India Public Holidays

India's states also observe their own additional regional holidays reflecting local linguistic, religious, and cultural history — a Gujarat-specific festival day or a South Indian harvest festival, for instance, may be a full state holiday in one state while being an ordinary working day elsewhere in the country.

India's three national holidays — Republic Day, Independence Day, and Gandhi Jayanti — are observed uniformly across the entire country, while a much larger number of additional religious and regional holidays are set individually by each state government, reflecting India's enormous religious and cultural diversity.

Independence Day (August 15) marks India's 1947 independence from British colonial rule, while Republic Day (January 26) marks the date the Indian Constitution came into effect in 1950 — two distinct milestones commonly conflated by people less familiar with Indian history.

Because major festivals including Diwali, Holi, and Eid follow lunar or lunisolar calendars, their dates shift every year and are deliberately excluded from this page's fixed-date table — they're treated as reference/awareness dates elsewhere on the site instead.

India's central government also designates a category of "restricted holidays," from which individual employees or state governments choose a smaller subset to actually observe each year — a genuinely different, more flexible system from the fixed national and state holiday lists most other countries use.

Gandhi Jayanti (October 2) marks the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi and is also observed internationally as the UN's International Day of Non-Violence, a rare case of an Indian national holiday date carrying a directly corresponding global observance.

India's banking sector observes an additional, separate holiday calendar of its own beyond general public holidays — banks in different states can close on different specific dates for state-level festivals, which is a genuinely important, sometimes overlooked detail for anyone scheduling a financial transaction across Indian states.

India's stock exchanges (the BSE and NSE) publish their own separate trading-holiday calendar that overlaps with but isn't identical to the general public holiday list, following the same pattern seen in the US where financial markets set their own closure schedule distinct from the government's general list.

India's Negotiable Instruments Act specifically defines which dates count as a legal "public holiday" for the purposes of financial instruments like cheques, a narrower and more specific legal definition than the broader central and state government holiday lists used for general employment purposes.

India's three national holidays are deliberately treated as "gazetted" holidays observed identically by the central government in every state, distinguishing them clearly from the much larger set of "restricted" holidays a state or individual can choose from — a two-tier system genuinely different from most other countries' single unified national list.

Individual Indian states also observe their own state formation days (marking when that specific state was created or reorganized), a further real layer of the country's holiday variation distinct from religious festivals or the three shared national dates.

India's central list of restricted holidays each year typically runs to several dozen options, from which an individual employee usually selects only a small handful — a genuinely more personalized system than the fixed, non-optional lists used in most other countries on this page.

Anyone scheduling business across Indian states should check both the central gazetted list and the specific relevant state's own additional holidays directly, since this page's fixed-date table alone doesn't capture the full state-by-state picture described above.

Diwali, Holi, Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, and several other major holidays follow lunar/lunisolar calendars and shift every year — treated separately as reference/awareness dates.

Source: Government of India national holiday list, as of 2026-07-12.