Every company in Bangladesh needs a holiday calendar, and every year the same confusion shows up. Which dates are confirmed, which are estimates, and what happens when a holiday lands on a Friday or Saturday that was already a weekly off day. Here’s what’s actually settled for 2026 and what isn’t yet.
Fixed-date holidays you can calendar now
These follow the Gregorian calendar and don’t move year to year, so they’re safe to publish internally today:
| Holiday | 2026 Date |
|---|---|
| Language Martyrs’ Day | 21 February |
| Independence Day | 26 March |
| Pohela Boishakh (Bengali New Year) | 14 April |
| May Day | 1 May |
| National Mourning Day | 15 August |
| Victory Day | 16 December |
| Christmas Day | 25 December |
Dates that depend on moon sighting
Eid ul Fitr, Eid ul Azha, Eid e Miladunnabi, Shab e Barat, Shab e Qadr, and Ashura follow the lunar Hijri calendar. Government sources publish tentative windows well ahead of time. Eid ul Fitr is currently estimated around late March 2026, Eid ul Azha around late May 2026, but the confirmed date is only set by moon sighting committee announcement, usually a day or two before. Durga Puja and Buddha Purnima follow the Bengali lunar and Buddhist calendars and carry the same caveat.
Don’t publish a final internal holiday calendar with exact dates for lunar holidays. Publish the estimated window, and confirm the exact date once the government gazette or moon sighting announcement lands, usually within a week of the holiday.
When a holiday lands on a weekend
This is where a lot of companies get it wrong. A public holiday falling on a Friday or Saturday, the standard Bangladesh weekend, doesn’t automatically shift to the next working day or create a compensatory off day. That only happens if the government explicitly announces it for that holiday, or if the employer’s own leave policy commits to it. Assuming the shift happens by default, without checking, is how employees end up disputing their leave balance in January.
Why this trips up attendance and leave tracking
A holiday calendar isn’t just a list on a wall. It feeds two systems that have to agree with each other:
- Attendance: staff who don’t clock in on a gazetted holiday shouldn’t be flagged absent, but staff on a shift that legitimately runs through a holiday need to be paid correctly for it.
- Leave balances: an employee who applied for annual leave that happens to include a public holiday shouldn’t have that holiday deducted from their leave balance.
Both of these are easy to get right in theory and easy to get wrong in practice when the holiday list lives in one spreadsheet, the attendance system is separate, and someone has to manually reconcile them every time the list changes. Given how many dates stay estimates until weeks before, that happens more than once a year.
Utso’s attendance management and leave management run off one configurable holiday calendar per company, so a gazetted holiday is recognized automatically across both attendance and leave balances instead of needing a manual update in two places every time a date is confirmed.
One more thing
This calendar reflects publicly reported estimates for 2026 as of publication. Lunar calendar holiday dates aren’t final until confirmed by official moon sighting announcement, and the government occasionally issues supplementary holiday notifications after the initial gazette. Confirm exact dates against the official government gazette before finalizing any company calendar.