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Public holidays in Japan in 2026

16 public holidays

Japan has 16 public holiday dates recorded for 2026. 16 of the listed dates are treated as non-working days and reduce the working-day count; 0 of those fall at a weekend. For the effect on working days see Japan business days 2026.

Dates

Sixteen holidays and the substitute-day machine

Japan runs the most structurally elaborate holiday calendar of any major economy: sixteen national holidays are fixed by the Public Holidays Act, with two movable ones — the third Mondays of January (Coming of Age) and July (Marine Day) — and two spring equinox dates plus two autumnal ones that are astronomically determined each February by cabinet order.

The machinery is what makes Japanese working-day counts unintuitive. When a holiday falls on a Sunday, the following non-holiday weekday becomes a substitute holiday (kurikae hentenkyū) — often a Monday, sometimes a Tuesday if Monday is also taken. 29 April, 3 May and 4 May sandwich Golden Week, and 4 May is itself a temporary holiday whenever 3 May is a Sunday. and Citizen's Holiday appears on 19 September whenever Respect for the Aged Day falls on the 20th, filling the gap. The practical read: a "normal" year in Tokyo routinely produces May and September clusters of four or five consecutive off-days that no static calendar site flags, and the sum of off-days per year swings by two or three depending on how the weekday dice fall — which is exactly the case for computing the count from a table rather than trusting an annual blog.

Method and scope

Deducted days are national public holidays (the days the dataset records as applying to the whole country). Holidays observed only in part of the country, or only in particular sectors, are listed with “Regional or sector-specific only” and are not deducted from the business-day counts.

Other years

• Japan 2027
• Japan business days
• 2026 summary