US Long Weekends 2026 and 2027: Every Federal Holiday and What Each Trip Costs

Five: Labor Day on Monday 7 September, Columbus Day on Monday 12 October, Veterans Day on Wednesday 11 November, Thanksgiving Day on Thursday 26 November and Christmas Day on Friday 25 December. After that the next one is New Year’s Day on Friday 1 January 2027, and then nothing until Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday 18 January.

Not necessarily. Federal holidays bind federal agencies and set the pay and leave rules for federal employees. There is no federal law requiring a private employer to give you a paid holiday, and no state law requiring it either. Most employers follow six to eight of the eleven, and the ones most often left out are Columbus Day, Veterans Day and Juneteenth. Check your own employer’s calendar.

Because a state holiday list tells you what state government offices do, not what your employer does, and treating one as the other is the most common mistake in US holiday guides. The lists are also full of distinctions that do not survive a summary: New York runs Election Day as a floating holiday for certain bargaining units, Texas separates days when all agencies close from days it keeps a skeleton crew, and California replaced Columbus Day with a substitute personal day rather than a fixed date. This page gives you the federal floor and says plainly that it is a floor.

Same Monday, different name. Columbus Day is the name in 5 U.S.C. section 6103(a), so that is the federal holiday. A large number of states and cities observe the day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead, and some observe only that. Either way it is the second Monday in October, which is 12 October in 2026 and 11 October in 2027.

It is not a federal holiday, which is why this page never counts it as free. It is also the single most commonly granted non-federal day off in the country. The difference is worth naming: Thanksgiving weekend, 26 to 29 November 2026, costs you one leave day if you have to book the Friday, and nothing at all if your employer gives it to you.

Christmas Day 2026 is a Friday and New Year’s Day is the Friday after, with two full weekends between them. Book Monday 28 to Thursday 31 December and the block runs 25 December to 3 January, which is 10 consecutive days for four leave days. Three leave days would only buy you six, so the fourth is worth four days on its own. Nothing else in the US year pays like that.

It moves. Under 5 U.S.C. section 6103(b) a holiday falling on a Saturday is observed the Friday before, for anyone on a Monday to Friday week. The statute says nothing about Sunday: that rule comes from Executive Order 11582 of 1971, which moves it to the Monday after. Lists that cite the statute for both are citing something that is not in it. Three dates in this table move for that reason, all of them in 2027.

From New York, yes. From Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles, no, and the connection is priced on the Christmas window here so you can see what it costs rather than guessing. Air India suspended Delhi to Chicago from 1 June 2026 over fuel costs and airspace restrictions, and the route was still out at the end of August. Nothing flies nonstop between the United States and Pakistan or Bangladesh from any of these four cities.

Because it is usually an unbundled fare, where the headline price buys the seat and nothing else. Frontier Airlines is the cheapest option on 29 of the 96 priced routes on this page. On those fares a checked bag, a carry-on bigger than a personal item, seat selection and any change are all charged separately, and the real total can land well above a full-service fare that looked dearer. Southwest runs the other way: its fares here still include two checked bags. Wego does not publish a baggage allowance, so check the airline’s own baggage page before you treat two of these numbers as comparable.