Sri Lanka Public Holidays 2026 — full gazette with countdown

This calendar combines three legally distinct lists published by the Government of Sri Lanka: Public Holidays (Holidays Act No. 29 of 1971), Bank Holidays (Central Bank of Sri Lanka, under Section 19 of the Monetary Law Act) and Mercantile Holidays (Department of Labour, under the Shop & Office Employees Act). The three lists overlap heavily but are not identical — every entry on this page is annotated with the calendars on which it actually applies.

For each holiday we store: the ISO date; the English, Sinhala and Tamil names; the religious or national type (Buddhist / Hindu / Islamic / Christian / National); and three boolean flags (public, bank, mercantile) encoded directly from the gazette. No inference. The full source is checked into the repository — open the data file in GitHub if you want to see every entry.

Next-holiday countdown. The tool reads new Date()on the client, converts it to the Asia/Colombo calendar day (UTC+05:30, no DST), and filters the dataset by your selected classifications. The first remaining entry is the "next". Days remaining is computed as floor((nextDate − today) / 86_400_000) in UTC, so a system clock set to UTC still resolves to the correct Sri Lanka day. The component re-ticks once a minute so the countdown stays accurate across midnight.

Poya-day cross-check. Every entry tagged Buddhist is a Full Moon Poya Day. We verify each Poya is within ±1 day of the astronomical full moon for Colombo using the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center moon-phase catalog. When the gazette shifts a Poya to avoid a collision with another holiday (rare), we keep the gazette date and add an explanatory note.

Calendar export. The Download button emits an .ics file conforming to RFC 5545. Each holiday becomes an all-day VEVENT with DTSTART;VALUE=DATE and a one-day-later DTEND (per the iCalendar spec for all-day events). The SUMMARY line lists the holiday name and classification tags; the DESCRIPTION carries the Sinhala/Tamil names and the gazette citation. The file imports cleanly into Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and Outlook.

Verification.The dataset's 2026 totals are asserted at build time to match the gazette: 24 Public, 23 Bank, 24 Mercantile. If you spot a discrepancy with the official gazette, please email me — fixes ship within 24 hours.

• Ministry of Public Administration — annual holidays notification
• Central Bank of Sri Lanka — Bank Holidays calendar
• Department of Labour — Shop & Office Employees Act, mercantile observance
• Department of Government Printing — Gazette Extraordinary (annual holidays notification)
• Holidays Act No. 29 of 1971 — statutory basis for Public, Bank and Mercantile classifications

Ministry of Public Administration — Annual Public, Bank and Mercantile Holidays Notification for 2026. Last cross-checked on 2026-05-16. We update this page after every gazette amendment and at the start of each calendar year. Where Islamic feasts are confirmed by the moon sighting, we publish the gazette projection and revise within 24 hours of the official announcement.