Dutch public holidays, and what is actually closed

The Netherlands has a fixed list of officially recognised public holidays. None of them is automatically a paid day off, for an employee or for you: it depends on the written schedule agreed with your host family. What actually closes, shops, schools, BSO, trains, is a separate question, and the answer differs by holiday.

The recognised holidays, and the dates

The officially recognised Dutch public holidays are New Year's Day, Good Friday, Easter Sunday and Easter Monday, King's Day, Liberation Day, Ascension Day (Hemelvaartsdag), Whit Sunday and Whit Monday (Pinksteren), and Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

What is left of 2026: Christmas Day falls on Friday 25 December and Boxing Day on Saturday 26 December. For 2027: New Year's Day is Friday 1 January, Good Friday is 26 March, Easter Sunday is 28 March and Easter Monday 29 March, King's Day is Tuesday 27 April, Liberation Day is Wednesday 5 May, Ascension Day is Thursday 6 May, Whit Sunday is 16 May and Whit Monday 17 May, and Christmas falls on Saturday 25 and Sunday 26 December. In 2027, Liberation Day and Ascension Day fall back to back, Wednesday and Thursday, which many Dutch families turn into a long weekend by taking the Friday off too.

Do you actually get the day off

Dutch law does not say a public holiday is automatically a paid day off. For an employee it depends on their contract or cao, and for you it depends on the written schedule you and your host family agreed as part of your permit. See your-signed-daily-schedule for what that schedule has to say and what to do if a public holiday is not accounted for in it.

Liberation Day on 5 May is where this catches people out. It is an officially recognised holiday, but even in a lustrum year, once every five years, only some employers give their staff the day off, depending on their own cao or contract, not most of them. Outside the meivakantie period, 5 May is also an ordinary school day for most schools. Do not assume you have this day off: check your schedule, or ask.

Good Friday has the same kind of catch: it is officially recognised, but most schools and many employers still work or study that day anyway. Check before you plan around it.

What is actually closed

The Winkeltijdenwet, the Dutch Shop Opening Hours Act, closes shops by default on Sundays, on public holidays, and between 22:00 and 06:00, but every municipality can allow shops to open on top of that, so it genuinely differs from town to town. If you are not sure, check your own supermarket's opening hours rather than assuming. On 24 December shops must close by 19:00 at the latest, again unless the municipality allows longer, and Christmas Day and New Year's Day tend to be the two days when even city supermarkets are shut for the whole day.

Schools are in principle closed on New Year's Day, Easter Monday, King's Day, Liberation Day, Ascension Day, Whit Monday and both Christmas days. Good Friday is not an automatic school closure, but many schools close anyway, so check with your host family's school rather than assuming either way. Out-of-school care (BSO) follows the same closures as school: on an official holiday there is no BSO to fall back on, which matters if you are the one covering childcare that day.

Do your grocery shopping the day before a holiday if you can. Assuming you can pop out on the day itself is the mistake almost everyone makes once.

Trains on a holiday

NS runs a reduced timetable, closer to a Sunday schedule than a weekday one, on several public holidays, including Easter Sunday, Ascension Day, Whit Sunday, Christmas Day and New Year's Day. Around Christmas and New Year specifically, NS also publishes a separate holiday timetable with its own hours, reset every year rather than fixed from one year to the next, so check the NS app or ns.nl close to your travel date instead of assuming last year's hours still apply.

For a school holiday week rather than a single day off, see school-holidays-per-region, which is a different calendar with its own regional dates.