Public Holidays and Customs

German public holidays, or Feiertage, are not just cultural occasions – they are the days that decide when the shops shut, when your parcel does not arrive, when the office closes, and whether you get a paid day off. For a newcomer, they can be genuinely confusing, because Germany does not have one national holiday calendar. Each of the sixteen Bundesländer (federal states) sets most of its own public holidays, so a day that is a holiday in Munich can be an ordinary working day in Hamburg. This chapter is the practical side of the German holiday year: which days are gesetzliche Feiertage (statutory public holidays), how they differ from state to state, what actually closes, and how to plan your life and your leave around them. For what these days mean and how Germans celebrate them – Heiligabend, Karneval, the customs and the food – see our companion guide to German festivities and local traditions. Here we deal with the calendar and the consequences.

One thing is worth saying up front, because it catches almost everyone out at least once. When a public holiday lands, the country slows to a near-total stop, much like a Sunday. If you have just arrived from a country where holidays mean late-night shopping and special opening hours, the German version can feel severe. Knowing the rules in advance saves you an empty fridge, a missed delivery, and the odd wasted evening.

How the German holiday system works

The key fact to understand is that public holidays in Germany are, with a single exception, set at state level rather than by the federal government. There is one holiday established by federal law that applies everywhere: the Tag der Deutschen Einheit (German Unity Day) on 3 October, which was fixed nationwide in the 1990 reunification treaty. Every other day off, including Christmas and Easter Monday, is a gesetzlicher Feiertag only because the individual Bundesland has written it into its own law. In practice several of these days coincide across all sixteen states, so they feel national – but legally they are state holidays that happen to agree. This is why you will never find a definitive “German holiday list” that fits everyone: the honest answer to “is tomorrow a holiday” is always “it depends on your Bundesland”.

Because states decide for themselves, the total number of public holidays varies. The range runs from around nine or ten in the northern and eastern states up to thirteen in Bavaria, which has the most of any Bundesland. One Bavarian city, Augsburg, has an extra local holiday of its own, the Augsburger Friedensfest on 8 August, giving it more statutory days off than anywhere else in the country. The pattern behind this is largely religious history. The traditionally Catholic south and west – Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, the Saarland, and parts of the Rhineland – kept more Catholic feast days as legal holidays, while the traditionally Protestant north and the formerly socialist east recognise fewer. So the difference is not random: it broadly tracks the old confessional map of Germany. If you move from Cologne to Hamburg, or from Munich to Berlin, expect to lose a few days off in the process.

This also means that where you work, not where you live, usually determines your day off – the holiday law that applies is the one for the state in which your workplace sits. If you live just across a state border from your job, it is worth checking which calendar governs you, because the two states may not match on the regional holidays described further below.

The nine holidays every state shares

Nine public holidays are the same in all sixteen Bundesländer, so these are the ones you can rely on wherever you are in Germany. The year opens with Neujahr (New Year’s Day) on 1 January. Then come the movable spring holidays tied to Easter: Karfreitag (Good Friday) and Ostermontag (Easter Monday), which fall on different dates each year but are always a Friday and a Monday. Karfreitag matters practically for more than the day off, as explained later under the quiet holidays. Tag der Arbeit (Labour Day) on 1 May is a fixed date and a genuine national institution, often marked by union demonstrations and street events.

Two more spring holidays are counted from Easter and land on set weekdays. Christi Himmelfahrt (Ascension Day) always falls on a Thursday, forty days after Easter, and doubles as Vatertag (Father’s Day). Pfingstmontag (Whit Monday, or Pentecost Monday) is the Monday seven weeks after Easter. Then comes the one truly federal holiday, Tag der Deutschen Einheit on 3 October. The year closes with the two Christmas holidays: der 1. Weihnachtstag on 25 December and der 2. Weihnachtstag on 26 December, known formally as the First and Second Day of Christmas.

That second Christmas day tends to surprise newcomers, and so does Easter Monday. In many countries 26 December is either a normal day or a single “Boxing Day”; in Germany it is a full statutory holiday in its own right, so shops and offices stay closed on the 26th just as they do on the 25th. The same logic makes the Monday after Easter a proper day off nationwide. The useful takeaway is that German public holidays often come in pairs built around a religious event, and the “day two” is just as closed as the first. Plan your groceries accordingly, because you can easily face two shut days in a row.

