India Long Weekends 2026 and 2027: Which Days to Book Off, and Where to Fly

Seven three-day weekends across the whole span from now to the end of 2027, and four of those fall in 2027 itself: Good Friday on 26 March, Mahavir Jayanti on Monday 19 April, Id-ul-Zuha on Monday 17 May and Diwali on Friday 29 October. Nothing in the central calendar gives four consecutive days off without leave. That is the structural difference between India and the Gulf, where a two-day or three-day Eid holiday routinely runs into a Friday and Saturday weekend. In India the weekend is Saturday and Sunday and almost every festival date is fixed by a lunar or lunisolar calendar that pays no attention to it. If you want more than three days you have to bridge, and the break finder above shows exactly which days to book off for each holiday.

Two nine-day windows, both in 2027, both costing three leave days. Holi falls on Tuesday 23 March and Good Friday on 26 March, four days apart, so booking off Monday 22, Wednesday 24 and Thursday 25 March gives you Saturday 20 to Sunday 28 March. Id-ul-Zuha on Monday 17 May and Buddha Purnima on Thursday 20 May repeat the pattern: book off Tuesday 18, Wednesday 19 and Friday 21 May for Saturday 15 to Sunday 23 May. Every other holiday in the calendar tops out at six days for the same three leave days. The single best leave day of the year is Friday 16 April 2027, which links Ram Navami on Thursday 15 April to Mahavir Jayanti on Monday 19 April and buys five days off for one.

No, and this is the part most calendars get wrong. The list on this page is the central government gazetted list issued by the Department of Personnel and Training, O.M. 12/2/2023-JCA of 16 July 2026. Central government offices in Delhi and New Delhi observe seventeen of them in 2027; offices elsewhere observe fourteen compulsory ones and choose three more from a local list. Employees can also take any two from a separate list of thirty-two restricted holidays. On top of that, every state publishes its own list, and bank holidays are declared state by state under the Negotiable Instruments Act, which is why a bank can be shut in Chennai and open in Chandigarh on the same day. Onam in Kerala, Pongal in Tamil Nadu, Durga Puja in West Bengal and Gudi Padwa in Maharashtra are all real days off for millions of people and none of them appear here. Treat this page as the floor, then check your own employer list.

Nepal needs nothing at all: no visa, no fee, and Tribhuvan International in Kathmandu runs a separate counter for Indian nationals. Carry a passport for a flight, since an Aadhaar card is not accepted. Thailand still gives Indian passport holders sixty days visa-free as of August 2026, though the rule is under review and immigration officers can now refuse a third consecutive visa-free entry inside a rolling 180-day window. Sri Lanka is free but not automatic: Indian nationals get a no-cost double-entry tourist ETA for thirty days and must apply at eta.gov.lk before travelling. The United Arab Emirates and Singapore both need a visa arranged before you fly. The UAE grants a fourteen-day visa on arrival only if you already hold a valid US, EU, Australian or Canadian visa, and it withdrew the UK-visa route for Indian passports in 2026. Singapore has no visa on arrival for Indian nationals at all. Rules move: check the official portal for your destination before you book anything non-refundable.

Not Christmas. Across the thirty-two routes priced here, the Friday-to-Sunday Christmas break costs more than the identical Friday-to-Sunday shape at Gandhi Jayanti on twenty-four of them, a median of nineteen per cent more and as much as fifty-seven per cent on Chennai to Singapore. The counterintuitive one is March: the nine-day Holi-to-Good-Friday break in 2027 prices at roughly the same level as the three-day October weekend, because it is seven months out rather than five weeks. Lead time is doing more work than the holiday itself. Diwali is a smaller effect than most people expect, and it pushes some international routes down rather than up, because the demand around it is people flying home inside India rather than leaving it.

Because the gazette does. Holi runs over two days: Holika Dahan on the evening of the Phalguna full moon, then Rangwali Holi, the day of colour, the morning after. The DoPT gazetted list marks one of them as the public holiday and for 2027 that is Tuesday 23 March. Calendars that list 22 March are giving you Holika Dahan. Book your leave against the gazetted day, because that is the one your office is closed. The same caution applies to the four dates marked Moon in the table above: Id-e-Milad, Id-ul-Fitr, Id-ul-Zuha and Muharram are set by sighting and the gazetted date can move by a day, which is why the widget flags them rather than quietly presenting them as fixed.