Public holidays on a weekend - which ones move to Monday

2026

2027

What a moved holiday means in practice

When a public holiday moves to a Monday, the Sunday is no longer a public holiday - the Monday is. Employees who work on Sundays under a shift arrangement should check which day their employer treats as the holiday, because the pay rules for Sunday work and public holiday work are not the same. The Basic Conditions of Employment Act deals with both separately, and the sectoral determination for your industry may add its own rule.

When a public holiday falls on a Saturday and does not move, employees who do not normally work Saturdays lose nothing and gain nothing. Employees who do work Saturdays are working on a public holiday, which carries its own pay consequences. There is no "day in lieu" in the Act for a Saturday holiday, whatever an employer may offer as a benefit.

For planning purposes, the practical consequence is on the long weekends page: a moved holiday creates a three-day weekend, and a Saturday holiday creates nothing.

Where these dates come from

Every date in the table is a record in our open date dataset, each carrying the Government Gazette or departmental source it came from and the dates it was last verified and next reviewed. The dataset is maintained in a public repository, and corrections are logged rather than silently applied - the corrections policy explains how.

Weekday names above are calculated from the ISO date with a fixed UTC reference, so they are not affected by the timezone of whoever is reading the page.