Mali public holidays

What this value means

STATUTORY BASIS: Loi n deg 05-040 du 22 juillet 2005 relative aux fetes legales enumerates twelve fetes legales - the fixed civil dates (1 janvier, 20 janvier, 26 mars, 1er mai, 25 mai, 22 septembre, 25 decembre), Lundi de Paques, and the movable Muslim feasts (Korite/fin du Ramadan, Tabaski, and Maouloud comprising both the naissance and the bapteme du Prophete). Mali is unusual in giving the 'Bapteme du Prophete', the seventh day after Mawlid (19 Rabi al-Awwal), its own public holiday. The 2026 Tabaski communique cites Loi 05-040 by name, independently confirming the instrument number and date. OBSERVANCE / SUBSTITUTION RULE APPLIED - CORRECTED: Malian practice, as reported by WageIndicator/Votresalaire.org's Mali labour-law pages and by Malian press summaries of the Code du Travail, is that a holiday falling on a SUNDAY is carried to the following day, i.e. the Monday ('les jours feries qui tombent un dimanche sont deplaces au lendemain, c'est-a-dire le lundi suivant'), while a holiday falling on a SATURDAY stays on its own date and is absorbed. An earlier draft of this record asserted that Mali has NO substitution mechanism at all; that was wrong and is corrected here. The rule is nevertheless INOPERATIVE for calendar 2026: not one date in this list falls on a Sunday (1 Jan Thu, 2 Jan Fri, 20 Jan Tue, 16 Mar Mon, 19 Mar Thu, 20 Mar Fri, 26 Mar Thu, 6 Apr Mon, 1 May Fri, 25 May Mon, 27 May Wed, 28 May Thu, 25 Aug Tue, 1 Sep Tue, 22 Sep Tue, 25 Dec Fri), so NO date has been shifted. Confidence note: the Sunday-carry rule is reported at secondary-source confidence only - the promulgated text of Loi 05-040 could not be loaded, so it is not established whether the rule sits in that law or in the Code du Travail. Easter Sunday 2026 is 5 April, so Lundi de Paques is 6 April 2026. MOVABLE ISLAMIC DATES, individually confirmed by MTFPDS communique for 2026: Laylat al-Qadr Monday 16 March; Korite Thursday 19 and Friday 20 March; Tabaski Wednesday 27 and Thursday 28 May - the 27/28 May declaration was re-verified on 2026-07-20 against multiple Malian outlets reproducing the MTFPDS communique, which declares both days 'chomees et payees sur toute l'etendue du territoire national' for public, private and parapublic sector workers. The 'lendemain' second days for Korite and Tabaski are NOT standing entitlements in the 2005 law - they are granted by annual ministerial communique, and were granted for both feasts in 2026. TWO PROVISIONAL ENTRIES, FLAGGED IN-BAND: Maouloud and the Bapteme du Prophete are genuine statutory holidays under Loi 05-040, but as at 2026-07-20 the MTFPDS had not yet issued the communique fixing their 2026 dates. The dates carried here (25 August and 1 September 2026) are astronomical projections for 12 Rabi al-Awwal 1448 and its seventh day, and are marked DATE PROVISOIRE inside the name field so that no consumer can mistake them for confirmed values. They must be re-pulled once the communique issues, and may move by a day in either direction on local moon sighting - Mali determines these dates by national sighting, not by calculation. DELIBERATE EXCLUSIONS: (1) Ascension, Pentecote, Assomption (15 August) and Toussaint (1 November) are NOT among the fetes legales of Loi 05-040; the Ivorian embassy's Bamako page that lists them was found to be conflating Cote d'Ivoire's own calendar with Mali's (it lists 7 August Ivorian independence and 15 November Journee de la Paix, neither of which is Malian) and was discarded as a source. (2) ASHURA (10 Muharram) appears on the English Wikipedia list for Mali but is NOT in the Loi 05-040 enumeration reproduced by Malian labour-law sources, and no 2026 MTFPDS communique declaring it could be found; it is excluded and flagged rather than guessed. ACCESS QUIRKS: the full promulgated text of Loi n deg 05-040 could not be loaded - sgg-mali.ml (Journal Officiel) timed out; maliweb.net, bamada.net, maliactu.net and amkfinancehub.com return HTTP 403 to automated fetches; publicholidays.africa refused the connection outright (ECONNREFUSED) on 2026-07-20. The enumeration of the law and the individual 2026 declarations are corroborated across multiple independent Malian outlets reproducing the MTFPDS communiques verbatim, but the gazette text itself was not read first-hand.

Get it programmatically

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

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