Most professionals know their Gazetted holidays by heart—Republic Day, Diwali, and Christmas. These are the days when financial markets pause, banks pull down their shutters, and corporate treasuries plan their cash flows well in advance. Restricted holidays, however, present a unique liquidity and payroll challenge. They are officially on the books, yet their staggered utilisation across different states can silently disrupt regional cheque clearing and inter-bank settlements.
Read on to explore the Indian Restricted Holiday List for 2026, as this guide explains how these optional leaves impact your corporate payroll accounting and alter regional banking operations and why treasury managers must track them to prevent unexpected cash flow bottlenecks.
What is a Restricted Holiday?
Think of a restricted holiday as an optional working day that the government has pre-approved for leave. India has an incredibly diverse workforce, and the government simply cannot declare a national holiday for every regional festival without grinding operations to a halt.
The restricted holiday system is how it handles that: by giving employees a curated list of cultural and regional observances and letting them pick the ones that matter to them. Each employee gets a maximum of two restricted holidays per calendar year from the Central Government Restricted Holidays 2026 list.
In case of financial organisations like banks, restricted holidays are generally not mandatory closing days for banks, meaning most banks remain open and fully operational. These are optional days for employees to choose, whereas bank closures are primarily governed by Gazetted holidays, 2nd/4th Saturdays, and Sundays.
You apply for them in advance, and your employer approves them based on operational requirements and team staffing levels.
State-wise Restricted Holidays 2026
Here is a complete and consolidated list of all official restricted holidays across India for 2026, as notified by the Department of Personnel and Training. Use this to identify the dates that apply to your cultural preferences or regional location.
| Date | Day | Holiday Name |
Observing States / Regions
|
| 1st Jan | Thursday | New Year’s Day | Nationwide |
| 13th Jan | Tuesday | Lohri |
Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, HP, J&K
|
| 14th Jan | Wednesday | Makar Sankranti / Pongal |
TN, AP, TS, MH, GJ, KA, UP, Bihar
|
| 14th Feb | Saturday | Guru Ravidas Jayanti |
UP, MP, Punjab, Haryana, Delhi
|
| 19th Feb | Thursday | Shivaji Maharaj Jayanti | Maharashtra |
| 24th Feb | Tuesday | Swami Dayanand Saraswati Jayanti | Northern India |
| 2nd Mar | Monday | Holika Dahan |
Northern, Western & Central India
|
| 20th Mar | Friday | Gudi Padwa / Ugadi |
Maharashtra, Karnataka, AP, Telangana
|
| 5th Apr | Sunday | Easter Sunday | Nationwide |
| 14th Apr | Tuesday | Vaisakhi / Vishu |
Punjab, Haryana, Kerala
|
| 15th Apr | Wednesday | Poila Baisakh / Bohag Bihu |
West Bengal, Tripura, Assam
|
| 7th May | Thursday | Guru Rabindranath Jayanti |
West Bengal, Tripura
|
| 23rd Jun | Tuesday | Rath Yatra |
Odisha, Gujarat, Jharkhand
|
| 16th Aug | Sunday | Parsi New Year (Nauraj) |
Maharashtra, Gujarat
|
| 28th Aug | Friday | Onam |
Kerala, Lakshadweep
|
| 29th Aug | Saturday | Raksha Bandhan |
Northern, Western & Central India
|
| 14th Sep | Monday | Ganesh Chaturthi |
Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka, AP, TS
|
| 19th Oct | Monday | Dussehra (Maha Navami) |
Eastern India, UP, Bihar, Kerala
|
| 24th Oct | Saturday | Maharishi Valmiki Jayanti |
Northern & Central India
|
| 30th Oct | Friday | Karwa Chauth |
Punjab, Haryana, UP, Delhi, Rajasthan
|
| 9th Nov | Monday | Govardhan Puja |
Northern & Central India
|
| 10th Nov | Tuesday | Bhai Dooj |
Northern & Western India
|
| 15th Nov | Sunday | Chhath Puja |
Bihar, Jharkhand, UP, Delhi
|
| 24th Nov | Tuesday | Guru Teg Bahadur’s Martyrdom Day |
Punjab, Haryana, Delhi
|
| 24th Dec | Thursday | Christmas Eve | Nationwide |
| 31st Dec | Thursday | New Year’s Eve | Nationwide |
Suggested Read: Public Holidays In India 2026
Get Personal Loan Online Up to ₹15 Lakhs
By entering your number, you're agreeing to Terms & Conditions & Privacy Policy.
