School Holidays & Term Dates API: UK, Australia, Malaysia

What does School Holidays & Term Dates API do?

School Holidays & Term Dates API gives you school term dates, half terms and school holidays for UK councils, Australian states and Malaysian states as clean, consistent JSON. Every record links to the official government page, PDF or calendar feed it comes from and carries a lastVerified date, so you can show it to customers and trust it. Each source is checked every week, and changes are reviewed before they are published.

Use it in Apify Console with no code, or as a school holidays API from your own website, app, spreadsheet or pricing engine.

Why use School Holidays & Term Dates API?

Every council, state and ministry publishes its school calendar differently: HTML tables, PDFs, calendar feeds, six-term or four-term years, Malay-language tables. Collecting them by hand every year is slow and error-prone. This Actor does it for you:

• 📅 One format for every country: terms, half terms and holidays with ISO dates, the school year, the number of days and the name of each period.
• 🔗 Source on every record: sourceUrl, sourceName, licence and lastVerified for each date range.
• ✅ Checked, not just scraped: dates are extracted twice and compared, weekday names are checked against the dates, and every change is reviewed before it goes live.
• 🧭 Region names you already use: "East Sussex County Council", GB-ESX, "NSW" or "Penang" all work.
• 🏦 Bank holidays included on request: UK bank holidays for England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, mapped onto the same school years.
• 🤖 Apify platform features: run it on a schedule, call it by API, or send the results to Google Sheets, Slack, Make or Zapier with integrations.

Who uses it: travel and holiday companies (school holiday demand and pricing), childcare, holiday clubs and activity camps, family and education apps, HR and workforce planners, and marketers timing back-to-school campaigns.

Which countries and regions are covered?

Country	Regions
🇬🇧 United Kingdom (GB)	England: Buckinghamshire, Bracknell Forest, East Sussex, Milton Keynes, Staffordshire, Wolverhampton. Wales: Merthyr Tydfil, Monmouthshire. Scotland: Falkirk, Renfrewshire. Northern Ireland (school holidays only).
🇦🇺 Australia (AU)	New South Wales (Eastern and Western divisions), Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, Tasmania.
🇲🇾 Malaysia (MY)	All 13 states and 3 federal territories (Kumpulan A and Kumpulan B calendars, with the Kedah and Sarawak variations).

More UK councils will be added. Only sources whose terms allow reuse are included. Every UK source is published under the Open Government Licence, and every Australian source under CC BY 4.0.

What data does School Holidays & Term Dates API return?

Field	Description
country	GB, AU or MY.
region	Council, state or territory name.
regionCode	Stable code, ISO 3166-2 where one exists (GB-ESX, AU-NSW, MY-10).
schoolYear	2026/27 in the UK, 2026 in Australia and Malaysia.
type	term, half_term, holiday or public_holiday.
name	Name of the period, e.g. "Autumn term", "October half term", "Christmas holiday".
start, end	First and last day, inclusive, YYYY-MM-DD.
days	Calendar days from start to end.
derived	true when the holiday was worked out from the term dates (the source lists only terms).
notes	Anything you should know, e.g. "Merged from Term 1 and Term 2".
scope	Which schools the dates apply to.
sourceName	Publisher of the official source.
sourceUrl	Official page, PDF or calendar feed.
licence	Licence of the source data.
lastVerified	Last day the source was checked and still matched these dates.

How to get school term dates with School Holidays & Term Dates API

1. Click Try for free and open the Input tab.
2. Choose the Country.
3. Add the councils or states you need under Regions, or leave it empty for all of them.
4. Optionally pick School years and Record types, and set Maximum results.
5. Click Start. Results appear in the Output tab within seconds; download them as JSON, CSV or Excel.

How much does it cost to get school holiday dates?

This Actor uses pay-per-event pricing: you pay $0.005 per record returned, plus a start fee of $0.00005 per run. There is no charge for compute time.

• One UK council for two school years is about 18 records: about $0.09.
• All six Australian regions for one school year is about 45 to 55 records: about $0.25.
• All 16 Malaysian states and territories for one year is about 160 to 190 records: about $0.80 to $0.95.
• Maximum results is a hard cap, and Apify also stops charging when your run reaches the maximum cost you set.
• Invalid input or unavailable data stops the run before any record is saved, so you pay no record fees. Records saved before an unexpected failure or an abort stay charged.

Apify's free plan includes monthly platform credit, which is enough for many runs.

Input

See the Input tab for every option. Example input:

{
    "country": "GB",
    "regions": ["East Sussex", "Falkirk"],
    "years": [2026, 2027],
    "types": ["term", "half_term", "holiday"],
    "includeDerived": true,
    "maxResults": 1000
}

• regions: names, codes or common short names. Words such as "Council", "County" and "City of" are ignored. A region that is not covered is reported in the run status and in the SUMMARY record; the others are still returned.
• years: the year each school year starts. In the UK 2026 means 2026/27; in Australia and Malaysia it means the 2026 school year. Leave it empty for the current school year, every later year already published, and holidays still running today.
• types: add public_holiday to get bank holidays too (UK only for now).

