United Arab Emirates Public Holidays

The UAE's National Day celebrations in early December are among the country's largest public events, marking both the 1971 union of the seven emirates and, in recent years, increasingly coordinated public celebrations across the country's major cities.

The United Arab Emirates observes a notably shorter fixed-date public holiday list than many Western countries, with the bulk of its holiday calendar instead governed by the Islamic lunar (Hijri) calendar, whose dates shift every Gregorian year.

National Day (December 2) and Commemoration Day (December 1, honoring the UAE's fallen soldiers) together mark the country's 1971 founding as a federation of seven emirates.

Because the UAE — like several countries in the region — observes a Friday-Saturday weekend rather than the Saturday-Sunday weekend common in much of the rest of the world, business-day calculations involving the UAE should account for that different weekend definition, available as a setting on the site's Business Days Calculator.

The UAE notably shifted its own weekend structure in 2022, moving from a Friday-Saturday weekend to a Saturday-Sunday weekend for the federal government and much of the private sector, while keeping a half-day Friday — a genuinely recent, significant policy change rather than a longstanding fixed rule, so scheduling assumptions about the country's weekend should be checked against the specific year and sector involved.

Islamic New Year and the Prophet's Birthday (Mawlid), both movable dates tied to the Hijri lunar calendar, are official UAE public holidays excluded from this page's fixed-date table for the same reason as Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha.

The UAE's federal government announces the exact Gregorian dates of its Hijri-calendar holidays only shortly in advance each year, since they depend on an official moon-sighting or astronomical determination rather than a purely arithmetic formula — a genuinely different confirmation process from the fixed-date holidays on this page, which never require an annual announcement.

Because the UAE's population is majority expatriate, many of the country's largest employers publish an internal holiday calendar that explicitly maps out both the fixed-date and (once announced) the movable Hijri holidays each year, rather than relying on staff to track two separate calendar systems independently.

Each of the UAE's seven emirates retains some autonomy over local ceremonial observances even under the federal holiday structure, similar in spirit (though smaller in scale) to the state or provincial variation seen in federally structured countries elsewhere on this page.

The UAE's Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation typically issues the official public and private sector holiday circular separately each year, meaning government employees and private-sector employees can occasionally see slightly different numbers of days off for the same underlying observance depending on which circular applies to their employer.

The UAE's fixed-date holiday list on this page is comparatively short specifically because so much of the country's actual annual time off is governed by the Hijri lunar calendar rather than the Gregorian calendar this site's tools otherwise work in throughout.

Because the UAE's Hijri holidays are confirmed only close to the actual date each year, businesses scheduling international meetings or shipments around that period should treat the projected date as provisional until an official confirmation is issued, rather than a fixed year-ahead certainty the way this page's fixed-date table can be.

Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, Islamic New Year, and Prophet Muhammad's Birthday follow the Islamic lunar calendar and shift every year — treated separately as reference/awareness dates.

Source: UAE Government public holiday list, as of 2026-07-12.