UK Bank Holidays

Methodology

This page explains how Bank Holiday Guide compiles, verifies, and updates its data. Reference sites only have value if you can trust what they say, so we make our process explicit.

Source

All bank holiday dates on this site come from a single canonical source: the official UK Government bank holidays dataset at gov.uk/bank-holidays.json.

This dataset is:

  • Published by the Government Digital Service
  • Updated when Parliament announces new bank holidays (including one-off holidays such as state funerals, jubilees, and the 2026 World Cup bank holiday for Scotland)
  • Available under the Open Government Licence v3.0, which permits commercial reuse with attribution
  • The same dataset that powers gov.uk's own bank holidays page

We don't compile dates from secondary sources or from our own knowledge of when holidays "usually" fall. Every date you see has come from the gov.uk feed.

How updates flow through

The site is built statically using Astro and deployed to Cloudflare Pages. The build process:

  • Fetches the latest data from gov.uk/bank-holidays.json
  • Normalises it across the three regions (England & Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland)
  • Generates per-year, per-region, and per-holiday pages
  • Pre-calculates "days until" figures relative to the build date
  • Deploys the static result to Cloudflare's global edge network

If the gov.uk feed fails at build time, the build uses a committed JSON snapshot as fallback. This means the site never goes down or shows stale data — at worst, it might be a few days behind the latest gov.uk update.

Rebuild cadence

The site rebuilds:

  • At least monthly, to refresh "days until" calculations and pick up any silent updates from gov.uk
  • On every code change, which is whenever we add new pages, fix issues, or improve features
  • Manually triggered when a major event happens (Parliament announcing a one-off bank holiday, a Budget Day if it affects employment law around holidays)

The "days from now" and "next bank holiday" calculations are based on the visitor's local timezone (handled in browser), so they're always accurate to the moment the page loads.

What we add on top of the gov.uk data

The gov.uk feed gives us dates. We add:

  • Editorial framing: per-region introductions explaining the differences (Scotland's 2nd January, NI's St Patrick's Day, the World Cup bank holiday)
  • The Leave Optimiser: a tool that maps your annual leave around bank holidays to maximise consecutive days off, written from scratch and running entirely in your browser
  • Per-holiday pages with year-over-year date tables and long-weekend tips
  • FAQs covering the questions we see asked repeatedly: what happens when a holiday falls at a weekend, whether bank holidays are paid leave by default, why Scotland and Northern Ireland have different patterns

We don't add anything that contradicts or reinterprets gov.uk. Where we explain a rule (substitute days, employer obligations), we link to the relevant gov.uk page.

What we don't do

  • No tracking. No analytics that identify users, no marketing pixels, no cookies that require consent.
  • No advertising. The site has no ad slots, no affiliate links, and no paid placements.
  • No newsletter capture. The site collects no email addresses.
  • No AI-generated content for facts. Date data is machine-imported from gov.uk; editorial copy is written by humans. Where AI tools were used (e.g. to draft this methodology page), the output was reviewed and edited by the site's editor.

Limitations

We cover the three official UK bank holiday regions: England & Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. We do not currently cover:

  • Republic of Ireland bank holidays (which differ from Northern Ireland and are set by Irish, not UK, law)
  • Crown dependencies (Isle of Man, Channel Islands) — these have their own bank holidays
  • Regional or local public holidays that aren't recognised as bank holidays by the UK government (e.g. local trade holidays, fair days)

If demand justifies it, we may add these in future. For now they're out of scope.

Spotted a problem?

If a date is wrong, an explanation is misleading, or the site behaves unexpectedly, please email [email protected]. We read every email and fix issues fast.

Last comprehensive review of this methodology page: 18 May 2026.