Full list of India’s 2026 public holidays: 17 gazetted dates, restricted holidays, state variations, long weekends, and compliance rules for employers.
Full list of India’s 2026 public holidays: 17 gazetted dates, restricted holidays, state variations, long weekends, and compliance rules for employers.
If you’re hiring in India, the holiday calendar isn’t just a list of days off. It shapes payroll cycles, project deadlines, customer support coverage, and how much you’ll owe in double wages when someone has to staff a desk on Diwali.
India runs on a layered system. Three constitutional national holidays everyone observes. Seventeen gazetted holidays the central government recognises. Dozens of state-specific holidays. And a separate list of restricted holidays employees can pick from. Those layers don’t always agree with each other.
Below is the full 2026 list, what each tier means in practice, where the legal teeth are, and how to plan workforce coverage without getting blindsided by a regional festival you’ve never heard of. If you’re new to running an Indian team, the section on double wages and compensatory off is the one to bookmark.
Gazetted holidays in 2026
Plus 33 restricted holidays employees can pick from, 3 constitutional national holidays every employer must observe, and a separate state-by-state calendar that varies wildly. Maharashtra alone publishes 24 mandatory dates.
There are three layers worth understanding before you build a 2026 calendar.
These come first, and they’re the only ones that apply uniformly across every state and every employer in India: Republic Day on 26 January, Independence Day on 15 August, and Gandhi Jayanti on 2 October. The legal anchor sits in the National and Festival Holidays Act framework that most states have adopted, with their own minor variations.
If your business runs on these three days, you need prior approval from the labour department. Employees who work get either double wages, a compensatory day off, or both, depending on the state. We’ll get into the details further down.
The Department of Personnel and Training (DOPT) publishes seventeen gazetted holidays each year. These apply to central government offices, public sector banks, and PSUs. The official memorandum lives on the Ministry of Personnel portal and is republished by every central department before December.
Most large private employers follow the gazetted list closely, even though they aren’t legally bound to all 17. IT services, GCCs, banks, and MNCs typically default to it, then adjust based on which state the employee is based in.
Restricted holidays are where India’s diversity shows up in HR systems. Each central government employee picks two from a list of about 33, based on which festivals they actually observe at home.
A Hindu employee in Delhi might take Karva Chauth and Govardhan Puja. A Christian colleague picks Easter Sunday and Christmas Eve. A Sikh employee in Punjab picks Vaisakhi and Guru Tegh Bahadur Martyrdom Day. Same workplace, completely different days off. Most large private employers mirror the same flexibility.
This is the layer that catches foreign employers off guard. Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, West Bengal, Punjab, and every other state publishes its own calendar with regional festivals layered on top. We’ll break the big ones down later in this guide.
For a deeper view of how compliance complexity scales with multi-state hiring, our breakdown of PEO services in India walks through how this gets handled at the operational level.
Compliance doesn't scale linearly. Peorient compares 50+ EOR and PEO providers, then delivers a side-by-side recommendation based on India payroll, leave management, statutory holiday compliance, and operational fit for different team sizes and budgets.
Here’s the complete DOPT calendar for 2026, with the day of the week and a short note on what each one means for workforce planning. Dates with a tentative tag depend on lunar sighting and may shift by a day.
