France has 11 national public holidays in 2026, running from New Year's Day on 1 January to Christmas Day on 25 December. Two of them — Assumption on Saturday 15 August and All Saints' Day on Sunday 1 November — fall at the weekend, and France does not move holidays to the following Monday, so only nine land on a working day this year.
The 2026 Calendar, Date by Date
| Date | Day | Holiday | What it marks |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 January | Thursday | Jour de l'An | New Year's Day |
| 6 April | Monday | Lundi de Pâques | Easter Monday |
| 1 May | Friday | Fête du Travail | Labour Day |
| 8 May | Friday | Victoire 1945 | End of the Second World War in Europe |
| 14 May | Thursday | Ascension | Ascension Day, 39 days after Easter |
| 25 May | Monday | Lundi de Pentecôte | Whit Monday |
| 14 July | Tuesday | Fête nationale | Bastille Day |
| 15 August | Saturday | Assomption | Assumption of Mary |
| 1 November | Sunday | Toussaint | All Saints' Day |
| 11 November | Wednesday | Armistice | End of the First World War, 1918 |
| 25 December | Friday | Noël | Christmas Day |
One legal detail catches out most people reading a list like this. Under Article L3133-1 of the French labour code, all eleven are jours fériés, but only 1 May is chômé et payé — a compulsory paid day off for essentially every employee, with double pay for the small number of sectors that must operate anyway. The other ten are ordinary public holidays whose non-working status depends on the collective agreement covering the job. In practice almost every office, bank, school and public service closes on all eleven, but a bakery, a museum or a large supermarket may not.
Two of the eleven are also unusually recent as fixed law. Victory in Europe Day was made a public holiday in 1953, dropped by de Gaulle in 1959 on the grounds that France had too many commemorations, marked only by a Sunday ceremony through the 1960s and 1970s, and restored as a full holiday by François Mitterrand in 1981. Bastille Day was adopted as the national day in 1880, ninety-one years after the event, and the parliamentary text deliberately left it ambiguous whether it honours the storming of the Bastille prison on 14 July 1789 or the Fête de la Fédération held exactly a year later — a unity celebration that was far less bloody and easier for a divided Third Republic to agree on.
Why Six of the Eleven Are Catholic Feast Days
France separated church and state by the law of 9 December 1905 and describes itself in Article 1 of its constitution as an indivisible, secular republic. Its holiday calendar says otherwise. Easter Monday, Ascension, Whit Monday, Assumption, All Saints' and Christmas are all Christian feasts — six of eleven, a majority.
The explanation is inertia rather than doctrine. The revolutionary Republic did try to erase them: the French Republican Calendar, in force from 1793 to 1805, replaced the seven-day week with a ten-day décade and swapped saints' days for days named after seeds, tools and farm animals. It was deeply unpopular and Napoleon abolished it. The Concordat of 1801 restored four Catholic holidays, and the 1905 separation law removed the church's legal privileges without touching the days themselves — they had become social habit, detached from the observance that created them. Only a small minority of French people attend Mass on Assumption; nearly everyone takes the day.
The three secular holidays each commemorate a distinct national moment: 14 July for the storming of the Bastille in 1789, 8 May for the German surrender in 1945, and 11 November for the 1918 armistice. Labour Day on 1 May is the fourth non-religious date, and the only one with an international rather than a French origin.
The Moveable Feasts and How Their Dates Are Set
Four holidays shift each year because they hang off Easter, which Western churches fix as the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox. Easter Sunday in 2026 is 5 April, one of the earlier dates in its 22 March to 25 April range.
- Easter Monday — the day after Easter Sunday: 6 April 2026
- Ascension — always a Thursday, 39 days after Easter: 14 May 2026
- Whit Monday — the day after Pentecost, 50 days after Easter: 25 May 2026
Because Ascension is always a Thursday, it is the single most reliable long-weekend generator in the French year, and traffic on the A6 and A7 southbound on the preceding Wednesday evening is forecast every spring.
