Africa · 50+ countries

Public holiday calendars for Africa

Africa Calendar is a small website I run so anyone in the world can open a public-holiday calendar for African countries, then print a wall calendar or subscribe to a feed. Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa have the fullest written pages; the rest of the 50+ country catalogue uses the same studio.

I am Collins Odeny. This is a personal project, not a company product and not a government gazette. I use it myself for leave, school-term planning, and a clean print at home. If a date looks wrong, email me and I will check it against the official notice.

This home page is the same Africa-wide landing page for every visitor. It does not guess your country, swap in a foreign holiday grid, or send you into the print studio until you ask. Start with a written hub, a planning guide, or the studio button below.

Kenya 2026, Nigeria 2026, and South Africa 2026 each list the named public holidays, what the day marks, and how it sits against that country’s weekend. From those hubs you can open a leave planner, count working days, print PDF, PNG, or SVG, or subscribe to an ICS feed.

The studio also covers Ghana, Egypt, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, and the rest of the African catalogue. Ghana, Egypt, Tanzania, and Uganda now have written leave guides. Their year hubs stay out of the sitemap until those pages have country-specific prose at hub length. Ethiopia and the rest still open as print and subscribe tools.

The calendar studio is built so a printed page stays clean. Core use does not need an account. Theme choices and personal dates stay in your browser.

Who I am

I run Africa Calendar under my own name, Collins Odeny. This is a personal project, not a government office, payroll bureau, or school board, and I do not sell credentials I do not have.

I live in Kenya, so Kenya is where I can cross-check dates against the Kenya Gazette and Ministry of Education circulars with my own eyes. That is why Kenya 2026 has the holiday hub, the school-term page, and the leave planner.

Read the About page for how I treat sources, what this site will not claim, and how to send a correction to contact@africacalendar.app.

This month in Africa

October 2026 · handwritten from this site’s holiday list

October 2026 on this site is a Kenya-and-Nigeria month. I am writing this block from the October 2026 list already on these country pages — not from a news wire, and not from holidays I do not have.

Nigeria’s Independence Day is Thursday 1 October 2026. It marks independence from Britain in 1960. It is a nationwide close on this site’s Nigeria 2026 hub. It is a mid-week Thursday, so it does not create a natural Friday or Monday long weekend unless you spend leave next to it.

Kenya’s Mazingira Day is Saturday 10 October 2026. This project uses the current name; older lists called the same 10 October date Moi Day, Huduma Day, or Utamaduni Day. Because it already sits on the ordinary Kenyan weekend, the 2026 list does not add a Monday for it.

Kenya’s Mashujaa Day (Heroes’ Day) is Tuesday 20 October 2026. It replaced Kenyatta Day and honours people across Kenya’s history. It is a single mid-week weekday. Pair it with the Kenya 2026 school calendar: Term 3 ends on Friday 23 October 2026, and KPSEA starts on Monday 26 October.

South Africa has no October 2026 public holiday on this site’s list. The nearest South African marker is Heritage Day on Thursday 24 September 2026, already behind this October note. I will not invent a South African October date to fill the card.

If you are planning leave in October 2026, open the country hub rather than this summary. The hubs name every civil date this project carries for the year.

Country hubs

Kenya 2026 public holidaysNamed days, gazette-backed 2026 Eid dates, and links to the school calendar and leave planner.Nigeria 2026 public holidaysFederal Independence Day, Democracy Day, and the Eid dates this project lists for 2026.South Africa 2026 public holidaysFreedom Day, Heritage Day, Family Day, and the Public Holidays Act Sunday-to-Monday dates.

Open the calendar studio

The print studio is a separate tool page. It is not this home page. Use it when you want a year grid, a theme, personal dates, and a PDF, PNG, or SVG.

The default studio link is the Kenya 2026 calendar. Inside the studio you can switch country and year. Those switchers live only there, not on this landing page.

