Papua New Guinea public holidays
Public holidays throughout Papua New Guinea for calendar year 2026 under the Public Holidays Act (Chapter 321, originally 1953). Section 1 fixes the recurring statutory days; Sections 2, 3 and 5 let the Head of State, acting on advice, appoint Independence Day(s), the Sovereign's birthday and any additional holidays by notice in the National Gazette.
| Current value | 19 days held |
|---|---|
| In force from | 2026-01-01 |
| In force until | 2026-12-31 |
| Official source | Public Holidays Act (Chapter 321), Section 1 — 'The following days are public holidays throughout the country: (a) 1 January; and (b) Good Friday and the following Saturday and Monday; and (ba) 23 July to be known as Papua New Guinea Rememberance day; and (c) the day or days appointed under Section 2; and (d) Christmas Day and the following day; and (e) the day appointed under Section 3' (as amended by No. 110/1980 s.1 and No. 15/1981) — official reprint prepared for inclusion as at 1 January 1982, supplied by the Office of the Legislative Counsel and hosted by PacLII |
| Last verified | 2026-07-30 |
| Verification | primary — No verification limitation recorded — read from the official source cited. |
| Provenance | source fingerprint |
What this value means
The 2026 dates above are derived from the statutory text, not from a sighted 2026 gazettal — see the access note below. Easter 2026: Easter Sunday falls on 5 April, so Good Friday is 3 April, Easter Saturday 4 April and Easter Monday 6 April. Substitution rule, s.1(2): when a listed day OTHER than an Independence Day or Christmas Day falls on a SUNDAY, the next Monday is observed instead unless the Head of State declares otherwise — this rule is triggered by Sundays only, never by Saturdays. No shift applies in 2026: 1 Jan is a Thursday, 23 July a Thursday, 25 Dec a Friday and 26 Dec a Saturday (a Saturday Boxing Day is simply lost, since s.1(2) does not reach it). s.1(3) adds the following Tuesday only when Christmas Day falls on a Sunday — not applicable in 2026. TWO DAYS IN THE LIST ARE GAZETTAL-DEPENDENT, not fixed by s.1: National Repentance Day (26 August, declared each year under s.5 since 2011) and Independence Day (16 September, the anniversary of independence in 1975, appointed under s.2). They are included because they recur on the same calendar date every year, but the 2026 gazettal itself was not sighted. DELIBERATELY OMITTED — DO NOT SERVE AS FACT: (1) the SOVEREIGN'S BIRTHDAY (King's Birthday), a genuine public holiday appointed under s.3 whose date is set afresh by gazettal each year and typically falls on a Monday in June; commercial holiday calendars report Wednesday 17 June 2026, which is both unverified and inconsistent with recent PNG practice (2025 was Monday 9 June), so no date is served. (2) a National Remembrance Day for the late Grand Chief Sir Michael Somare, reported by commercial calendars as 26 February 2026; the Somare commemorations in 2022-2023 were one-off s.5 declarations and no recurring statutory basis was found. Also note the Act permits one-off and REGIONAL holidays under s.5 ('throughout the whole country or a part of the country') — e.g. the 2023 Pacific Leaders Visit holiday applied to the National Capital District only — so a national list can never be complete for a given province. ACCESS: PNG's National Gazette is not freely published online, and no PNG government department publishes a consolidated annual public-holidays notice on the open web (the Department of Foreign Affairs page at dfa.gov.pg/png-public-holidays/ still shows 2023 and is stale). PacLII 403s bare curl/fetch clients on .pdf paths and serves a file download rather than a page to browsers; retrieve with a UA-spoofing HTTP client. Repealed: s.7 (the original Remembrance Day provision) was repealed by No. 11 of 1980 and re-enacted as s.1(1)(ba). 2027 EXTENSION (2026-07-30) - PARTIAL, with one date deliberately left open. The entries come from the Public Holidays Act 1953 (Chapter 321) s.1(1) plus the appointed days that have held on fixed dates. The s.1(2) weekend rule substitutes SUNDAY occurrences only, and is itself defeasible - 'unless the Head of State, acting on advice, declares otherwise' - so Boxing Day moves to Monday 27 December while Christmas Day, a Saturday, does not move. KING'S BIRTHDAY IS NOT SERVED FOR 2027 and is carried as a pending entry instead: it is appointed each year by notice in the National Gazette under s.2, there is NO statutory nth-weekday rule for it, and the observed weekday has genuinely varied (it fell on Friday 16 June in 2023, and sources conflict for 2026 between Wednesday 17 June and Monday 8 June). We will not guess a date that a gazette notice fixes. NOTE: we deliberately serve NO King's Birthday for 2026 either, for the same reason, so there is no 2026 value to re-verify - the day is a genuine holiday that we omit rather than guess, and a working-day count for a June range in either year will therefore be one day short. The Somare Remembrance and National Repentance days are appointed days rather than s.1(1) entries and so are formally gazettal-dependent too, though both have held on 26 February and 26 August. SELF-CORRECTION (2026-07-30): two entries were removed from the 2027 list after a cross-year audit. A Somare Remembrance Day on 26 February was added in error - the 2026 record deliberately omits it because the 2022-2023 Somare commemorations were one-off declarations under s.5 with no recurring statutory basis - and an Easter Sunday entry on 28 March was added in error, because s.1(1)(b) covers Good Friday and the following Saturday and Monday only, which is why 2026 has no Easter Sunday either. Both years now model the same set of days.
Get it programmatically
curl https://ausref.dev/v1/pg/public-holidays
# Free.
# History: curl https://ausref.dev/v1/pg/public-holidays/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://ausref.dev/provenance/pg/public-holidaysOther Papua New Guinea series: policy interest rate · VAT rate · minimum wage · inflation rate (CPI) · corporate tax rate · income tax rates