Calendar — entry 017 of 17
UK Bank Holidays
The UK government publishes England & Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland bank holidays as a single static JSON file at gov.uk, listing each holiday's date, title, and whether it's a “substitute day” moved from a weekend. It's official, authoritative, and requires nothing beyond an HTTP GET — no key, no rate limit, and it's licensed under the Open Government Licence for reuse including commercially.
The UK government publishes bank holidays for England & Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland as static JSON, licensed under the Open Government Licence. A live GET this run returned all three divisions in one 22,207-byte response spanning 2019-01-01 through 2028-12-26 (83 England & Wales events, 94 Scotland, 103 Northern Ireland), and each division is also served on its own path -- a live `GET /bank-holidays/scotland.json` this run returned just that division's 94 events in 7,390 bytes. There's no per-year route, though: every response covers the full 2019-2028 span.
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- No API key, signup, or credit card required. A live GET this run confirmed both the combined file and each per-division path answer keyless with `access-control-allow-origin: *` and no rate-limit headers of any kind -- it's a static document served off gov.uk's CDN, reusable under the Open Government Licence including commercially.
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Fetch all UK bank holidays (all three divisions)
GEThttps://www.gov.uk/bank-holidays.json
{"england-and-wales": {"division": "england-and-wales", "events": [{"title": "New Year’s Day", "date": "2019-01-01", "notes": "", "bunting": true}, {"title": "Boxing Day", "date": "2026-12-28", "notes": "Substitute day", "bunting": true}, {"...": "81 more events, same shape, spanning 2019-01-01 to 2028-12-26"}]}, "scotland": {"division": "scotland", "events": [{"...": "94 events total, same shape as england-and-wales"}]}, "northern-ireland": {"division": "northern-ireland", "events": [{"title": "Battle of the Boyne (Orangemen’s Day)", "date": "2026-07-13", "notes": "Substitute day", "bunting": false}, {"...": "102 more events total, same shape"}]}}Try it
Developer reference
https://www.gov.uk- GET/bank-holidays.json
- GET/bank-holidays/{division}.json
- GET/bank-holidays/scotland.json
Gotchas & limits
- The two routes wrap their payload differently, so code can't share one parser: the combined file nests each division under its own top-level key (`{"england-and-wales": {"division": ..., "events": [...]}, "scotland": {...}, "northern-ireland": {...}}`), while a live `GET /bank-holidays/scotland.json` this run returned that division object unwrapped at the top level (`{"division": "scotland", "events": [...]}`). Either way there's no combined or deduplicated list, so a holiday observed in multiple nations (e.g. Christmas Day) appears once per division.
- The per-division split is a path, not a query parameter, and picking the wrong idiom fails silently: a live GET this run against `/bank-holidays.json?division=scotland` returned HTTP 200 and valid JSON, but the identical full 22,207-byte all-three-divisions document rather than a filtered one -- nothing signals the parameter was ignored. The route that actually filters is `/bank-holidays/scotland.json` (7,390 bytes, 94 events). That path is exact: live probes this run got a 404 for `/bank-holidays/scotland` without the `.json` extension, and for `/bank-holidays/wales.json` -- only the three documented divisions exist.
- "Substitute day" entries are real, distinct events with their own date, not annotations on the original holiday -- a live GET this run found Northern Ireland's Battle of the Boyne substitute landing on 2026-07-13 (`"notes":"Substitute day"`) as its own array entry, separate from the nominal 2026-07-12 date.
- The dataset spans nearly a decade (2019-2028 in this run's response) rather than just the current year, so code that assumes "the next N entries are upcoming" must filter by today's date itself -- the API does no date filtering for you.