In short: Counting every run of three or more consecutive days off in the 2027 calendars — from Ireland’s seven long weekends to Colombia’s thirteen, and Russia’s ten-day January shutdown.
4 October 2026 — A public holiday is worth far more when it lands on a Monday or a Friday. PublicHolidayCalendar.com’s 2027 dataset, now published for 191 countries, makes it possible to count those breaks precisely rather than guess at them: every run of three or more consecutive non-working days, calculated from the actual dated entries in each country’s 2027 calendar.
The results show how much of the gap between countries is legislative rather than cultural. Some countries simply have more holidays. Others move the ones they have.
How we count a long weekend
The method is deliberately simple and applied identically to every country:
- Take every dated public holiday entry published for that country in 2027.
- Add all Saturdays and Sundays.
- Find the runs of consecutive non-working days. Any run of three or more days is counted as a long weekend.
This captures three different ways a break is created: a holiday that falls on a Friday or a Monday; two holidays that land next to each other; and a substitute day that extends an existing run. It does not count bridge days — the informal practice of taking an extra day off between a holiday and a weekend — because those are not public holidays.
Two caveats are stated on the affected country pages. A small number of country lists still mix national holidays with provincial or state holidays, and a handful of older year pages contain duplicate rows. Both are being cleaned.
Where 2027 gives you the most long weekends
| Country | Public holidays, 2027 | Runs of 3+ days off | Longest single break |
|---|---|---|---|
| Colombia | 19 | 13 | 4 days |
| South Korea | 24 | 10 | 4 days |
| United States | 15 | 9 | 3 days |
| New Zealand | 16 | 8 | 4 days |
| Japan | 17 | 7 | 5 days |
| Ireland | 10 | 7 | 3 days |
| Mexico | 9 | 6 | 4 days |
| Brazil | 25 | 6 | 6 days |
| United Kingdom | 8 | 5 | 4 days |
| Singapore | 12 | 5 | 3 days |
| France | 11 | 4 | 3 days |
| Italy | 14 | 4 | 3 days |
| Spain | 10 | 4 | 3 days |
| India | 18 | 4 | 3 days |
| Netherlands | 10 | 3 | 4 days |
| Germany | 9 | 3 | 4 days |
The country at the top of the table is not the country with the most holidays. Colombia produces thirteen breaks from nineteen holidays because Colombian law shifts a group of public holidays to the following Monday, converting ordinary mid-week holidays into three-day weekends as a matter of policy. It is the clearest example in the dataset of long weekends being manufactured rather than inherited.
At the other end, Russia records only two conventional long weekends — and then shuts down for ten consecutive days over the New Year and Orthodox Christmas period. China shows four three-day breaks plus two seven-day runs, its Spring Festival and National Day Golden Weeks, created by moving weekend days around the holiday rather than by adding public holidays. Japan’s longest run in 2027 is five days, as Golden Week begins on 1 May and runs through Children’s Day on 5 May.
Long weekends are the single most useful thing you can extract from a holiday calendar, and almost nobody publishes them. Once you compute them, the ranking changes completely — the country with the most holidays is rarely the country with the most breaks.
— Public Holiday Calendar editorial team
How to use it
For travellers, the practical takeaway is that holiday counts are a poor proxy for how disruptive or convenient a country’s calendar will be. A country with eight holidays that all fall on Mondays gives you more usable breaks than a country with eighteen scattered across the week.
For employers, the same table is an absence-forecasting tool: the dates on which a Monday or Friday holiday will thin out a distributed team are knowable a year in advance.
Every country hub links its 2025, 2026 and 2027 calendars, so a single URL answers both when the holidays are and when they become long weekends.
About Public Holiday Calendar
PublicHolidayCalendar.com publishes public holiday and school holiday calendars for 192 countries and territories, covering 2025, 2026 and 2027. Dates are sourced from official national channels; anything unverified is labelled rather than estimated. The site is free to use and requires no account.
Contact
Public Holiday Calendar editorial team
privacy@publicholidaycalendar.com
https://www.publicholidaycalendar.com/