| Date | Day | Holiday | Type | Workforce note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 26 Jan | Mon | Republic Day | National | Three-day weekend with Sat–Sun. Mandatory closure. |
| 4 Mar | Wed | Holi | Gazetted | North India effectively offline for 2 days. South unaffected. |
| 21 Mar | Sat | Id-ul-Fitr (tentative) | Gazetted | Falls on a Saturday. No bonus day. |
| 26 Mar | Thu | Rama Navami | Gazetted | Bridge Friday possible if you allow it. |
| 31 Mar | Tue | Mahavir Jayanti | Gazetted | Bridge Monday possible. Quarter-end pressure. |
| 3 Apr | Fri | Good Friday | Gazetted | Long weekend. Plan support coverage. |
| 1 May | Fri | Buddha Purnima | Gazetted | Coincides with Labour Day. Long weekend. |
| 27 May | Wed | Id-ul-Zuha / Bakrid (tentative) | Gazetted | Mid-week. Limited disruption nationally. |
| 26 Jun | Fri | Muharram (tentative) | Gazetted | Long weekend. Subdued festival, less travel. |
| 15 Aug | Sat | Independence Day | National | Falls on Saturday. No bonus day. |
| 26 Aug | Wed | Id-e-Milad (tentative) | Gazetted | Mid-week. Onam falls the same day in Kerala. |
| 4 Sep | Fri | Janmashtami | Gazetted | Long weekend. Major in north and west India. |
| 2 Oct | Fri | Gandhi Jayanti | National | Long weekend. Mandatory closure nationwide. |
| 20 Oct | Tue | Dussehra | Gazetted | Bridge Monday possible. Travel demand peaks. |
| 8 Nov | Sun | Diwali (Deepavali) | Gazetted | Falls on Sunday. Most employers extend through 11 Nov. |
| 24 Nov | Tue | Guru Nanak Jayanti | Gazetted | Bridge Monday possible. Big in Punjab and Delhi. |
| 25 Dec | Fri | Christmas Day | Gazetted | Long year-end weekend. Strong leave season. |
A few of the gazetted dates deserve a closer look, because they’re the ones that tend to break naive holiday calendars.
Pairs with the weekend to give you a clean three-day break right at the start of the year. Schools, banks, courts, and most offices stay shut. If you operate India-based customer support, you’ll want a backup region staffed.
Mid-week and disruptive. North India effectively goes offline for two days because Holika Dahan on the evening of 3 March pulls people into long weekend mode. South India observes it less. Plan two days of reduced output if your team sits in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, or Bangalore.
Falls on a Saturday in 2026. No bonus day for most employers. Some companies move the observance to Friday or Monday, which is technically optional unless your standing orders or shop and establishment registration say otherwise.
This one trips up a lot of overseas employers. Diwali is on a Sunday in 2026, which means the productivity hit shifts. Most Indian companies extend the break: Govardhan Puja on Monday 9 November, plus Bhai Dooj on Wednesday 11 November, typically get bundled in.
Plan for at least three to five days of reduced output around this window, especially if you have engineering or operations teams in north and west India. Output recovers slowly because employees often combine the holidays with personal leave.
Closes out the year with another natural three-day weekend. Add the year-end leave that most employees take and you’re typically looking at a 10-day slowdown from 22 December through 1 January.
Banks in India operate on a separate calendar published under the Negotiable Instruments Act. The Reserve Bank of India also keeps banks closed on the second and fourth Saturday of every month, plus all Sundays, plus 1 April for annual account closing. If weekly payroll or disbursements run through banks, planning around these cutoffs becomes critical.
Restricted holidays are a quirk of the Indian system that most overseas employers miss. Each central government employee can pick two from this list, in addition to the gazetted holidays. Private employers often allow the same flexibility, especially in IT, banking, and large MNCs.
