Lesotho public holidays

What this value means

ELEVEN holidays. Eight are fixed by date (New Year's Day 1 Jan; Moshoeshoe's Day 11 Mar; Workers' Day 1 May; Africa/Heroes' Day 25 May; King's Birthday 17 Jul; Independence Day 4 Oct; Christmas Day 25 Dec; Boxing Day 26 Dec) and three are movable Western-calendar Christian days. Western Easter Sunday 2026 is 5 April, so Good Friday is 3 April, Easter Monday 6 April, and Ascension Day (the Thursday 39 days after Easter Sunday) is 14 May 2026. THE 1995 ACT NO LONGER MATCHES PRACTICE — read the amendment. The Schedule as enacted in 1995 reads: New Year's Day (1 January), Moshoeshoe's Day (11 March), Heroes Day (4 April), Good Friday, Easter Monday, Ascension Day, Workers' Day (1 May), King's Birthday (2 May), National Independence Day (4 October), Christmas Day (25 December). Three things have changed since, all attributed to the Public Holidays (Amendment) Act No. 1 of 2003: the King's Birthday moved from 2 May (King Moshoeshoe II) to 17 July (King Letsie III); the separate 4 April Heroes Day was dropped and merged into 25 May, which official Lesotho sources now call 'Africa's Heroes' Day' (the Washington embassy) or simply 'Africa Day' (LNDC); and Boxing Day, 26 December, was added. CORRECTION TO A COMMON BRIEF: there is NO 4 April Heroes Day in Lesotho in 2026 — no official 2026 list carries it. DATE ERROR IN THE SOURCE: the Washington embassy's 2026 table lists Ascension Day as 'Thursday, May 29'. 29 May 2026 is a Friday, and 29 May 2025 was Ascension Day and a Thursday — the embassy carried last year's date into this year's table. Every other date and weekday in that table checks out for 2026, so the list is otherwise sound; the Ascension entry has been corrected here to 14 May 2026 from the Act's own definition. SECOND DISCREPANCY: the Lesotho National Development Corporation's standing list (https://lndc.org.ls/knowledge-base/public-holidays-in-lesotho/) gives only ten holidays and OMITS Ascension Day entirely. Ascension Day is in the statutory Schedule, is not shown as repealed, and is listed by the embassy, so it is served here — but a user who finds their Lesotho counterparty open on 14 May 2026 should not be surprised. NO SUBSTITUTION RULE: unlike South Africa and Namibia, the Public Holidays Act 1995 contains NO provision moving a holiday that falls on a Sunday to the following Monday. Section 5 only deems Sundays and public holidays to be non-business days for bills of exchange and promissory notes. In 2026 Independence Day, 4 October, falls on a Sunday and is simply lost; Boxing Day, 26 December, falls on a Saturday and is likewise not substituted. AD-HOC HOLIDAYS: section 3 lets the King, on the advice of the Minister of Home Affairs, appoint any other day as a public holiday by Legal Notice in the Gazette — Public Holiday (Appointment) Notices were gazetted in 2023 and repeatedly in 2025 (Government Gazettes of 22 Sep 2023, 7 Mar 2025, 20 May 2025 and 2 Oct 2025). None has been found for the rest of 2026, but this series can change on a single legal notice with no amendment to the Act. ACCESS: there is no Lesotho government page that publishes the year's public holidays authoritatively. The Act text used here is the Lesotho Government copy mirrored by CommonLII at https://www.commonlii.org/ls/legis/num_act/pha1995163.pdf — that URL returns HTTP 403 unless a Referer header pointing at https://www.commonlii.org/ls/legis/num_act/pha1995163/ is sent, and CommonLII's Lesotho collection was last updated in 2005 and holds only 33 documents, so it does NOT contain the 2003 amending Act. The amending Act No. 1 of 2003 could not be retrieved from any reachable source: LesothoLII does not hold it and is behind a Cloudflare bot wall; gazettes.africa holds 99 Lesotho gazettes for 2003 but has no full-text search over them. The UK High Commission's holiday page (lesothohc.org.uk) is STALE — it still shows 2024 and mixes in UK bank holidays — do not use it. 2027 EXTENSION (2026-07-30): the Schedule to the Public Holidays Act 1995 (Act 7 of 1995). IMPORTANT NEGATIVE FINDING: Lesotho has NO weekend-substitution rule - s.2 simply declares the scheduled days to be public holidays with no proviso, and the King's s.3 gazette power is additive only. That is unusual for the region and it costs Lesotho four holidays in 2027: Workers' Day, King Letsie III's Birthday and Christmas Day all fall on Saturdays and Boxing Day on a Sunday, and none is moved. Note that Africa/Heroes' Day, the King's Birthday and Boxing Day rest on instruments outside the 1995 Schedule that could not be retrieved, so they are served but are not Schedule days. MONITOR: a Public Holidays Bill 2025 was introduced in April 2025 which would repeal the 1995 Act, add National Tree Planting Day on 21 March, and introduce Saturday AND Sunday substitution with cascade. It had not been enacted as at 30 July 2026 and 2026 practice shows no substitution applied, but if it passes the 2027 calendar changes materially.

Get it programmatically

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

Other Lesotho series: policy interest rate · VAT rate · minimum wage · inflation rate (CPI) · corporate tax rate · income tax rates