Central African Republic public holidays

What this value means

SOURCING CAVEAT - READ BEFORE RELYING. The Labour Code (Loi n°09.004, loaded in full) establishes the paid-public-holiday regime and distinguishes 'jour ferie chome et paye' from 'jour ferie chome et non paye' for overtime purposes (Art. 264: +50% day rate, +150% night rate on a paid public holiday), and Art. 217 makes work during public holidays a mandatory subject of collective agreements - but it does NOT enumerate the days. The enumerating statute is Loi n°62-315 of 28 April 1962 on fetes legales, as amended by Loi n°64-55 (27 Nov 1964) and Ordonnance n°74-024 (21 Feb 1974). That text is not published on gouv.cf, finances.gouv.cf, ILO NATLEX, FAOLEX or any accessible Central African gazette; repeated searches and a French-embassy route both failed. The 2026 list above is therefore RECONSTRUCTED from the fixed statutory anniversaries and the Christian calendar and cross-checked for date arithmetic, not transcribed from the statute. Treat the LIST MEMBERSHIP as medium confidence; the DATE ARITHMETIC is exact. SUBSTITUTION RULE: Central African law provides that when a listed holiday falls on a Sunday, the following Monday is NOT a holiday ('lorsque les jours feries tombent un dimanche, le lundi ne sera pas un jour ferie et chome'). This has been APPLIED: 29 March (Boganda Day) and 1 November (All Saints) both fall on Sunday in 2026 and generate NO Monday substitute; both are retained in the array at their statutory dates. MOVABLE DATES: Easter Sunday 2026 is 5 April, so Easter Monday = 6 April, Ascension (Easter +39) = 14 May, Whit Monday (Easter +50) = 25 May. Eid al-Fitr (approx. 20 March 2026) and Eid al-Adha (approx. 27 May 2026) are PROVISIONAL pending local moon sighting and may shift by one day; note further that a Central African legal critique argues the Muslim feast days and the 30 June national prayer day rest on regulatory decrees rather than on the fetes legales statute, so their legal status as statutory paid holidays is contested even though they are observed in practice. DELIBERATE EXCLUSIONS: (a) 5 December, 'Journee de la Reconciliation, de la Paix, de la Cohesion sociale et du Vivre-ensemble', appears in a draft consolidation of the fetes legales law and in some Central African commentary as a paid legal holiday but does not appear in mainstream published Central African holiday calendars - excluded as unconfirmed; (b) Monday 30 March 2026 was declared an exceptional non-working day for the presidential inauguration by ministerial communique N°004/MTEPSFP/DIRCAB.26 of 25 March 2026, but expressly UNPAID and non-statutory (its legality was publicly contested), so it is a one-off closure and not a statutory paid holiday - excluded from the array by design; (c) Mothers' Day appears in the draft consolidation but has no confirmed fixed 2026 date - excluded. ACCESS QUIRK: the CNSS-hosted scan of the Labour Code is an un-OCR'd image PDF with garbled text extraction; the africa-laws.org copy cited here has a clean text layer and was used for verification.

Get it programmatically

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

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