The Bahamas public holidays
Public holidays of the Commonwealth of The Bahamas for calendar year 2026, as listed in the Cabinet Office notice. Statutory basis: section 3 and the First Schedule of the Public Holidays Act (Ch. 36), which requires the listed days to be kept as close holidays in all public offices, banks and shops.
| Current value | 23 days held |
|---|---|
| In force from | 2026-01-01 |
| In force until | 2026-12-31 |
| Official source | Cabinet Office, Government of The Commonwealth of The Bahamas — official notice 'Public Holidays (2026)', published 5 January 2026: 'The following days will be observed as Public Holidays during the Year 2026'. Statutory basis: Public Holidays Act (Ch. 36), section 3 and First Schedule (LRO 1/2017) |
| Last verified | 2026-07-30 |
| Verification | primary — No verification limitation recorded — read from the official source cited. |
| Provenance | source fingerprint |
What this value means
EMANCIPATION DAY IS 3 AUGUST 2026, NOT 7 AUGUST. The brief is correct and the widely syndicated calendars are wrong. The First Schedule to the Public Holidays Act fixes the day as '1st Monday in August'; 1 August 2026 is a Saturday, so the first Monday is 3 August. At least one holiday aggregator publishes 'Friday 7 August' for 2026, which corresponds to no rule in the Act at all. The Cabinet Office notice confirms Monday 3 August. The notice itself carries the footer 'Please Note: This list supercedes the list previously circulated' — an earlier 2026 list was issued and withdrawn, which is the most likely origin of the wrong dates now in circulation. Always take the 5 January 2026 notice over anything scraped earlier. TWO OBSERVED-DAY SHIFTS IN 2026, both flagged with an asterisk on the notice: *Majority Rule Day falls 10 January (Saturday) and is observed Monday 12 January; *Boxing Day falls 26 December (Saturday) and is observed Monday 28 December. NOTE A GENUINE STATUTE-VS-PRACTICE GAP: the proviso to section 3 of the Public Holidays Act only says 'when any public holiday shall fall on a Sunday the following day shall be observed and kept as a public holiday' — it does not on its face cover Saturday. The Cabinet Office nonetheless moves Saturday-falling holidays to the following Monday (Majority Rule Day's own rule, from the 2013 legislation, expressly covers Saturday as well as Sunday). Serve the Cabinet Office dates: they are what banks, public offices and shops actually close on. Date rules from the First Schedule, for forward computation: 1st of January; Majority Rule Day (10th of January, added by 9 of 2013); Good Friday; 1st Monday after Easter (Easter Monday); 1st Monday after Whitsunday (Whit Monday — Whitsunday is Easter + 49 days, so 24 May 2026 and Whit Monday 25 May); Randol Fawkes Labour Day (first Friday in June); Independence Day (10th of July); 1st Monday in August (Emancipation Day); National Heroes Day, second Monday in October (the LRO 1/2017 print of the Schedule still shows the pre-2013 fixed '12th of October' with a marginal note to 40 of 2013 which renamed the former Discovery Day and moved it to the second Monday — in 2026 both readings coincide on Monday 12 October, so nothing turns on it this year, but they will diverge in most other years and the second-Monday rule is the operative one); Christmas Day; Boxing Day (26th of December). Easter Sunday 2026 is 5 April. Section 4 additionally lets the Governor-General declare special holidays or cancel a scheduled one by Order published in the Gazette, so an in-year change is possible. ELEVEN HOLIDAYS. ACCESS PROBLEM — RECORD FOR THE SOURCE-WATCHER: www.bahamas.gov.bs returns HTTP 403 to scripted fetchers and must be read through a real browser session. Worse, the notice page carries NO TEXT LIST AT ALL: the holiday table is a single raster image with no text layer, served from https://cdn.bahamas.gov.bs/tenant/tenanttgotb/webp/Public-Holidays-2026-20260105101021.webp (700x906 WebP). The dates above were read visually from that image. A text-diff watcher pointed at the page will never see a change; watch the CDN image URL (the filename embeds the publication timestamp) or re-read the image. 2027 EXTENSION (2026-07-30): the Public Holidays Act, Chapter 36 list as amended by the National Heroes Act 2007 and the Majority Rule (Public Holiday) Act 2013, including three nth-weekday holidays - Randol Fawkes Labour Day is the first Friday in June, Emancipation Day the first Monday in August and National Heroes Day the second Monday in October. The ONLY statutory substitution is the s.3 proviso for a holiday falling on a SUNDAY, which is observed the following day: that gives Majority Rule Day on Monday 11 January and the Boxing Day observance on Monday 27 December. IMPORTANT: a widely-republished claim that Bahamian holidays move from Tuesday to the preceding Monday and from Wednesday or Thursday to the following Friday is NOT supported by the statute and is contradicted by practice (Majority Rule Day was observed on Thursday 10 January 2019 and Friday 10 January 2020 as-is); it is not applied here. SATURDAY occurrences have no statutory substitution and are instead handled case by case by Governor-General Order in the Gazette - so Independence Day (Saturday 10 July 2027) and Christmas Day (Saturday 25 December 2027) are listed on their statutory dates, and any Monday or Tuesday lieu days for them, which precedent from 2020 suggests are likely, are NOT YET PROCLAIMED and are not served.
Get it programmatically
curl https://usaref.dev/v1/bs/public-holidays
# Free.
# History: curl https://usaref.dev/v1/bs/public-holidays/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://usaref.dev/provenance/bs/public-holidaysOther The Bahamas series: policy interest rate · VAT rate · minimum wage · inflation rate (CPI) · corporate tax rate · income tax rates