Holiday Patterns/FinancialCalendar.Com - Thousands of Holidays, No Vacations

Global Holiday Patterns

We are conducting ongoing research into the question of whether holiday occurrences follow any patterns. Our conclusion: Holidays are most definitely not random.

The first pattern we noticed is that holidays are often bunched together. In fact, 18% of all holidays occur the day after another holiday (think Christmas/Boxing and Good Friday/Easter Monday). A further 10% fall only two to five days after a prior holiday. In fact, fully 62% of all holidays occur within 30 days of an earlier one. (To see how this bunching leads to large gaps between holidays in certain countries, click here.)

Years

You might think that, when averaged across the entire globe, the number of holidays would be pretty much the same from one year to the next. In fact, there are significant year-to-year variations. On average over the next 32 years, each Center has 11.5 full day holidays per annum (see chart below). However, this average disguises some significant variations, with a low of 10.5 days in 2022 and a high of 12.3 in 2014.

There are similar year-to-year variations in the number of weekends, with the result that the number of working days can also be very variable (see chart below). The different weighing methods produce different numbers (an average of 259.1 days on a population-weighted basis, 251.4 for GNP and 251.6 for stock market capitalization) because many countries with below-average GNP work a six day week.

This gives rise to an interesting economic question: Should GNP be higher in years when there are more working days? Not being economists, we're not qualified to answer that question. However, we can point out that the effect is very significant in some years. For example, in 2032 there will be 0.9% more working days than in 2031 (see chart below).

Days of the week

Among all the Centers in our database, by far the most common day of the week for a holiday is Monday. The least common, apart from Saturday and Sunday, are Tuesday and Wednesday (see chart below). [In doing these calculations, we have ignored holidays that fall on a weekend. The reason we still show a small number of holidays on Saturday and Sunday is that the weekend falls on different days in some Centers.]

The reason for this pattern is simple: There are a vast number of fixed date holidays (e.g. July 4 or December 25). Over the course of many years, these holidays will fall equally on all seven days of the week. However, when a fixed date holiday falls on a weekend, many countries have a practice of observing it on the following Monday.
A less significant factor is that politicians and other setters of holidays have discovered that people enjoy three-day weekends. As a result, there are many holidays whose algorithm is the X'th Monday of the month.

Months

Which came first, the holiday or the vacation? That is the question we find ourselves asking when we look at the month-by-month distribution of holidays (see chart below). June and August have the fewest holidays. But, at least for the Northern hemisphere, they are among the peak months for vacations. So, do people take their vacations in August because that is when they get the fewest holidays? Or are there so few holidays in August because people are on vacation anyway?

January, April, May and December are the most common months for holidays. Overall, the six month period from December to May contains two-thirds of the year's holidays.
Days

By far the most common day of the month for holidays is the first (think New Year's Day, May Day). The next most common day is the 25th, because of Christmas.

Measurement basis

In the charts, we have employed three different methods of weighting the data: A people-based measure (population), and two wealth-based measures (gross national product and stock market capitalization). Each measure produces a different result because of global disparities in the per-capita distribution of wealth and stock market value.

January, 2008