🇬🇧 GOV.UK Bank Holidays Scraper

🚀 Export the official UK bank holiday calendar in seconds. Pull every past and upcoming holiday for England & Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland from the canonical gov.uk feed. No API key, no registration, no manual calendar wrangling.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-22 · 📊 9 fields per record · 🇬🇧 3 divisions · 📅 15+ years coverage · 🎏 50+ holidays per division

The GOV.UK Bank Holidays Scraper exports the canonical UK public-holiday calendar published by the Government Digital Service and returns 9 fields per record, including title, ISO date, year, weekday, division, notes, bunting flag, substitute-day flag, and the scrape timestamp. The underlying feed is the authoritative reference for UK payroll, banking, scheduling, and HR systems.

The dataset covers England & Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland separately, with each division carrying its own statutory calendar. Past holidays and several years of upcoming dates are returned in a single run, ready for downstream payroll, scheduling, or compliance pipelines. This Actor turns the calendar into downloadable CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML in under a minute.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
UK payroll and HR teams, fintech and banking ops, scheduling and rota apps, logistics and delivery platforms, retail and hospitality	Payroll calculations, working-day calendars, settlement-date logic, courier SLAs, store-opening rosters, holiday-aware booking flows

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📋 What the GOV.UK Bank Holidays Scraper does

Three filtering workflows in a single run:

• 🇬🇧 All divisions. Pull every holiday across England & Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.
• 🏴 Single division. Restrict to one nation, useful for region-specific payroll or scheduling logic.
• 📅 Year window. Limit to a date range, for example just the upcoming three years or a historical lookback.

Each record includes the official holiday title, the ISO date, the year extracted from the date, the weekday name, the division code (england-and-wales, scotland, northern-ireland), the human-friendly division label, any notes (such as substitute-day notices), the bunting flag indicating whether bunting is traditionally displayed, the substitute-day flag derived from the notes, and the scrape timestamp.

💡 Why it matters: UK payroll, banking, and scheduling pipelines all depend on the canonical bank-holiday calendar. Building your own feed parser means handling JSON updates, division-specific differences, and substitute days. This Actor skips all of that and refreshes on every run.

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🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon: a 3-minute walkthrough showing how to go from sign-up to a downloaded dataset.

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⚙️ Input

Input	Type	Default	Behavior
maxItems	integer	10	Records to return. Free plan caps at 10, paid plan at 1,000,000.
division	string	"all-divisions"	One of all-divisions, england-and-wales, scotland, northern-ireland.
yearFrom	integer	null	Earliest holiday year (inclusive). Empty = all available.
yearTo	integer	null	Latest holiday year (inclusive).

Example: every upcoming holiday for England & Wales through 2028.

{
    "maxItems": 100,
    "division": "england-and-wales",
    "yearFrom": 2026,
    "yearTo": 2028
}

Example: every Scottish bank holiday in 2026.

{
    "maxItems": 20,
    "division": "scotland",
    "yearFrom": 2026,
    "yearTo": 2026
}

⚠️ Good to Know: the feed publishes a rolling window of past and upcoming holidays. For long-range planning, run this Actor weekly or monthly so new years and any substitute-day changes show up in your downstream calendar.

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📊 Output

Each holiday record contains 9 fields. Download the dataset as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

🧾 Schema

Field	Type	Example
🎏 title	string	"Christmas Day"
📅 date	string (YYYY-MM-DD)	"2026-12-25"
📆 year	number	2026
🗓️ weekday	string	"Friday"
🏴 division	string	"england-and-wales"
🇬🇧 divisionLabel	string	"England & Wales"
📝 notes	string | null	"Substitute day"
🎉 bunting	boolean	true
🔁 isSubstituteDay	boolean	false
🕒 scrapedAt	ISO 8601	"2026-05-22T10:00:00.000Z"

📦 Sample records

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✨ Why choose this Actor

	Capability
🇬🇧	Canonical source. Pulls direct from the gov.uk bank-holiday feed published by the Government Digital Service.
🏴	Per-division. England & Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland each carry their own statutory calendar.
📅	Past and future. Multiple years of historical and upcoming holidays in a single run.
⚡	Fast. Full dataset in under 10 seconds.
🔁	Substitute-day flag. The Actor flags substitute weekday holidays so payroll logic stays correct.
🔁	Always fresh. Each run pulls the latest feed, so the dataset reflects any recent calendar updates.
🚫	No authentication. Works against the public gov.uk feed. No login or API key needed.

📊 An accurate bank-holiday calendar is the backbone of UK payroll runs, banking settlement, courier SLAs, and store rosters.

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	Coverage	Refresh	Setup
⭐ GOV.UK Bank Holidays Scraper (this Actor)	$5 free credit, then pay-per-use	3 divisions, 15+ years	Live per run	⚡ 2 min
Hard-coded calendar in your codebase	Free	Stale within a year	Manual	🐢 Tech debt
In-house gov.uk feed parser	Free + engineering	Full	Build it yourself	🛠️ Hours
Commercial holiday APIs	$9+/month	Global	Daily	⏳ Hours

Pick this Actor when you want a canonical UK calendar with zero parser maintenance and zero per-API-call billing.