The state holidays that catch people out

Beyond the shared nine, each state adds its own extra holidays, and these are the ones that trip up new arrivals – because a day off announced to your Bavarian colleagues may mean nothing to your team in Berlin. The safest habit is to check the official Feiertagsliste for your own Bundesland each year, but it helps to know the main regional days and roughly who observes them. Heilige Drei Könige (Epiphany, or Three Kings’ Day) on 6 January is a holiday in Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, and Saxony-Anhalt. Fronleichnam (Corpus Christi), a movable Thursday in early summer, is observed in the Catholic states – Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, the Saarland, and parts of Saxony and Thuringia. Mariä Himmelfahrt (Assumption of Mary) on 15 August is a holiday in the Saarland and in the Catholic-majority communities of Bavaria, which is one reason the Bavarian count is not even uniform inside Bavaria.

Allerheiligen (All Saints’ Day) on 1 November is a public holiday in the Catholic states of Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, and the Saarland. On the Protestant side, Reformationstag (Reformation Day) on 31 October is a holiday across the eastern states – Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia – and since 2018 it has also been a permanent statutory holiday in the northern states of Bremen, Hamburg, Lower Saxony, and Schleswig-Holstein, which added it to balance out having fewer days off than the south. Buß- und Bettag (Day of Repentance and Prayer), a Wednesday in November, is now a paid public holiday in Saxony alone; elsewhere it was abolished as a day off in the 1990s to fund long-term care insurance, though it survives with some legal effect as a quiet day in a few states.

A couple of newer, secular additions round out the picture, and they show that the holiday map is still changing. Thuringia introduced Weltkindertag (World Children’s Day) on 20 September as a public holiday in 2019. Berlin made Internationaler Frauentag (International Women’s Day) on 8 March a public holiday in 2019, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern followed, so those two states now have a holiday on 8 March that exists nowhere else. Because this list genuinely varies and occasionally moves, treat the mechanism as the thing to remember – Catholic states have more religious holidays, the north and east have added a few of their own – and confirm the specific dates for your Bundesland rather than assuming a colleague in another state has the same day off.

What actually happens on a Feiertag

On a statutory holiday, daily life closes down in much the same way it does on a Sunday. Supermarkets and almost all shops are shut, since the same rules that keep stores closed on Sundays apply to Feiertage – so a holiday is not a chance to catch up on shopping, it is a day you need to have shopped for already. Our guide to grocery shopping explains how to plan around these closures, and the short version is: buy what you need the day before, because a bakery open for a couple of morning hours may be the only thing trading. There is no post and generally no parcel delivery, banks and public offices are closed, and most doctors’ practices do not open. Pharmacies keep an emergency rota (Notdienst), petrol stations stay open, and restaurants, cafes, and many tourist sites carry on, but the everyday infrastructure of errands simply stops.

Public transport switches to its Sunday-and-holiday timetable, which usually means fewer trains, trams, and buses and longer gaps between them. If you are relying on transit to get somewhere on a Feiertag, check the schedule the night before rather than assuming a normal weekday service; our guide to the public transport system covers how these timetables are labelled. Long-distance trains still run, but city networks thin out noticeably.

If you are employed, a public holiday that falls on a day you would normally work is a paid day off – you receive your regular wage without using any of your annual leave, under Germany’s continued-pay rules for holidays. There is one difference from the British and American systems that genuinely surprises people, so it is worth stating plainly: if a public holiday falls on a Saturday or Sunday, it is not moved to the following Monday. There is no substitute day. The holiday simply coincides with the weekend and you lose the extra day off. This makes the calendar matter each year – some years are generous because the fixed-date holidays land midweek, and some years are poor because several of them fall on weekends. In 2026, for example, 3 October is a Saturday, so most workers get nothing extra for German Unity Day that year.

Brückentage: turning a holiday into a long weekend

Because several German holidays fall on a fixed weekday, they create a well-known opportunity that Germans plan around carefully: the Brückentag, or “bridge day”. When a public holiday lands on a Thursday, the Friday sits alone between the holiday and the weekend; take that single Friday as annual leave and you get four days off for the cost of one leave day. The same works in reverse when a holiday falls on a Tuesday and you bridge the Monday. Christi Himmelfahrt, always a Thursday, is the classic example – the long weekend around it is so predictable that many people book it a year ahead.

