Belize public holidays

What this value means

FOURTEEN days in 2026, transcribed verbatim from the gazetted notice (day-of-week in the notice matches the calendar date in every row, checked). The list is authoritative because section 3 of the Holidays Act, Cap. 289, is what fixes the OBSERVED date — several Belizean holidays are 'moveable' and are shifted to the nearest Monday when they fall mid-week, so the statutory date and the observed date are not always the same and the annual notice is the only reliable source. TRAP — 2026 IS A YEAR WITH FEW MONDAY SHIFTS. Three holidays that are commonly assumed to be Monday-shifted are observed on their ACTUAL dates in 2026: George Price Day (Thu 15 Jan), St. George's Caye Day (Thu 10 Sep) and Garifuna Settlement Day (Thu 19 Nov). Only National Heroes and Benefactors Day (Mon 9 Mar, statutory date 9 March), Indigenous People's Resistance Day (Mon 12 Oct) and Independence Day (Mon 21 Sep, its actual statutory date) land on Mondays. Do not generate Belizean holiday dates algorithmically — take them from each year's notice. Two fall on a Saturday with NO compensating weekday in the notice: Emancipation Day (Sat 1 Aug — a relatively recent addition to the schedule) and Boxing Day (Sat 26 Dec). Holy Saturday (Sat 4 Apr) is a statutory holiday in Belize, which is unusual regionally; Easter Sunday itself (5 Apr) is not listed. Belize does not observe Corpus Christi, Assumption or All Saints as public holidays. Next release: the equivalent notice for 2027 is expected from the Belize Press Office around late October / early November 2026 (the 2026 notice was dated 6 November 2025). Access is clean — pressoffice.gov.bz serves the PDF without a bot wall, though the PDF is image-and-text mixed and needs a PDF reader rather than an HTML-to-markdown fetch. 2027 NOT SERVED - HELD (2026-07-30). Belize's observed holiday dates are set each year by a Government Press Office notice under s.3 of the Holidays Act, Cap. 289 (the 2026 notice, PR#218-25, issued 6 November 2025), and no 2027 notice existed as at 30 July 2026; expect it around October or November 2026. Holding is not merely a formality here: the Monday-transfer rule that Wikipedia and commercial holiday feeds publish for Belize - Tuesday to Thursday moving back to the preceding Monday and Friday to Sunday forward to the following Monday - is EMPIRICALLY FALSE, as six consecutive official notices from 2021 to 2026 show. Friday and Saturday holidays are never moved; Independence Day moved only from a Sunday; Christmas Day stayed on Sunday 25 December 2022 with no substitute; Emancipation Day, St George's Caye Day and Garifuna Settlement Day were Monday-ised in 2023 but not in 2024, 2025 or 2026; Labour Day was moved in 2024 but not in 2025 or 2026; and the 2024 St George's Caye Day observance was publicly announced as a Monday and then reversed to the Tuesday. Only National Heroes and Benefactors Day and Indigenous Peoples' Resistance Day have moved consistently. Computing Belize 2027 from any published rule would therefore produce dates that the actual notice is likely to contradict, so 2027 questions are refused free until the notice is issued.

Get it programmatically

curl https://latamref.dev/v1/bz/public-holidays
# Free.
# History:    curl https://latamref.dev/v1/bz/public-holidays/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://latamref.dev/provenance/bz/public-holidays

Other Belize series: policy interest rate · VAT rate · minimum wage · inflation rate (CPI) · corporate tax rate · income tax rates