Nepal public holidays

What this value means

TWO GAZETTES COVER ONE GREGORIAN YEAR. Nepal gazettes holidays by Bikram Sambat year (Baishakh 1 to Chaitra end), so calendar 2026 is spliced from the BS 2082 notice (1 January – 13 April 2026) and the BS 2083 notice (14 April – 31 December 2026). Every entry above carries its BS date so a reader can reconcile against the instrument. The BS 2083 notice is the one published 18 Falgun 2082; the BS 2082 notice is Khanda 74 Sankhya 59, at https://www.moha.gov.np/page/government-and-public-holidays-in-2082. THE WEEKLY HOLIDAY IS SATURDAY ONLY — this is the single biggest trap in Nepali payroll and settlement. Sunday is a normal WORKING day. Clause 1 of each notice lists every Saturday of the year by BS date (52 of them in BS 2083) as the weekly holiday; Friday is a short working day under the office-hours clause. None of the 45 entries above is a Saturday-as-such, but three FALL on a Saturday (29 August, 19 September and 17 October 2026) and are simply absorbed — there is no Monday-transfer or substitute-day rule for a festival landing on the weekly holiday. Eight fall on a Sunday, which in Nepal is an ordinary working day, so they are real days off. CATEGORY MATTERS — THE LIST IS NOT UNIFORM. The gazette separates: clause 2.1 festivals that are public holidays MULUKBHARI (nationwide); clause 2.2 festivals for a particular religion, culture, geography or place; clause 3 women employees only (Teej, Jitiya); clause 4 educational institutions only (Basanta Panchami); clause 5 Jatra holidays for the KATHMANDU VALLEY ONLY (Gai Jatra, Indra Jatra, Bhoto Jatra, Ghode Jatra); clause 6 day-holidays; clause 7 birth-anniversary holidays. Counting all 45 rows as national paid holidays overstates the entitlement badly — 33 of the 45 are nationwide and 12 are restricted, each labelled above. HOLI IS TWO DIFFERENT DATES: 2 March 2026 in the 56 hill and mountain districts and 3 March 2026 in the 21 named Terai districts (Jhapa, Morang, Sunsari, Saptari, Siraha, Udayapur, Dhanusha, Mahottari, Sarlahi, Rautahat, Bara, Parsa, both Nawalparasis, Rupandehi, Kapilvastu, Dang, Banke, Bardiya, Kailali, Kanchanpur). No single national Holi date exists. FOUR DATES CARRY TWO GAZETTED HOLIDAYS EACH, so a naive row count and a distinct-date count disagree (45 rows, 41 distinct dates): 1 May 2026 is both Buddha Jayanti / Chandi Purnima and International Labour Day (Baishakh 18, 2083); 4 September is Krishna Janmashtami and Gaura Parva; 11 November is Bhai Tika and Falgunanda Jayanti; 30 December is Tamu Lhochhar and Dura Mhaipu Nakuma. DASHAIN AND TIHAR ARE RANGES, NOT DAYS: the gazette grants Dashain as a block from Asoj 31 (Phulpati) to Kartik 6 (Dwadashi) — seven consecutive days, 17–23 October 2026 — and Tihar from Kartik 22 (Laxmi Puja) to Kartik 26 (the day after Bhai Tika), five days, 8–12 November 2026. They are expanded here into individual dates. Together they are 12 of the 36 nationwide holidays; Nepali business effectively stops for both. NOT DATED IN THE GAZETTE, SO NOT SERVED AS DATES: the notice grants Eid ul-Fitr and Eid ul-Adha (Bakar Eid) 'on the day of' the festival for Muslims, Mohammad Jayanti for Nepali Muslims, Guru Nanak Jayanti for Nepali Sikhs, Bhoto Jatra (Matsyendranath) for the Kathmandu Valley on the day the jatra falls, and Siruwa Pawani for Jhapa, Morang, Sunsari, Siraha and Saptari — none carry a fixed BS date and the Islamic ones move with the moon, so they are deliberately omitted from the list above rather than guessed. In 2026 Eid ul-Fitr and Eid ul-Adha fall in late March and late May respectively. OBSERVED BUT OFFICES OPEN: clause 8 names three days that are marked nationally with offices working — the National Day against Caste Discrimination and Untouchability (Jestha 21), Civil Service Day (Bhadau 22) and 'Gen-Z Martyrs' Day' (Bhadau 23 = 8 September 2026, commemorating the September 2025 uprising). Do not treat these as holidays. ESSENTIAL SERVICES: clause 10 requires ministries to keep citizenship, passport and other listed services running on most of the listed holidays. MISSIONS ABROAD: clause 9 lets Nepali diplomatic missions self-manage up to 18 holidays, blending local and Nepali festivals — an embassy's list will not match this one. ACCESS PROBLEM: both gazette PDFs on moha.gov.np are SCANNED IMAGES with no text layer (8.2 MB and 7.8 MB), so nothing extracts as text; the dates here were read from rendered page images and every BS-to-Gregorian conversion was cross-checked against the day-of-week the gazette itself prints for each entry and against the gazette's own complete list of Saturdays, which pins the BS 2083 month lengths exactly (Baishakh 31, Jestha 31, Asar 32, Saun 31, Bhadau 31, Asoj 31, Kartik 30, Mangsir 29, Poush 30, Magh 29, Falgun 30, Chait 30). The Nepal Gazette portal rajpatra.dop.gov.np serves over HTTP only (HTTPS refuses the connection) and its title search returned nothing for these notices.

Get it programmatically

curl https://asiaref.dev/v1/np/public-holidays
# Free.
# History:    curl https://asiaref.dev/v1/np/public-holidays/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://asiaref.dev/provenance/np/public-holidays

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