The full 2026 restricted list, as notified by DOPT:
| Date | Day | Holiday |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Jan | Thu | New Year's Day |
| 3 Jan | Sat | Hazrat Ali's Birthday |
| 14 Jan | Wed | Pongal / Makar Sankranti |
| 23 Jan | Fri | Vasant Panchami |
| 1 Feb | Sun | Guru Ravidas Jayanti |
| 12 Feb | Thu | Maharishi Dayanand Saraswati Jayanti |
| 15 Feb | Sun | Maha Shivratri |
| 19 Feb | Thu | Shivaji Jayanti |
| 3 Mar | Tue | Holika Dahan |
| 19 Mar | Thu | Ugadi / Gudi Padwa |
| 20 Mar | Fri | Jumat-ul-Vida |
| 5 Apr | Sun | Easter Sunday |
| 14 Apr | Tue | Vaisakhi / Mesadi |
| 15 Apr | Wed | Bahag Bihu |
| 9 May | Sat | Rabindranath Tagore Jayanti |
| 16 Jul | Thu | Rath Yatra |
| 26 Aug | Wed | Onam |
| 28 Aug | Fri | Raksha Bandhan |
| 14 Sep | Mon | Ganesh Chaturthi |
| 18 Oct | Sun | Maha Saptami |
| 19 Oct | Mon | Maha Ashtami |
| 26 Oct | Mon | Maharishi Valmiki Jayanti |
| 29 Oct | Thu | Karva Chauth |
| 9 Nov | Mon | Govardhan Puja |
| 11 Nov | Wed | Bhai Dooj |
| 15 Nov | Sun | Chhath Puja |
| 24 Nov | Tue | Guru Tegh Bahadur Martyrdom Day |
| 23 Dec | Wed | Hazrat Ali's Birthday |
| 24 Dec | Thu | Christmas Eve |
If you’ve never run an Indian payroll before, the restricted list is also where the practical headaches live. A Sikh employee in Punjab will likely take Vaisakhi on 14 April. A Bengali employee in Kolkata will probably want Maha Saptami and Maha Ashtami (18 and 19 October) for Durga Puja. A Tamil employee will request Pongal on 14 January. HR systems that don’t account for this end up with frustrated emails in October.
The other reason this matters: misclassifying a restricted holiday as a paid leave day, or vice versa, can throw off your annual leave accrual calculations. Our guide on EOR payroll walks through how a good provider handles the leave-versus-holiday accounting in the background.
The constitutional baseline is just three days. Everything else changes by state. If you’re hiring across India, you’re not running one calendar; you’re running ten or fifteen, depending on where your employees sit.
Here’s what 2026 looks like for the seven biggest tech and operations hubs:
| State / region | Mandatory holidays in 2026 | Key state-specific dates to plan for |
|---|---|---|
| Maharashtra | Around 24 (S&E Act) | Gudi Padwa (19 Mar), Maharashtra Day (1 May), Shivaji Jayanti (19 Feb), Ganesh Chaturthi (14 Sep) |
| Karnataka | Around 11 (statutory) | Kannada Rajyotsava (1 Nov), Mahalaya Amavasya, Ayudha Puja |
| Tamil Nadu | Around 23 | Pongal block (14–17 Jan), Tamil New Year (14 Apr), Vinayaka Chaturthi |
| Kerala | Around 21 | Onam window (24–28 Aug, with main day 26 Aug), Vishu (14 Apr), Thiruvonam |
| West Bengal | Around 25 | Durga Puja block (Oct), Kali Puja, Poila Boishakh (Bengali New Year) |
| Delhi NCT | Around 21 | Mostly mirrors gazetted list with state additions |
| Punjab | Around 21 | Lohri (13 Jan), Vaisakhi (14 Apr), Guru Gobind Singh Jayanti, Martyrdom days |
| Telangana | Around 18 | Bathukamma, Bonalu, Telangana Formation Day (2 Jun) |
| Gujarat | Around 20 | Uttarayan (14 Jan), Navratri block (Oct), Diwali extended |
If your employees are remote and spread across these states, the cleanest path is usually to align with the central gazetted list as your base, then layer in regional dates per location. This is exactly the kind of mess that an Employer of Record handles in the background, which is one of the bigger reasons companies hiring in India end up using one. For a quick read on how the model differs from a traditional PEO, our breakdown of EOR vs PEO in India covers the differences clearly.
Under the Karnataka Industrial Establishments (National and Festival Holidays) Act, 1963, eligible employees include contract, part-time, and gig workers. Treating them as ineligible for paid national holidays is a common audit finding. Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu have similar provisions.
