Federal Holidays and the Observed-Date Rule

The eleven, and how they are defined

The list is set by statute at 5 U.S.C. § 6103. Four are fixed to a calendar date — New Year's Day, Juneteenth, Independence Day, Christmas Day — and one, Veterans Day, is fixed to 11 November. The rest are defined by position rather than date: the third Monday in January, the third Monday in February, the last Monday in May, the first Monday in September, the second Monday in October, the fourth Thursday in November. Thanksgiving is the only one of the positional holidays not on a Monday.

Because the positional ones are rules rather than dates, they can be computed for any year rather than looked up, which is what this site does. The one recent change is Juneteenth, added in June 2021 — so any calculation over a period before that date should not be removing it, and a calculator that removes it from a 2019 span is quietly wrong about history.

The observed-date rule

Federal employees are entitled to a day off, and a holiday landing on a weekend would silently take it away. The statute therefore moves the observance: a holiday falling on a Saturday is observed on the Friday before, and one falling on a Sunday is observed on the Monday after.

This produces the situation that causes most business-day disagreements. In 2026, Independence Day falls on a Saturday. The holiday is 4 July; the day offices are closed is Friday 3 July. A calculation that removes the 4th removes a day that was already a weekend and does not remove the 3rd, which was the working day actually lost — and so it comes out one day short. The business days calculator removes the observed day and labels it as observed, so the substitution is visible rather than silent.

Note the asymmetry: a Saturday holiday moves backwards. It is the one case where a deadline can land earlier than a naive reading suggests, which is the direction that costs you.

Who is actually closed

The federal list governs federal offices. Everyone else decides for themselves, and the four groups you are most likely to be counting against diverge:

• Federal offices and the postal service follow the statutory list and the observed-date rule.
• Banks largely follow the same list, because the Federal Reserve does, so settlement stops.
• Stock markets keep a separate calendar. It is close to the federal list but not identical — the most conspicuous difference is Good Friday, which is not a federal holiday and on which the US equity markets are closed.
• Employers set their own. Many observe a subset, many add days that appear on no public list, and some work through days everything else is shut.

State holidays are a further layer again, and courts often follow the state list rather than the federal one. Where a deadline turns on a specific institution being open, the institution's own calendar is the authority and no general-purpose list substitutes for it.

What this site does

The calculators compute the eleven federal holidays from the statutory rules for whatever year you ask about, apply the 6103(b) weekend substitution, and never remove Juneteenth from a date before it existed. Holiday removal is optional, because a great many real calculations should not remove them — and when it is on, every removed day is listed by name and date so the answer can be checked rather than trusted. The full method sets out each rule.