This is worth understanding early, because German colleagues treat Brückentage as a competitive sport. Popular bridge days get claimed in the leave calendar months in advance, so if you wait until the last minute you may find the Friday after Ascension already fully booked by your team. At the start of each year it is worth looking at where the holidays fall and marking the good Brückentage before anyone else does. A few well-placed leave days around Easter, Ascension, and the autumn holidays can stretch a modest annual allowance into several genuine short breaks – and Germany’s generous statutory holiday entitlement gives you the raw material to do it.

One more piece of timing helps here. Germany deliberately staggers its school holidays across the states, so that the whole country does not travel at once, and the dates rotate from year to year. That stagger affects prices and crowds far beyond families with children: it shapes when the Autobahn jams, when trains fill, and when a long-weekend break is cheap or expensive. If you are planning a trip around a holiday, our guide to travel and exploration goes into how to use these windows, and the short advice is to check both the holiday calendar and your state’s school-holiday dates before you book.

Stille Feiertage and the Tanzverbot

Some holidays carry an extra legal layer that surprises foreigners more than any other rule here: they are stille Feiertage, or “quiet holidays”, on which loud public entertainment is restricted by law. The best-known consequence is the Tanzverbot, literally a “dance ban” – on these days states prohibit public dancing and, depending on the state, other noisy or festive events for part or all of the day. The quiet days typically include Karfreitag, Volkstrauertag (a day of mourning in November), Totensonntag (the Protestant Sunday of the dead), and Buß- und Bettag, with Allerheiligen and parts of the Easter period added in some states. The intent is to keep these days of remembrance and religious observance solemn.

Karfreitag is the strictest by a wide margin. Across most of Germany, public dancing is banned for the whole of Good Friday, which is why clubs close or hold silent, seated events, and why a Good Friday night out can quietly fall flat if you have not checked. The exact hours and the list of banned activities vary from state to state – Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg are among the strictest, some city states are more relaxed – so a party that is legal in one Bundesland may be forbidden across the border. This genuinely catches people who plan a big Easter-weekend evening and find the venues dark. If you have a night out in mind around Good Friday or one of the November days of mourning, check whether your state has a Tanzverbot in force before you make plans. It is not merely a tradition; it is written into state law and enforced.

Sunday: the weekly holiday you did not book

Public holidays are easier to make sense of once you realise they behave like Sundays, because the Sunday itself is close to a legal institution in Germany. The Sonntagsruhe, or Sunday rest, is protected in the constitution and in shop-closing law: on Sundays, as on Feiertage, retail is closed, construction noise and many kinds of loud work are restricted, and there is a general expectation of quiet. For a newcomer this is one of the largest everyday adjustments – you cannot do a big grocery run on Sunday, and even mowing the lawn or running a noisy machine may annoy the neighbours or breach the local Ruhezeiten (quiet hours). It is less a rule to fight than a rhythm to adopt; our guide to German social etiquette explains how deeply the quiet Sunday is woven into daily life.

There are limited exceptions to the Sunday and holiday shop closures. Bakeries may open for a few morning hours, and shops at train stations, airports, and petrol stations are allowed to trade, which is why the Bahnhof supermarket is a lifeline when you have forgotten something. Cities also designate a handful of verkaufsoffene Sonntage (open Sundays) each year, usually tied to a local festival or market, when normal shops may open for an afternoon – but these are the exception and are announced well ahead. The practical rule stays simple: treat Sundays and public holidays as closed days, keep enough food in the house to cover them, and use the exceptions as a backup rather than a plan.

Putting it to use

The habits that make German holidays painless are small and worth building early. At the start of each year, look up the official Feiertage for the Bundesland where you work – not just where you live – and put them in your calendar, since only that list is authoritative for your days off. Mark the good Brückentage while your leave calendar is still empty, and book the popular ones such as the Friday after Christi Himmelfahrt before your colleagues do. Get into the routine of shopping the day before any holiday or Sunday, because two closed days in a row are common around Easter and Christmas, and a Feiertag means no post, no deliveries, closed banks, and a thinned-out transport timetable.

Keep two special cases in mind. If a holiday falls on a weekend, you simply lose it – Germany does not move it to Monday – so check each year’s calendar rather than assuming a fixed number of days off. And if you are planning a night out around Good Friday or a November day of mourning, check whether your state’s Tanzverbot is in force before you commit. For the meaning behind these days and how to take part in the customs – the markets, the meals, the family traditions – read our companion guide to German festivities and local traditions. This chapter has given you the calendar; that one gives you the celebration. None of this is legal advice – holiday and shop-closing rules are set by each Bundesland and change from time to time, so confirm the current rules for your state when it matters.