This is the section your team will actually screenshot. The 2026 long weekend map for India:
| Weekend window | Dates | Anchor holiday | Total off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Republic Day weekend | 24 Jan (Sat) – 26 Jan (Mon) | Republic Day | 3 days |
| Holi week | 3 Mar (eve) – 4 Mar (Wed) | Holika Dahan + Holi | 1.5 days mid-week |
| Easter weekend | 3 Apr (Fri) – 5 Apr (Sun) | Good Friday | 3 days |
| May Day weekend | 1 May (Fri) – 3 May (Sun) | Buddha Purnima + Labour Day | 3 days |
| Muharram bridge | 26 Jun (Fri) – 28 Jun (Sun) | Muharram | 3 days |
| Janmashtami weekend | 4 Sep (Fri) – 6 Sep (Sun) | Janmashtami | 3 days |
| Gandhi Jayanti weekend | 2 Oct (Fri) – 4 Oct (Sun) | Gandhi Jayanti | 3 days |
| Diwali extended | 7 Nov (Sat) – 11 Nov (Wed) | Diwali + Govardhan Puja + Bhai Dooj | Up to 5 days |
| Christmas weekend | 25 Dec (Fri) – 27 Dec (Sun) | Christmas Day | 3 days |
If your operations team plans capacity at the start of the year, the Diwali stretch (7 to 11 November) and the year-end window (22 December to 1 January) are the two most important to staff carefully. Both routinely lose 30 to 50 percent of expected throughput in Indian-based teams.
An EOR or PEO will run the full multi-state holiday calendar for you, handle leave accruals, statutory bonus calculations, and labour department filings if staff are needed on a national holiday. Peorient's free report compares the providers handling India compliance best.
See the top India EOR providers →Asking employees to work on a national holiday isn’t just inconvenient. It triggers specific legal obligations, and the penalty exposure is bigger than most foreign employers expect.
Under most state versions of the National and Festival Holidays Act, an employer who needs an employee to work on Republic Day, Independence Day, or Gandhi Jayanti has to either:
Some states require both. Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu each phrase the obligation slightly differently, and labour inspectors do read the standing orders carefully when a complaint comes in. As a baseline, the central reference at WageIndicator’s labour law guide is reliable for the principles, but always cross-check the specific state rule that applies to your registration.
You also need prior approval from the relevant labour authority before opening the office on a national holiday. This isn’t usually a rubber-stamp process, especially for sectors like manufacturing, security, BPO, or essential services.
Most states require notification at least two weeks in advance, with a stated reason and the headcount that will be present. Skipping this step is the most common audit finding when a labour inspector visits a tech or BPO floor on 26 January or 15 August.
Fines under state Acts typically run up to ₹500 per violation per day, which sounds small until you realise it stacks per employee per offence. The bigger risks are reputational damage and the retroactive payroll liability that shows up later.
We’ve seen companies pay tens of thousands of dollars in retroactive double wages plus interest after a labour inspector audit, especially when a former employee files a complaint after exit. Provident Fund and ESI authorities can also flag the underlying records during their own audits, which compounds the cost.
If you want a deeper view of the broader cost of compliance failures, our breakdown of global payroll services pricing covers what you actually pay for when you outsource this stuff to a managed provider.
If staff absolutely need to operate on 26 January, 15 August, or 2 October, file the labour department notification at least two weeks in advance. Document the compensatory off in the next payroll, not the one after that. Auditors look for the paper trail in date order, and a six-week-old comp-off entry raises the same scrutiny as no entry at all.
If you don’t have an Indian entity, navigating all of this from outside the country gets expensive. There are three usual paths.
Full control, full compliance burden. Realistic only if you’re hiring 50-plus people long term, because the entity setup alone takes three to six months and the ongoing statutory audit overhead is real. You’ll also need an Indian director, a registered office, and a separate payroll team or vendor.
Lower setup cost, but India’s contractor classification rules are strict. Misclassification penalties can be steep, and you don’t get the loyalty, IP protection, or non-compete enforcement of full employees. The Income Tax department also looks closely at long-running monthly contractor payments and often re-characterises them as salary.