Open the calendar studio

Planning guides

Planning leave around Kenyan public holidaysKenya’s year is easiest to read once you separate three documents: the Kenya Gazette for named public holidays, your employer’s observed calendar, and — if you have school-age children — the Ministry of Education circular. This guide is about using those documents together, not reciting the holiday list.Planning leave around Nigerian federal holidaysNigeria’s useful split is not “Muslim holidays versus Christian holidays.” It is federal announcement versus state circular, and Friday national days versus Sunday national days. This guide is about that split. It is not a second copy of the holiday list.Planning leave around South African public holidaysSouth Africa is the country on this site where a statute, not only a gazette notice, explains the extra Mondays. The Public Holidays Act is why Sunday 9 August 2026 produces Monday 10 August on the list. This guide starts from that rule, then walks the three years I have written hubs for.Planning leave around Ghanaian public holidaysGhana is the first new country leave guide in this series because the 2001 Act, the 2025 amendment, and the holiday list I started from do not start from the same schedule. Act 1142 is the governing amendment I am following. The Ministry of the Interior is the announcement door. This site’s Ghana list is the third document, and it is not yet a gazette.Planning leave around Egyptian official holidaysEgypt is the country on this site where the official year list and this site’s holiday list diverge in public. The Presidency published a 2026 holiday table I could open. This site’s Egypt list still prints several civil commemorative dates. Leave planning starts by holding those two documents next to each other, not by pretending they are the same grid.Planning leave around Tanzanian public holidaysTanzania’s statute is short and specific. Cap. 35 names the days. The holiday list this site started from adds a few more names and, until the Cap. 35 correction is applied, gets Zanzibar Revolution Day wrong by ten days. This guide starts from the Act I opened, then shows what this site actually lists.Planning leave around Ugandan public holidaysUganda’s public-holiday statute, as I opened it on ULII, records Cap. 255 (Revised Edition, 2000) as the previous revised chapter. The 31 December 2023 consolidation on that page is titled Chapter 174. The Schedule is the legal list. This site’s Uganda list includes a couple of extras and one Easter Sunday the Act does not name. Leave planning starts by separating those layers.Mashujaa Day: from Kenyatta Day to Heroes’ Day20 October is still the same civil date it was when the day was called Kenyatta Day. The name, the constitutional status, and the leave conversation all changed. This page is about that change, and about how I treat the Tuesday, Wednesday, or Friday that 20 October becomes in a given year.Nigeria’s June 12 Democracy Day: why it moved from 29 MayFor eighteen years the federal public conversation treated 29 May as Democracy Day. On 6 June 2018 the State House published a different date. This page follows that official text, the 2019 inaugural celebration, and the weekday 12 June becomes on this site’s Nigeria list.South Africa’s Heritage Day and the Sunday-to-Monday ruleHeritage Day is 24 September every year. The leave is not always 24 September. Section 2(1) of the Public Holidays Act is why a Sunday Heritage Day becomes a Monday off, and why this site’s 2028 list says Heritage Day (observed) on 25 September.How public holidays affect payrollA public holiday changes a timesheet in more than one way. It can remove a weekday from the working-day count, trigger a different pay rule, or land after the payroll cutoff so the correction appears in the next cycle. This article stays at that conceptual level. It does not quote a statutory rate.School terms, holidays, and family travelA national public holiday is a bad proxy for “the children are off.” Terms, half-terms, exam windows, and gazette holidays overlap in ways that wreck a cheap flight. This guide is about that overlap. The only dated school circular on Africa Calendar is Kenya 2026.Moon-sighting holidays: why the date movesEid is not late. The Gregorian calendar is the one that slips. A lunar year is about eleven days shorter than a solar year, so the same Hijri date walks backward through the civil months. Governments that wait for a moon sighting add a second kind of movement: the date can shift by a day after you have already printed a wall calendar.How to use, print, embed, and share Africa CalendarAfrica Calendar is a small website with a handful of tools that are easy to miss if you only see a month grid. This page is the map: what each URL is for, what works without JavaScript, what stays on your device, and what I will not put in a downloaded file.