Output

You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV or Excel. Example results from the input above:

[
    {
        "country": "GB",
        "region": "East Sussex",
        "regionCode": "GB-ESX",
        "scope": "Community and voluntary-controlled schools. Academies, free and foundation schools may differ.",
        "schoolYear": "2026/27",
        "type": "term",
        "name": "Autumn term",
        "start": "2026-09-02",
        "end": "2026-12-18",
        "days": 108,
        "derived": false,
        "notes": "Merged from Term 1 (2 September to 23 October 2026) and Term 2 (2 November to 18 December 2026).",
        "sourceName": "East Sussex County Council",
        "sourceUrl": "https://www.eastsussex.gov.uk/education-learning/term-dates",
        "licence": "Open Government Licence v3.0",
        "lastVerified": "2026-10-12"
    },
    {
        "country": "GB",
        "region": "East Sussex",
        "regionCode": "GB-ESX",
        "scope": "Community and voluntary-controlled schools. Academies, free and foundation schools may differ.",
        "schoolYear": "2026/27",
        "type": "half_term",
        "name": "October half term",
        "start": "2026-10-24",
        "end": "2026-11-01",
        "days": 9,
        "derived": false,
        "notes": null,
        "sourceName": "East Sussex County Council",
        "sourceUrl": "https://www.eastsussex.gov.uk/education-learning/term-dates",
        "licence": "Open Government Licence v3.0",
        "lastVerified": "2026-10-12"
    }
]

The run also saves a SUMMARY record with the regions matched and not covered, the number of records matched and returned, and when the data was last checked.

Use School Holidays & Term Dates API as an API

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/messnomore~school-holidays-api/run-sync-get-dataset-items" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"country": "AU", "regions": ["NSW", "VIC"], "years": [2027]}'

See the API tab for clients in JavaScript and Python. You can also run it from AI assistants through the Apify MCP server.

Tips for better results

• Keep a copy of the results and re-run once a month or on a schedule: lastVerified shows when each source was last confirmed.
• Turn off Include derived holidays if you only want periods the publisher lists itself.
• Need several countries? Run the Actor once per country; each run takes a few seconds.

Related guides

• Is there an API for school term dates and school holidays?
• Free school term dates sample dataset on GitHub: 2026 NSW, Victoria and Queensland and 2026/27 Buckinghamshire, Staffordshire and Falkirk as JSON and CSV (CC BY 4.0 / OGL v3.0).

FAQ

Where do the dates come from, and how are they checked?

From the official publishers only: UK councils and the Northern Ireland Department of Education, the education departments of the Australian states, and Malaysia's Ministry of Education (KPM). The pages and PDFs are read with AI twice, independently, and each date range read from a document must come with a quote from it. Both readings are compared and checked automatically: valid dates, no overlapping terms, half terms inside terms, the expected number of terms per year, and weekday names that match the dates. Every change then waits for approval before it is published.

How fresh is the data?

Every source is checked weekly. lastVerified on each record is the last day its source was fetched and still matched the dates. New school years appear once the publisher releases them.

Which region names and codes can I use?

Names, codes and the short names in brackets all work, in any letter case:

• GB: Buckinghamshire GB-BKM (Bucks), Bracknell Forest GB-BRC (Bracknell), East Sussex GB-ESX, Milton Keynes GB-MIK (MK), Staffordshire GB-STS (Staffs), Wolverhampton GB-WLV, Merthyr Tydfil GB-MTY (Merthyr), Monmouthshire GB-MON (Sir Fynwy), Falkirk GB-FAL, Renfrewshire GB-RFW, Northern Ireland GB-NIR (NI).
• AU: New South Wales AU-NSW (NSW, Eastern division dates), New South Wales Western division AU-NSW-W (NSW Western), Victoria AU-VIC (VIC), Queensland AU-QLD (QLD), Western Australia AU-WA (WA), Tasmania AU-TAS (TAS).
• MY: Johor MY-01, Kedah MY-02, Kelantan MY-03, Melaka MY-04 (Malacca), Negeri Sembilan MY-05, Pahang MY-06, Pulau Pinang MY-07 (Penang), Perak MY-08, Perlis MY-09, Selangor MY-10, Terengganu MY-11, Sabah MY-12, Sarawak MY-13, Kuala Lumpur MY-14 (KL), Labuan MY-15, Putrajaya MY-16.

Why are some holidays marked derived?

Some publishers (for example Wolverhampton, Merthyr Tydfil, Monmouthshire, Victoria and Western Australia) list only term dates, or give only the first day of the summer holiday. The holidays between their terms are then worked out from the term dates, marked derived: true and given a note. Turn off Include derived holidays to leave them out.

Do the dates apply to every school?

They apply to the schools named in scope: in England, community and voluntary-controlled schools; academies, free and foundation schools may set their own dates. Training (INSET) days are set by each school and are not included. Northern Ireland publishes school holidays but not term dates, so only holidays are returned for it. Falkirk has four terms per school year, and the data keeps them as four.

Are public holidays included?

Add public_holiday to Record types to get UK bank holidays for England and Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland (from GOV.UK), mapped onto the school year of the region. Public holidays for Australia and Malaysia are not included yet. For Malaysia, the holiday records include the extra festive school holidays announced by KPM.

Why did I get fewer records than I expected?

A region may not be covered yet (it is listed in the run status and SUMMARY), the school year may not be published yet, or the run reached Maximum results or your maximum cost per run.

Can I use the data commercially?

The UK data is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0 and the Australian data under CC BY 4.0, both of which allow commercial use with attribution. Keep sourceName, sourceUrl and licence with the data and show an attribution such as "Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0". The Malaysian dates are factual dates from KPM's official academic calendar; credit KPM as the source.

Is my input stored or shared?

No. Your input is used only to filter the dates. Like every Apify run, it stays in your own run storage, which you can delete at any time.

I found wrong or missing data. What can I do?

Open the Issues tab and include the region and the date range. Requests for new councils, states or countries are welcome there too.