Netherlands Public Holidays

The Netherlands' King's Day celebrations are known for widespread orange-themed public street festivities and flea markets, a distinctly Dutch cultural tradition that goes well beyond the holiday's formal statutory status, making it one of the country's most visibly celebrated public holidays despite being tied to a comparatively recent monarch's birthday.

The Netherlands centers its national holiday calendar around the monarchy, most visibly through King's Day (Koningsdag, April 27), marking the reigning monarch's birthday — a date that shifts when the monarch changes, since it moved from Queen's Day on April 30 when King Willem-Alexander took the throne in 2013.

Liberation Day (May 5) commemorates the end of German occupation in the Netherlands at the close of World War II and is a full public holiday only once every five years by long-standing convention, with the intervening years observed more informally.

Dutch Christmas traditions distinguish Eerste Kerstdag (Christmas Day) and Tweede Kerstdag (Boxing Day/the "second Christmas Day") as two separate statutory holidays, similar in structure to the UK's Christmas Day/Boxing Day pairing.

Not every Dutch public holiday guarantees a paid day off by law — several, including King's Day itself, are only a paid holiday if a specific collective labor agreement (CAO) or individual contract says so, meaning actual entitlement varies genuinely by employer and sector rather than being uniform nationwide.

Ascension Day and Whit Monday, both movable dates tied to the Christian liturgical calendar and excluded from this page's fixed-date table, are widely observed non-working days in Dutch business and school calendars despite their movable nature.

The Netherlands' Liberation Day being a full public holiday only every five years (on the quinquennial anniversary) is a genuinely unusual scheduling structure by international standards — most countries with a liberation or independence day observe it as a full holiday every single year rather than on a multi-year cycle.

Dutch law recognizes a specific list of "algemeen erkende feestdagen" (generally recognized holidays), and while this list underpins most employment contracts, actual paid entitlement still ultimately depends on the applicable collective labor agreement rather than the government's list alone carrying automatic legal force for every employee.

The Netherlands' Liberation Day and Remembrance Day (May 4, the evening before) are commemorated together as a closely linked pair each year, with Remembrance Day marked by a nationwide two-minute silence — a specific ritual observance distinct from Liberation Day's more celebratory public character the following day.

Because the Netherlands' national holiday list is comparatively compact, the country relies more heavily than some neighbors on employer-negotiated collective labor agreements to determine actual additional paid time off, meaning the practical holiday experience for two Dutch workers in different sectors can differ meaningfully even under the identical national legal baseline.

The Netherlands doesn't observe any state- or province-level public holidays the way Germany or Switzerland does, keeping its calendar structurally simpler despite the country's otherwise detailed collective-agreement-driven variation in practical entitlement.

Dutch schools and many businesses also observe a set of "vacation weeks" tied to specific regions of the country on a staggered schedule, similar in purpose to Germany's staggered school-holiday system, even though neither is technically a public holiday in the legal sense covered by this page's fixed-date table.

Good Friday, Easter Monday, Ascension Day, and Whit Monday are movable and computed separately.

Source: Dutch government (Rijksoverheid) public holiday list, as of 2026-07-12.