Mon 31 Aug.

Scotland also loses Easter Monday, which surprises people who assume the Easter four-day weekend is universal. It is not: in Scotland, Good Friday is the bank holiday and the Monday is an ordinary working day. Many Scottish employers give it anyway, by contract rather than by statute. Separately, Scottish local authorities set their own local holidays — a Glasgow or Edinburgh trades holiday is a real day off for many people there, but it is not a bank holiday and does not appear on any list on this page.

Past dates, for checking a payslip, a contract or an invoice. The stretch from 2020 to 2023 is unusually irregular: the May holiday was moved to Friday 8 May in 2020 for the 75th anniversary of VE Day, the spring holiday was pushed to June in 2022 for the Platinum Jubilee, and one-off holidays were declared for the state funeral in September 2022 and the coronation in May 2023.

Dates on this page are confirmed against the gov.uk feed through 2028. Beyond that they are computed from the same rules and will hold unless a one-off holiday is declared by proclamation — which is precisely the thing no calendar can predict. Four such holidays have been declared since 2019.

Where these dates come from. Everything here is computed — Easter by the Meeus/Jones/Butcher algorithm, the fixed and nth-Monday holidays from the calendar, substitute days by the weekend rule — and then diffed against the gov.uk bank holidays feed across all three nations and every year from 2019 to 2028 before the site is allowed to build. Last built Saturday 5 September 2026. More about the method.