How does United States mark Long Holiday Weeks?
Three-Day Weekend
- Local date
- May 29, 2027–May 31, 2027
- When is it?
- Memorial Day, the last Monday in May, together with the Saturday and Sunday before it; a holiday falling on a Saturday is observed on the preceding Friday, and one falling on a Sunday on the following workday.
No American official can declare a bridging day. There is exactly one source of a long weekend: 5 U.S.C. 6103 writes five of the eleven legal public holidays as "the Nth Monday" of a month — the third Monday in January, the third Monday in February, the last Monday in May, the first Monday in September, the second Monday in October. That was the work of Public Law 90-363 of 28 June 1968, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which added Columbus Day and moved Washington's Birthday, Memorial Day and Veterans Day onto Mondays. Veterans Day was pushed back to 11 November by Public Law 94-97 in 1975 — the only one of the four ever reversed. Subsection (b) makes the Friday before a legal public holiday when the holiday falls on a Saturday, and Executive Order 11582 of 11 February 1971 pushes a Sunday holiday to the next workday. So Independence Day 2026 falls on Saturday 4 July and the Office of Personnel Management's calendar records it on Friday 3 July, while Memorial Day on Monday 25 May makes its usual three days. Nothing is worked back, and nothing is added.
What is this topic?
Seven places all end up with a run of consecutive days off, and not one of them builds it the same way. Japan's holiday act fills the gap by itself and nobody has to announce anything. China's State Council issues a notice every November that borrows weekends forward and takes them back afterwards as working Saturdays. Indonesia's joint leave is decided by three ministers together — and it is deducted from the worker's own annual leave. Taiwan rewrote its holiday law in 2025 and now only adds compensatory days, never borrowed ones. Brazil bridges with unnamed days declared by ministerial order that bind federal offices only. The United States moved five holidays to Mondays in 1968 and has done nothing since. India leaves it to the states, under a banking statute from 1881.
Sources and dates
Dates follow local time zones, calendars, and official notices. Check the source when a date is estimated or locally variable.