What makes this different from a generic calendar app

Most calendar apps assume you already know the holidays. Africa Calendar starts from the public-holiday list for each African country, then layers planning tools on top: a leave planner for long weekends, a working-days counter, printable wall layouts, and ICS feeds you can subscribe to on a phone.

Kenya has the deepest coverage on this site because that is where I live and where I cross-check dates against the Kenya Gazette and Ministry of Education circulars. Nigeria and South Africa have the same style of written holiday notes and leave planners. The other countries in the catalogue still open in the studio with the same export options, even when there is not yet a long article for every named holiday.

Nothing here replaces your employer’s payroll calendar or a school’s notice board. The goal is an honest, fast reference you can print or share without signing up for another product.

Kenya 2026 at a glance

If you only need one starting point, open the Kenya 2026 holiday hub. It lists Madaraka Day, Jamhuri Day, Mashujaa Day, Mazingira Day, the Easter pair, the Eid dates gazetted for 2026, and the rest of the civil year with a short note on what each day marks.

Parents and teachers can read the Kenya 2026 school calendar on its own page: three terms, half-terms, April and August breaks, and where KPSEA and KCSE sit against public holidays. The long-weekend planner shows which 2026 dates already give you a Friday–Monday stretch without booking leave.

When you are ready to hang a calendar on the wall, open the Kenya 2026 studio. Pick a theme, add personal dates if you want, and download PDF, PNG, or SVG.

Print, share, and subscribe

Printing is the reason I built the studio first. You choose country and year inside the studio, adjust colours and typography, then export a file sized for A4 or US Letter. Share cards and QR links are available from the live studio when you want to send a year view to a relative.

ICS feeds are listed on the feeds page for Kenya and other priority countries. Subscribing pulls the same holiday dates the studio uses, which is useful when you want phones and laptops to stay in sync without retyping dates.

Custom holidays you add in the browser stay in local storage on your device. They are not uploaded as a profile, and they can ride along in an export if you choose.

Planning guides, not only holiday lists

The written hubs list named public holidays. The guides series is the next layer: how Kenyan gazette notices and school terms shape leave, how Nigerian federal and state calendars diverge, how South Africa’s Public Holidays Act turns a Sunday into a Monday, and how payroll cutoffs, family travel, and moon-sighted Eid dates behave when the weekday is still pending.

Those articles are original essays, not year-swaps of the same paragraph. Start at the Guides page in the header and footer, then open the country you actually take leave in. The studio, ICS feeds, and working-days calculator still do the arithmetic; the guides teach the shape of the year first.

Trust, sources, and corrections

Holiday dates come from the public-holiday list this site already uses, plus corrections I make when a gazette notice moves a date. School-term ranges for Kenya 2026 follow the Ministry of Education circular cited on the school page.

I am not affiliated with the Government of Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, or any other state body. Confirm official notices before you treat a date as final for pay, exams, or travel. Corrections are welcome at contact@africacalendar.app — please quote the notice when you have it.

Analytics (Google Analytics 4 via Firebase) helps me see which pages are useful. The privacy policy explains retention, cookies, and your choices.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need an account?

No. You can browse holidays, customize a calendar, and download PDF, PNG, SVG, or ICS files without registering. Theme, language, and personal dates are stored in your browser until you clear site data.

Is Africa Calendar free?

The studio and holiday lists are free to use. Hosting is paid out of pocket today.

Which countries have the fullest written pages?

Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa have holiday lists with plain-language notes, leave planners, and working-day tools. Kenya also has a 2026 school-term page. Planning essays live under Guides. Every other African country in the catalogue still opens in the same studio for printing and ICS export.

Can I use this for payroll or legal leave entitlements?

Use it for planning only. Employers, schools, and banks publish their own observed dates. Africa Calendar is not a payroll bureau and does not guarantee any leave outcome.

How do I report a wrong holiday date?

Email contact@africacalendar.app with the country, year, and the official notice if you have it. You can also use the Feedback button inside the studio; that stores a message in Firebase so it does not get lost in a busy inbox.

Where is the operator based?

Africa Calendar is operated by Collins Odeny from Kenya. It is a personal side project, not a registered company product line.