If you’re trying to figure out where contractors stop and employees start, the relevant labour codes have shifted in the last two years. Most foreign employers either keep contractors strictly project-based with a defined end date, or convert them to full employment through an EOR.
Increasingly the default for teams under 25 in India. The EOR becomes the legal employer, handles all the gazetted and state-specific holiday calendars, runs payroll in INR, deducts TDS and provident fund correctly, and keeps you compliant. You direct the work and own the outputs; they own the legal employer status.
An international PEO plays a similar role at slightly different price points and structures. If you’re trying to figure out which model fits your situation, our guide on EOR vs PEO in India breaks down the trade-offs at each headcount stage.
For a curated shortlist, we maintain a regularly updated round-up of the best EOR providers for India and a separate list of the top international PEO services operating here. Both pieces compare pricing, compliance coverage, and onboarding speed across the major providers.
Before January hits, run through this. It will save you most of the audit pain we see in Q1 every year.
Peorient’s free advisory service compares 50-plus EOR and PEO providers based on hiring footprint, payroll handling, multi-state compliance, statutory holiday management, and operational fit for different team sizes. The process takes about 10 minutes to brief and two to three business days to receive the side-by-side report.
Start the free comparison →The central government has notified 17 gazetted holidays for 2026, plus 33 restricted holidays employees can pick from. State governments add their own under the Shops and Establishments Act and Industrial Establishments Act, taking the total observable holidays in some states past 25 days.
Just three, by law: Republic Day on 26 January, Independence Day on 15 August, and Gandhi Jayanti on 2 October. These come from the National and Festival Holidays Act framework adopted by most states. Every other holiday depends on the gazetted list, the state list, or company policy.
Diwali falls on Sunday, 8 November 2026. Most north and west Indian companies extend the break with Govardhan Puja on 9 November and Bhai Dooj on 11 November. South Indian companies typically take only one or two days.
In most states, yes. The standard is either 200 percent of the daily wage or a compensatory day off within 30 to 90 days, depending on state law. Some states require both. Check your state's National and Festival Holidays Act for the exact obligation.
Only if you're a central government office. Private employers are bound by their state's Shops and Establishments Act and Industrial Establishments Act, which usually layer regional holidays on top of the gazetted list.
Gazetted holidays are mandatory closures for central government offices, banks, and PSUs. Restricted holidays are optional, with each employee allowed to pick two or three based on personal or religious preference.
For most private employers, no extra day off is granted. Some companies move the holiday to Monday 9 November (which is also Govardhan Puja in many calendars), but this is discretionary unless your contract or standing orders specify otherwise.
No. Bank holidays are notified separately under the Negotiable Instruments Act, 1881. Banks observe gazetted holidays plus the second and fourth Saturday of every month plus 1 April for annual account closing. State-specific bank holidays also vary widely.
In states like Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu, the National and Festival Holidays Act is broadly worded to include contract, part-time, and gig workers. Excluding them is a common audit finding. The safe approach is to grant the three constitutional national holidays to anyone you classify as a worker, regardless of contract type.
An EOR is the legal employer of record, so it owns the holiday calendar, applies the right state-specific list per employee, runs payroll on the right dates, files labour department notifications when you need staff on a national holiday, and calculates double wages or comp-off automatically. You can compare the leading EOR providers in our best EOR in India guide or read individual provider write-ups like the Remunance review, Deel review, and Remote.com review.
Talk to the Peorient advisory team or browse the full library of EOR and PEO guides before planning your next India hiring move.
Cost of Living vs Salary in India: A 2026 Guide for Global Employers
India pairs some of the world’s lowest living costs with fast-rising, city-specific salaries, so the real question for global employers is not whether pay is cheap but whether it is fair. This guide maps cost of living against salary across India’s main hubs to help you set competitive, compliant offers.
