Most of Australia’s public holidays look shared at a glance — New Year’s Day, Australia Day, Easter, Christmas — but several of the biggest ones actually fall on different dates depending on which state or territory you’re in. Get the date wrong and a « public holiday » trip or rostering decision can be off by weeks.
Here’s exactly where the 2026 calendar lines up across all eight states and territories, and where it genuinely doesn’t, verified against each jurisdiction’s official public holidays register.
| Holiday | 2026 date(s) | How it varies by state |
|---|---|---|
| New Year’s Day | Thu 1 January | Same date, every state and territory |
| Australia Day | Mon 26 January | Same date everywhere |
| Good Friday – Easter Monday | Fri 3 – Mon 6 April | Same four days nationally, though the individual day names differ slightly (e.g. WA has no Easter Saturday holiday) |
| Anzac Day | Sat 25 April | Falls on a Saturday everywhere, but only NSW, WA and the ACT add a substitute public holiday on Monday 27 April — elsewhere it’s just the Saturday itself |
| King’s Birthday | Varies | Monday 8 June in NSW, VIC, SA, TAS, ACT and NT; Monday 28 September in WA; Monday 5 October in QLD (where it doubles as that state’s spring holiday) |
| Labour Day equivalent | Varies | A different date and even a different name in every state that has one — Labour Day (NSW/QLD/SA, three different dates), Eight Hours Day (TAS), Western Australia Day (WA), no separate holiday of this kind in VIC/ACT (their Labour Day-equivalent is Victoria’s March Labour Day) or NT |
| Christmas Day | Fri 25 December | Same date everywhere |
| Boxing Day | Sat 26 December | Falls on a Saturday everywhere; every state and territory adds Monday 28 December as a substitute day |
A few of the less obvious differences worth knowing:
- Not every « public holiday » applies to everyone. NSW and the ACT both have a Bank Holiday (Monday 3 August 2026) that applies to banks and some public servants only — not a general day off. Queensland’s Royal Queensland Show (Ekka) Day and Tasmania’s regional show days work similarly: real gazetted holidays, but scoped to a sector or a specific region rather than the whole state.
- South Australia and the Northern Territory both hold part-day public holidays on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve (7pm to midnight) — a legal entitlement for anyone working those hours, not a full day off.
- Tasmania and Victoria run genuinely different show-day calendars — Tasmania gazettes a public holiday for a different regional show almost every month from October through Show season, and Victoria sets a separate Melbourne Cup Day substitute date for each local government area outside metropolitan Melbourne.
Full detail for your state
- New South Wales public holidays, 2026
- Victoria public holidays, 2026
- Queensland public holidays, 2026
- Western Australia public holidays, 2026
- South Australia public holidays, 2026
- Tasmania public holidays, 2026
- ACT public holidays, 2026
- Northern Territory public holidays, 2026
Want to turn any of these into a longer break? See every state’s natural long weekends in 2026, or use the Annual Leave Optimiser to find exactly how many extra days off a day or two of leave would buy you.