Methodology

Official sources only

Each country's schedule is transcribed from the government document that sets it, such as the State Council's annual notice for mainland China. Third-party holiday sites and open-source libraries are used only to cross-check, never as a source.

How each year is checked

• Every date is compared with the full text of the official notice, and the date we checked it is shown next to the source.
• Automated tests reject impossible data: overlapping holidays, makeup workdays that are not weekend days or that sit inside a holiday, and invalid dates.
• For mainland China, the 13 statutory days are cross-checked against the Chinese lunar calendar. Qingming is a solar term, so it is checked by hand against the Hong Kong Observatory almanac.
• For Russia, tests re-apply the Labour Code's own rule — a weekend that falls on a holiday moves to the next working day — and every shortened pre-holiday day is cross-checked in at least two published calendars.
• For Vietnam, the paid holidays are checked against the lunar calendar and the Labour Code's rule that a holiday on a weekend is given on the next working day; every weekday swapped off must be matched by a Saturday worked. A year is added only once every holiday in it has been settled.
• For the United States, tests re-derive every federal holiday from 5 U.S.C. 6103 (fixed dates and "third Monday"-style rules) and move Saturday and Sunday holidays to Friday and Monday, then compare with OPM's list. The UK, Japan and Singapore are compared date by date with the official files from GOV.UK, the Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Manpower.
• For Hong Kong, the GovHK holiday list is compared date by date with the government's 1823 public holidays feed.
• For Taiwan, rest periods are generated from the official CSV's day-off flags, and tests re-apply the rule that a Saturday holiday moves to Friday and a Sunday holiday to Monday.
• A test also flags any stretch of more than six consecutive working days, which the rules allow only in special cases.

What we never do

• Guess a year that hasn't been published. Those dates show as not published, and calculations that reach them stop instead of returning a number.
• Claim first-hand experience. We describe the rules and the calendar, not what an office or factory does in practice.
• Give legal, tax or payroll advice.