A holiday calendar is a shared view of when people are away from work — public holidays, company closures, and individual time off — kept in one place so that anyone can see coverage at a glance. It’s also called a vacation calendar, team calendar, absence calendar, or who’s-out calendar.

Two different kinds of data

Most holiday calendars disappoint because they’re asked to hold two things that behave nothing alike.

Public holidays are reference data. They’re fixed a year or more ahead, identical for everyone in the same location, and change only when a government says so. You set them once and they sit there.

Absence is transactional data. It changes every day, differs for every person, arrives through requests and approvals, and has to reconcile against a balance. It’s never finished.

A spreadsheet handles the first beautifully and the second badly. A shared calendar handles the second reasonably and the first by brute force. Knowing which problem you’re actually solving is most of the decision.

The third thing a good calendar does is the one people forget: it has to tell you who is covering, not just who is away. A calendar showing six names in a week is only useful if you can see which team each belongs to.

United States

The US has 11 federal holidays — New Year’s Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, Juneteenth, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The important thing for a calendar: those dates bind federal employees, not private employers. There is no federal requirement for a private-sector employer to close on any of them, or to pay for the day if it does. A US company holiday list is a genuine business decision, which is why two employers in the same city routinely observe different days — many drop Columbus Day, many add the day after Thanksgiving. States add their own observances on top, so one national list will be wrong somewhere if you employ across several.

Canada

Federally regulated employers provide 10 general holidays, including the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

Ontario has nine public holidays under the ESA — the federal list without Truth and Reconciliation or Remembrance Day, but with Family Day.

Quebec provides eight paid statutory holidays, and its list diverges most: no Family Day, and the National Holiday on 24 June in place of observances kept elsewhere.

An employer with staff in Toronto, Montreal and a federally regulated division is running three calendars, not one.

Internationally

United Kingdom. The clearest illustration that “public holiday” isn’t a single list even within one country: eight bank holidays in England and Wales, nine in Scotland, and ten in Northern Ireland. Scotland swaps Easter Monday for 2 January and St Andrew’s Day; Northern Ireland adds St Patrick’s Day and the Battle of the Boyne.

Australia. National holidays plus state-specific ones, so a Melbourne employee and a Perth employee have different days off.

European Union. Entirely a national matter, and the spread is wide — some countries observe fewer than ten days, others comfortably more, with regional variation inside several of them.

Building one

A spreadsheet is genuinely fine for a single-location team of a dozen people with one holiday list. It’s free, everyone can read it, and it prints. It fails when someone forgets to update it, when two people edit at once, when you need a balance rather than a picture, and the moment you add a second country.

Read more: How To Manage Holiday Schedules in Excel

A shared Outlook or Google calendar is better for visibility — it sits where people already look, and it can overlay with meetings. Its limits are structural: no balances, no approval trail, no way to distinguish sick leave from vacation for reporting, and public holidays have to be imported per country and maintained by hand.

Read more: How To Create a Vacation Calendar in Outlook

A dedicated leave tool earns its place when any of the following is true: more than one location or holiday list, more than one leave type, a balance anyone has to trust, approval records you’d need in an audit, or a payroll system that wants the data. Below that threshold, it’s reasonable to stay with what you have.

Whatever you use, a few things decide whether people actually look at it: one source of truth rather than a calendar and a spreadsheet that disagree; visible by team, not just alphabetically; public holidays by location, not one global list; and a view that shows half-days honestly, since a calendar that rounds everything to full days will mislead someone on a Friday.