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🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the GOV.UK Bank Holidays Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Pick a division (or all) and optionally set a year range. Set maxItems.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💼 Business use cases

💼 Payroll & HR Working-day calendars for monthly payroll Pro-rata pay calculations for new starters Holiday-aware time-off accrual logic Bank-holiday overtime rate tables	🏦 Banking & Fintech BACS and CHAPS settlement-date logic Direct-debit calendar checks Trade-date and value-date calculators Card-network business-day handling
🚚 Logistics & Delivery Courier SLA business-day logic Warehouse rota planning Customer ETA calculators Cross-border delivery cutoffs	🛍️ Retail & Hospitality Store-opening hour overrides Seasonal staffing forecasts Promotion timing aligned to long weekends Booking-flow availability calendars

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🔌 Automating GOV.UK Bank Holidays Scraper

Control the scraper programmatically for scheduled runs and pipeline integrations:

• 🟢 Node.js. Install the apify-client NPM package.
• 🐍 Python. Use the apify-client PyPI package.
• 📚 See the Apify API documentation for full details.

The Apify Schedules feature lets you trigger this Actor on any cron interval. Weekly or monthly pulls keep downstream payroll and scheduling calendars in sync automatically.

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

UK calendar data powers more than enterprise workflows. The same structured records support research, education, civic projects, and personal initiatives.

🎓 Research and academia Labour economics studies on long-weekend effects Public administration coursework on UK policy Historical patterns of statutory holiday changes Reproducible datasets cited in papers	🎨 Personal and creative Personal calendars and reminder apps Travel planning tools for UK trips "Days off in 2026" content for creators Hobbyist scheduling experiments
🤝 Non-profit and civic Community event scheduling tools Volunteer rota apps with holiday awareness Local-council operations support Civic literacy and government-transparency datasets	🧪 Experimentation Test working-day libraries against real data Prototype agents that compute deadlines Build calendar chrome extensions Validate scheduling product logic with real holidays

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🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Open a ready-to-send prompt about this ParseForge actor in the AI of your choice:

• 💬 ChatGPT
• 🧠 Claude
• 🔍 Perplexity
• 🅒 Copilot

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🧩 How does it work?

Pick a division, optionally set a year range, click Start, and the Actor reads the canonical gov.uk bank-holiday feed and emits a clean structured record per holiday. No browser automation, no captchas, no setup.

📏 How accurate is the data?

The Actor pulls direct from the canonical gov.uk feed published by the Government Digital Service. The feed is the same source banks, payroll providers, and major UK platforms rely on.

🔁 How often is the dataset refreshed?

The feed updates when new years are published and when substitute days are added. Every run of this Actor pulls the live feed, so your dataset reflects the latest official calendar.

🏴 Why are there separate divisions?

Each UK constituent nation has its own statutory bank-holiday calendar. Scotland and Northern Ireland include holidays not observed in England & Wales (St Andrew's Day, Battle of the Boyne). Filter by division to match your payroll or scheduling region.

⏰ Can I schedule regular runs?

Yes. Use Apify Schedules to run this Actor on any cron interval (weekly, monthly) and keep your downstream calendar in sync.

⚖️ Is this data legal to use?

The feed is published under the UK Open Government Licence (OGL v3.0), which permits commercial and non-commercial reuse with attribution.

💼 Can I use this data commercially?

Yes. The Open Government Licence permits commercial use with attribution. You are responsible for the attribution requirements in your downstream product.

💳 Do I need a paid Apify plan to use this Actor?

No. The free Apify plan is enough for testing and small runs (10 records per run). A paid plan lifts the limit and gives you access to scheduling, higher concurrency, and larger datasets.

🔁 What if a new substitute day is added mid-year?

The Actor re-reads the feed on every run, so substitute-day updates appear automatically. Schedule a monthly refresh and downstream calendars stay accurate.

🌍 Does it include holidays for other countries?

This Actor covers the UK only. For other national calendars, reach out via the contact form below to request a companion scraper.

🆘 What if I need help?

Our support team is here to help. Contact us through the Apify platform or use the Tally form linked below.

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🔌 Integrate with any app

GOV.UK Bank Holidays Scraper connects to any cloud service via Apify integrations:

• Make - Automate multi-step workflows
• Zapier - Connect with 5,000+ apps
• Slack - Get run notifications in your channels
• Airbyte - Pipe holiday data into your warehouse
• GitHub - Trigger runs from commits and releases
• Google Drive - Export datasets straight to Sheets

You can also use webhooks to trigger downstream actions when a run finishes. Push fresh holiday data into your payroll system, or alert your team in Slack.

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more reference-data scrapers.

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🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form to request a new scraper, propose a custom data project, or report an issue.

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⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the UK Government, GOV.UK, or the Government Digital Service. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available open calendar data is collected.