How often do you update the data?

We check holidays every year and as soon as a law changes; school calendars as soon as the authorities publish the new dates. The date of the last check is shown on every data page.

Why do other sites sometimes show different dates?

Because many calendars copy from one another and so pass the errors along. We go back to the law instead and link it: if one of our figures differs from another site, you can check at the source which one is correct.

Methodology: how we handle the data

Calendana is a programmatic data site — which is exactly why we explain openly where every figure comes from. This page describes how we gather, compute, keep current and correct public holidays, school calendars and local data. It's the in-depth version of what we summarise in “About”, and the page the sources on every data page link to.

One verifiable source per fact

We don't copy data from other online calendars. Each entry is rebuilt from the country's primary legal source — for the UK, the official GOV.UK bank-holidays list. That avoids the “copy-paste” errors and stale years that pass from one site to the next. The source we used is linked on every data page, so you can check it yourself.

Holidays: scope and movable feasts

Which holidays apply nationwide and which only in part of the country (England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland each have their own bank holidays) is recorded in a scope table that follows the law: a regional holiday isn't extended to the whole country. Movable dates, such as Easter and the holidays that depend on it (Good Friday, Easter Monday), are computed with the ecclesiastical computus and Meeus's algorithms, not entered by hand year after year, which removes typos across every year. Weeks follow the ISO 8601 standard.

School calendars and regional data

School calendars can't be computed: they're collected region by region from the official term-date publications (local authority and devolved-government calendars) and updated by hand. The same goes for regional bank holidays and long weekends. That collection is the real work behind the site and the reason the data is correct at the local level, not just nationally.

Which pages we build

We don't automatically generate every possible combination of place and year. A page exists only when there's real demand and solid official data behind it — for example a region with its own calendar. Empty or invented pages, like the ones you find on some calendar portals, we avoid on purpose: better a few pages that tell the truth than many that only fill gaps.

Updates and corrections

For each source we save the date it was last checked; the most recent of those values appears on the page as “Last updated”. If you still find an error, write to us: we check it against the official source, correct it and update the date.

Editorial and language

The data is verified by the Calendana editorial team (an organisation, not an invented individual author). The text is written natively for each language and country — not a model's machine translation of a template, but our own wording with local examples and terms.

Found an error?

Send corrections or questions to [email protected].

How often do you update the data?: We check holidays every year and as soon as a law changes; school calendars as soon as the authorities publish the new dates. The date of the last check is shown on every data page.
Why do other sites sometimes show different dates?: Because many calendars copy from one another and so pass the errors along. We go back to the law instead and link it: if one of our figures differs from another site, you can check at the source which one is correct.