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.

Why the three lists differ.The overlap is close to total but the edges matter for payroll. Mahasivarathri (17 February 2026) is the clearest 2026 example: it is a Public and Mercantile holiday, so government offices, schools and shops close, yet it is not on the Central Bank's Bank Holidays calendar, so Licensed Commercial Banks stay open and cheque clearing runs normally. The reverse case — a Bank holiday that is not a Public holiday — can also appear when the CBSL declares a half-day or a mid-year bank closure that the Public list does not carry. This tool encodes each flag straight from its own source document rather than assuming the three lists are the same, which is the mistake most printed wall calendars make.

Payroll and leave implications.Under the Shop & Office Employees Act, an employee required to work on a gazetted Mercantile holiday is entitled to holiday-rate pay for that day. If you are working out what that day is worth, pair this calendar with the Sri Lanka Overtime Pay Calculator, which applies the correct weekday, rest-day and holiday multipliers. Holidays also do not consume your statutory leave balance — to see how annual, casual and medical leave accrue around them, use the Annual Leave Calculator. For notice periods, project deadlines and any count of business days that has to skip these dates, the Working Days Calculator reads from the same ground-truth list as this page, so the two never disagree.

Movable feasts and the ±1-day rule.Five 2026 entries are not fixed to the Gregorian calendar. The three Islamic feasts — Id Ul-Fitr (20 March), Id Ul-Alha (27 May) and Milad un-Nabi (25 August) — are set by the sighting of the crescent moon, so the gazette date is a projection that can move by one day once the sighting is confirmed. The two Sinhala & Tamil New Year days (13–14 April) are astrological rather than fixed; the auspicious timings for that festival are handled separately in the Sinhala & Tamil New Year Nekath tool. When the Ministry issues a correction we keep the gazette date as the source of truth and revise this page within 24 hours, rather than silently substituting our own astronomical calculation.

Each example below traces exactly what the tool does for a given "today" date and filter combination, so you can reproduce the result by hand and confirm the logic against the gazette. Every date is resolved in the Asia/Colombo timezone (UTC+05:30, no daylight saving), and the day count is a whole-day difference computed in UTC.

• 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.