About

Australia School Holidays shows school term dates, school holidays, public holidays and long weekends for New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, the ACT and the Northern Territory. Each page answers one question: when are the holidays, and how long are they?

Where the dates come from

School term dates come only from each state or territory's education department: its term dates page and, where it publishes one, its calendar PDF or file. Public holidays come from each government's official list, the public holidays acts and gazetted declarations. Every page names its source and the date we last checked it, and the sources page lists them all.

The dates shown are for government schools. Catholic and independent schools usually follow them but can set their own, and every school can add pupil-free days. When in doubt, your school's own calendar wins.

How each date is checked

Every year of term dates and public holidays is recorded from the official source, then checked a second time, separately, against the same source. Weekdays are recalculated for every date and compared with the weekday the department prints. Where two official documents disagree, such as a summary table and the act it summarises, we follow the legal source and say so on the page. The national data.gov.au holidays dataset stops at 2025, so from 2026 each government's own list is the only source.

How school holidays are counted

Departments describe breaks in different ways: some give term dates only, some list the holidays, and some count staff-only days as term. So that states compare fairly, each break here runs from the day after students' last day of term to the day before students return, weekends and public holidays included. Pupil-free days at the start or end of a term are listed on each state's page, because children are at home on those days.

Where a state has more than one calendar, such as the Eastern and Western divisions in New South Wales, the main calendar is shown first and the other is set out on the same page.

What counts as a public holiday

The main list on each state's page holds the days that apply across the whole state or territory, including additional days when a holiday falls on a weekend and part-day holidays such as Christmas Eve evening. Show days and other regional holidays, local half-days, bank holidays and days that apply only to some workers, such as Easter Tuesday for the Tasmanian State Service, are listed separately because most people work as normal.

Long weekends and leave ideas are worked out from the statewide days and weekends only, assuming a Monday to Friday week.

How the dates stay current

Departments publish term dates years ahead and occasionally change them. We re-check every source on a regular schedule and when a new year is released. The countdowns on the site are worked out in your browser from today's date, and the calendar files you can subscribe to update themselves when we change a date.

Corrections

If a date looks wrong, please tell us with the link to the official source. We check every report against the department's own page.

The company that publishes Australia School Holidays is identified in our privacy policy. You can reach us at [email protected].