Gazetted vs. Restricted Holidays
These two categories are often lumped together in casual conversation, but they operate very differently and for HR teams and treasury managers, mixing them up can cause real operational headaches.
| Feature | Gazetted Holiday |
Restricted Holiday
|
| Mandatory status | Yes. Offices remain closed. |
No. Offices remain open.
|
| Employee choice | None. Applies to everyone. |
High. Employees pick two dates.
|
| Leave deduction | Does not deduct from leave balance. |
Deducts from the specific RH quota.
|
| Banking impact | Banks close nationwide. |
Banks remain open generally.
|
The short version: on a Gazetted holiday, the office is shut and nobody is debating it. On a restricted holiday, the office is open, and only the employees who’ve applied and been approved, are absent.
Also Read: Gazetted Holidays
Get Personal Loan Online Up to ₹15 Lakhs
By entering your number, you're agreeing to Terms & Conditions & Privacy Policy.
The “Use It or Lose It” Rule
Here’s something a lot of employees find out too late: restricted holidays don’t carry forward. Your Earned Leaves accumulate over time and can be carried into the next financial year. Restricted holidays work completely differently. If you don’t use your two optional leaves before December 31, they lapse permanently. You cannot encash them during a final settlement or at the time of resignation. They simply disappear.
This is why it’s worth planning your restricted holidays at the start of the year rather than scrambling in December when everyone else is doing the same thing.
Also Read: Central Government Holidays 2026
How Restricted Holidays Affect Banking and Payroll
This is where things get a little more nuanced, and it’s worth understanding if you work in corporate finance or manage payroll for a team spread across states. A restricted holiday at the central level might simultaneously be a mandatory public holiday in a specific state, notified by the state government under the Negotiable Instruments (NI) Act. That regional overlap has real consequences for payment processing. The Cheque Truncation System operates on regional clearing grids.
Take Pongal as an example. Centrally, it’s a restricted holiday — banks generally stay open. But in the southern clearing grid, it’s a mandatory bank holiday. If you’re routing a vendor payment through an SBI branch in Tamil Nadu during Pongal, the local clearing cell pauses operations, and the final credit to your vendor can be delayed by up to 48 hours. Advance scheduling isn’t optional in these cases; it’s just good practice.
Payroll systems handle restricted holidays as standard working days by default. The system only registers a leave against the employee’s RH quota when they’ve formally applied and been approved. This means HR managers need to actively audit RH balances in November, not December. A wave of last-minute leave applications in the final weeks of the year creates unnecessary pressure during year-end closing and some of those applications will inevitably get rejected because approvals are capped to maintain business continuity.
A Strategic Leave Planning f0r 2026
Here’s the part most employees skip, and it’s actually the most useful bit. You can stretch two restricted holidays into significantly longer breaks by pairing them with existing weekends and Gazetted holidays. The 2026 calendar has some genuinely good opportunities for this.
The January Hack: New Year’s Day falls on a Thursday. Take your restricted holiday on January 1 and an Earned Leave on Friday, January 2, and you start the year with a four-day weekend.
The March Hack: Gudi Padwa falls on Friday, March 20. Apply your restricted holiday here and you get an instant three-day weekend with no Earned Leave spent.
The September Hack: Ganesh Chaturthi falls on Monday, September 14. Using a restricted holiday on this date creates a seamless Saturday-to-Monday break.
The October Hack: This is the best one in 2026. Maha Navami falls on Monday, October 19, and Dussehra is a Gazetted holiday on Tuesday, October 20. Use your restricted holiday on Monday, and you unlock a four-day weekend from Saturday to Tuesday, at the cost of just one RH and no Earned Leave at all.
Also Read: Indian Holiday Calendar 2026
Final Planning Steps
Map out your restricted holidays at the beginning of the financial year, not in Q4 when everyone is scrambling. Go through the 2026 master list, identify the two dates that matter most to you — whether by cultural relevance, regional significance, or strategic placement near a long weekend — and submit your requests early.
Employers regularly cap the number of people who can take a restricted holiday on the same date to keep operations running. Early applications get approved. Late ones, especially in November and December, often don’t, and that means your two optional leaves lapse with nothing to show for them.
Two days doesn’t sound like much, but used well, they can quietly become some of the best time off you take all year.
Download the Buddy Loan App Now!
One solution to each of your financial needs at your fingertip.
Scan to download now
