---
id: govuk-bank-holidays
version: "0.19"
license: MIT
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: active
---

# govuk-bank-holidays — Tool to load UK bank holidays from GOV.UK

License: permissive · Maintenance: active · Downloads: 262.7K/mo

## What it is and what it does

This package provides a simple interface to retrieve UK bank holidays from the official GOV.UK source, with automatic fallback to a cached list if the network is unavailable or slow. It handles the complexity of regional variation—bank holidays differ between England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland—so you can query holidays for a specific division or get only those common to all regions.

The library wraps requests to fetch fresh data on demand, but also ships with a cached backup of known holidays for offline use or as a safety net. It supports both English and Welsh locales for holiday titles and notes, and provides methods to find next and previous holidays, generate series of holidays or work days, and check specific dates.

Use it for:

- Determine whether a given date is a UK bank holiday in a specific region for payroll or scheduling systems
- Generate lists of upcoming bank holidays for calendar or planning applications
- Calculate work days by excluding bank holidays from date ranges
- Build UK-aware scheduling logic that respects regional holiday differences
- Provide holiday information in Welsh for bilingual UK applications

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

Fetches and caches the official UK bank holidays from GOV.UK, with support for regional divisions and English or Welsh locales.

Yes. The package solves a real, recurring problem (UK bank holiday lookup) with low install friction, active maintenance, no security vulnerabilities, and a permissive license. It is well-suited for any UK-based application that needs to handle holidays or work-day calculations. The regional division support and offline fallback add practical value for production use.

## Install

pip install govuk-bank-holidays
uv add govuk-bank-holidays
poetry add govuk-bank-holidays

## Installing govuk-bank-holidays

Before you install: Low friction install with a single runtime dependency (requests). Actively maintained with recent updates; last commit 2026-08-07.

License in practice: MIT license (permissive) allows free use, modification, and distribution with minimal restrictions, provided you include the license notice.

Quickstart:

pip install govuk-bank-holidays

from govuk_bank_holidays.bank_holidays import BankHolidays

bank_holidays = BankHolidays()
for holiday in bank_holidays.get_holidays():
    print(holiday['title'], 'is on', holiday['date'])

Verify before relying:

- Whether the cached backup list covers all years a typical user would need to query
- Performance characteristics when querying large date ranges or multiple divisions

## Package facts

- License: MIT (permissive)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: active
- Downloads: 262.7K/month (top 15,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

uk bank holidays, govuk bank holidays, british bank holidays, uk holiday dates, bank holidays by region, gov.uk holidays python, uk-holidays, scheduling

[View on SkillFed](https://skillfed.io/packages/govuk-bank-holidays) · [View on PyPI](https://pypi.org/project/govuk-bank-holidays/)