Angola public holidays

What this value means

TWO CORRECTIONS TO THE LAUNCHING BRIEF. (1) 4 DE JANEIRO (Dia dos Mártires da Repressão Colonial) IS NOT A PUBLIC HOLIDAY. Lei n.º 10/11 demoted it: Artigo 3.º lists it as a 'data de celebração nacional', and Artigo 7.º n.º 3 says celebration dates are marked WITHOUT suspension of work. The other celebration dates (also non-holidays) are 2 Março (Dia da Mulher Angolana), 15 Março (Expansão da Luta Armada), 14 Abril (Juventude Angolana), 25 Maio (Dia de África), 1 Junho (Dia Internacional da Criança) and 10 Dezembro (Direitos Humanos). It WAS a holiday under the older Lei n.º 16/96, de 27 de Setembro, which is where that belief comes from; Lei 16/96 was superseded by Lei n.º 7/03, de 21 de Março, itself revoked by Artigo 11.º of Lei n.º 10/11. (2) [SUPERSEDED 2026-07-30 — this passage described Lei n.º 10/11 before its 2018 amendment; see the CORRECTION at the end of this note.] Under the ORIGINAL Lei 10/11 there was no Tuesday/Thursday moving rule. Artigo 6.º ('Ponte') is narrow: 'Quando um dia de feriado nacional coincida com o dia de descanso semanal obrigatório (Domingo) deve aquele ser transferido para o dia útil imediatamente a seguir.' Only SUNDAY triggers a transfer — Saturday does not — and Artigo 6.º n.º 3 excludes four holidays from Ponte altogether: 1 Janeiro, Dia do Carnaval, 2 Novembro and 25 Dezembro. Artigo 6.º n.º 4 adds an operational sting: in the week preceding a Ponte, one hour is added to each normal working day. The only discretionary date-shifting in Angolan law is 'tolerância de ponto' (Artigo 5.º), an ad-hoc grant by the Titular do Poder Executivo, or by a Provincial Government within its province — it is not calendar-driven and cannot be predicted. 2026 SPECIFICS: 8 March 2026 is a Sunday and is NOT on the exclusion list, so it moves by Ponte to Monday 9 March 2026 — the only transfer of the year. 4 April 2026 (Peace Day) is a Saturday and is NOT transferred, because Artigo 6.º names only Sunday. Movable feasts: Easter Sunday 2026 is 5 April, so Sexta-Feira Santa is 3 April 2026 and Dia do Carnaval (Shrove Tuesday) is 17 February 2026 — note Angola's Carnival holiday is the Tuesday, and Ash Wednesday (18 Feb 2026) is not a holiday. Days of week in 2026: 1 Jan Thu, 4 Feb Wed, 17 Feb Tue, 3 Apr Fri, 4 Apr Sat, 1 May Fri, 17 Sep Thu, 2 Nov Mon, 11 Nov Wed, 25 Dec Fri. Pay rules: Artigo 7.º n.º 1 makes suspension of work compulsory in BOTH public and private sectors with pay; Artigo 7.º n.º 2 additionally suspends work from 12h30 on 24 and 31 December; Artigo 8.º pays holiday work at one extra day's normal salary PLUS a compensatory rest day within the following three days; shift workers are excepted from both. Artigo 4.º allows the Executive to approve ONE local holiday per city or município on a Provincial Government proposal — those are not in this list and, per Artigo 6.º n.º 3, never carry a Ponte. SOURCE NOTE: Angola has no free official consolidated-law database — the Imprensa Nacional SELLS the Diário da República (imprensanacional.gov.ao has no free full-text search) and governo.gov.ao's 'Legislação' section carries only a handful of unrelated 2021-2024 items. The URL above is lex.ao, a private Angolan legal-document mirror, used here ONLY as the delivery vehicle for the official gazette scan; every figure and every article quoted was verified directly against the fac-símile pages 571-572 of Diário da República I Série n.º 31 of 16/02/2011 rendered from that scan, not against lex.ao's own transcription (whose Artigo 2.º transcription silently drops alíneas d) and e), i.e. Carnaval and 4 de Abril, at the gazette page break). CORRECTION (2026-07-30) — THIS RECORD WAS BUILT ON THE SUPERSEDED TEXT OF LEI 10/11. Lei n.º 11/18, de 28 de Setembro (Diário da República I Série n.º 147 of 28 September 2018, page 4659) provides that 'É aprovada a alteração dos artigos 2.º, 3.º e 6.º da Lei n.º 10/11', and its preamble states the purpose as stimulating tourism, commerce and transport and as adding the days of the antigo combatente and of the liberation of Southern Africa. Two substantive consequences, both now applied. FIRST, the amended Artigo 2.º lists TWELVE feriados nacionais, adding alínea d) 23 de Março — Dia da Libertação da África Austral. This series previously carried eleven, so 23 March has been added for 2026 and is included for 2027. SECOND, the amended Artigo 6.º replaces the old Sunday-transfer rule entirely: it now reads that when a feriado nacional falls on a Tuesday or a Thursday, work is suspended on the adjacent Monday or Friday respectively, that this suspension is called the «Ponte», and that in the preceding week one and a half hours are added to each normal working day. There is therefore NO LONGER ANY SUNDAY TRANSFER. Our 2026 record had moved 8 March 2026 (a Sunday) to Monday 9 March under the repealed rule; that entry has been removed and 8 March restored to its statutory date, where it falls on a Sunday and is simply absorbed. NOT SERVED, and this is a deliberate gap: the Ponte days that the amended Artigo 6.º generates for Tuesday and Thursday feriados are not listed. The official gazette scan of Lei 11/18 carries no text layer and could not be read directly, so while two independent transcriptions agree on the three paragraphs quoted above, we cannot confirm whether the amended article retains the exclusion list that the original Artigo 6.º n.º 3 applied to 1 January, Carnaval, 2 November and 25 December. Listing Ponte days that may in fact be excluded would assert holidays that do not exist, so they are omitted and disclosed here instead — the same treatment we give the discretionary tolerância de ponto of Artigo 5.º. A reader computing Angolan working days should therefore expect our count to omit any Ponte day. To close this gap, the fac-símile of Diário da República I Série n.º 147 of 28 September 2018 at page 4659 needs to be read visually or by OCR.

Get it programmatically

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

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