Whit Monday has a complication. After the August 2003 heatwave, which killed around 15,000 people in France, mostly elderly, the government created the journée de solidarité: one extra day of unpaid work per employee, funding care for the elderly and disabled through a dedicated national fund. Whit Monday was the default date from 2005 to 2008, which made it a confusing half-holiday. A 2008 reform let employers pick the date instead, or spread it across the year in hours, so Whit Monday is now a normal public holiday for most workers while the solidarity obligation sits somewhere else in the calendar.
Faire le Pont: How the French Stretch a Day Off
Faire le pont — "to make the bridge" — is the practice of taking the working day between a holiday and a weekend as annual leave, turning a single day off into four. It is not a legal entitlement; it is a negotiated custom that many employers formalise in advance, and some schools build into the term calendar.
2026 is a good year for it. Ascension on Thursday 14 May puts Friday 15 May in bridge position, producing a four-day weekend for anyone who books one day. Bastille Day on Tuesday 14 July does the same in reverse with Monday 13 July. Both 1 May and 8 May fall on Fridays, which need no bridging at all — they are three-day weekends automatically. May 2026 is consequently a heavily disrupted month for French business: two Fridays off, one Thursday, and one Monday, all in five weeks.
The bridging habit has a measurable economic footprint. French employer federations produce an annual estimate of lost output in years where several holidays cluster midweek, and the Ascension bridge alone routinely closes schools nationwide for four days, which forces working parents to take leave whether they intended to or not. Anyone booking travel, medical appointments or deliveries in France should check the calendar for these clusters rather than assuming a normal week.
Alsace-Moselle and the Overseas Departments Keep Extra Days
The eleven-day list is not universal within France. In the departments of Bas-Rhin, Haut-Rhin and Moselle, two additional public holidays apply: Good Friday (3 April in 2026) and St Stephen's Day on 26 December, giving thirteen. These survive from the period between 1871 and 1918 when Alsace-Lorraine was part of the German Empire and kept a local legal code. When the territory returned to France after the First World War, the more generous local provisions on holidays, social insurance and church-state relations were retained rather than harmonised away, and they remain in force more than a century later.
The overseas departments each add a day commemorating the abolition of slavery, on dates matching their own history: 27 April in Mayotte, 22 May in Martinique, 27 May in Guadeloupe, 10 June in French Guiana and 20 December on Réunion. Saint-Martin marks 28 May. These are full public holidays locally and are entirely unobserved in metropolitan France.
Eleven Days Against Germany, Spain and the UK
France sits comfortably in the middle of the European range, and the raw count is less informative than how the days behave:
- United Kingdom — 8 bank holidays in England and Wales, 9 in Scotland, 10 in Northern Ireland. The UK does grant substitute Mondays when a holiday falls at the weekend, so the count is never eroded.
- Germany — 9 nationwide, but the states add their own: Bavaria reaches 13, Berlin has 10. Like France, Germany offers no weekend substitution, and its holiday calendar varies more sharply by region than France's does.
- Spain — 14 in most places, built from a national core plus regional and municipal choices.
- Italy — 12 nationally, plus each city's patron saint day.
France's real advantage lies elsewhere: the statutory minimum paid leave is five weeks, or 25 working days, on top of the holiday calendar, and many salaried staff receive additional RTT days as compensation for working beyond the 35-hour week. Counting holidays alone systematically understates French time off. For the global picture, see which countries have the most public holidays.
Planning Around the August Shutdown
The single most disruptive period in the French year is not a public holiday at all. Through most of August, and particularly the fortnight either side of Assumption on the 15th, a large share of the country takes annual leave simultaneously. Small businesses close entirely for two or three weeks with a handwritten note on the door; medical practices operate on rotas; municipal offices run skeleton hours; and Paris empties of Parisians while filling with visitors. The last weekend of July and the first of August produce the year's worst motorway congestion, forecast in advance on a colour-coded scale by the national traffic service.
If you are scheduling business in France, the safe windows are mid-September to mid-December and mid-January to late April. If you are travelling for the atmosphere rather than the paperwork, 14 July is the day to aim for: the military parade down the Champs-Élysées is the oldest and largest regular military parade in Europe, fire stations across the country throw open their doors for the bals des pompiers on the 13th and 14th, and the fireworks over the Eiffel Tower draw hundreds of thousands to the Champ de Mars. For the wider context of regions, climate and travel seasons, our guide to France covers the rest of the year.