Tonga public holidays

What this value means

Tonga's shifting rule is unusual and runs in BOTH directions. s.2 first proviso: a public holiday falling on a Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday is celebrated on the NEXT following Monday, and one falling on a Tuesday or Wednesday is celebrated on the Monday BEFORE the actual date — but this rule expressly EXCEPTS Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year's Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, ANZAC Day, the Sovereign's Birthday and the Heir's Birthday, which are always kept on the day they fall. s.2 second proviso (inserted by Act 5 of 2013): the Sovereign's and the Heir's birthdays are celebrated on the day they fall unless that is a Sunday, in which case the following Monday. Applying this to 2026 gives exactly the three moved days in the list: Emancipation Day (4 June, a Thursday) → Monday 8 June; Constitution Day (4 November, a Wednesday) → the Monday BEFORE, 2 November; Anniversary of the Coronation of King George Tupou I (4 December, a Friday) → Monday 7 December. Unmoved because excepted: 1 Jan (Thu), 25 Apr ANZAC Day (Sat), 25 Dec (Fri) and 26 Dec (Sat) — four holidays are therefore effectively lost to the weekend or kept on a weekday without a substitute day. The Sovereign's Birthday is observed on 4 JULY, not King Tupou VI's actual birth date of 12 July: endnote 2 to s.2 records 'By Cabinet Decision of 6th July 2012 this date was declared to be 4th July'. The statutory list in s.2 names TWELVE occasions but 2026 has ELEVEN holidays because the 'Anniversary of the Coronation Day of the reigning Sovereign' (King Tupou VI was crowned 4 July 2015) falls on the same 4 July as the declared official birthday and the two collapse into a single observed day. s.2(b) lets Cabinet appoint additional special days at any time, so a twelfth day can appear mid-year without notice — hence the ~200-day update cycle. Legal effect (s.3): a public holiday is dies non — no person can be compelled to make a payment or do an act that they could not be compelled to do on a Sunday; s.4 lets Cabinet order shops closed, s.5 penalty up to TOP 100, s.6 exempts sales of drugs/medicines, bread, butter, fresh milk, fresh meat, fresh fish and ice before noon, refreshment rooms, and burial articles. ACCESS PROBLEM: the Prime Minister's Office notice at https://pmo.gov.to/tonga-public-holidays-for-2026/ returns HTTP 403 to automated fetches (both plain and browser-UA), so the PMO page could not be read directly; the eleven observed dates above were derived from the statutory text of s.2 (which WAS fetched and read in full from the AGO consolidated PDF cited) and independently corroborated against the reported contents of the PMO notice. The statutory derivation and the reported PMO list agree on all eleven dates with no discrepancy. Do not point the source-watcher at pmo.gov.to expecting a 200. 2027 EXTENSION (2026-07-30): the Public Holidays Act, Cap. 8.11 (2020 Revised Edition) list, with its BIDIRECTIONAL Monday-isation applied - a non-exempt holiday falling Thursday to Sunday moves to the following Monday, and one falling Tuesday or Wednesday moves BACK to the preceding Monday. Hence Emancipation Day (statutory 4 June, a Friday) is observed 7 June, Constitution Day (4 November, a Thursday) 8 November, and the King George Tupou I coronation anniversary (4 December, a Saturday) 6 December. The Sovereign's coronation anniversary (4 July) falls on a Sunday and moves to 5 July under the separate proviso for royal days. IMPORTANT LIMITATION: New Year's Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, ANZAC Day, Christmas Day, the day after Christmas and the two royal birthdays are EXPRESSLY EXCEPTED from Monday-isation. In 2027 ANZAC Day falls on Sunday 25 April and Christmas and the following day on Saturday and Sunday, so on the face of the Act no lieu day arises for any of them and they are listed on their statutory dates. Cabinet may appoint special days under s.2(b) and commonly does in exactly this situation, so those three dates should be re-checked when Tonga publishes its 2027 list; we do not invent lieu days that the Act does not create.

Get it programmatically

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

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