Public holidays in Bermuda

This is a list of regular named Holidays in Bermuda. Every Sunday is also considered a holiday.

There are exceptional Holidays from time to time. E.g. the 8th of May 2023 was such a public holiday to commemorate the King's Coronation.

Nature of Public Holidays
The official list of Public Holidays was set out in 1947 in the Public Holidays Act. Since the Act has been amended a number of times including in 2009 to move the National Heroes Day from October to June to replace the Queen's Official Holiday and the replacement of Somers' Day with Mary Prince Day in 2020.

Emancipation Day and Mary Prince Day (formerly Cup Match Day and Somers' Day) which last two days, are know together be known as Cup Match, during which a intra-island cricket game is played between the Somerset Cricket Club in the east of the island and St. George's Cricket Club in the west. The Cup Match was created to celebrate and commemorate the emancipation of enslaved people in Bermuda and has taken place since at least 1902.

Public holidays featured nearly a complete shut-down of Bermuda, with all public offices and stores closed. Not only was the sale of goods on public holidays made illegal, but offering items for sale and even allowing customers into a store constituted an offense. Hotel restaurants, pharmacies and stores that had been granted special licenses by the government were exempted from this.

In March 2005, the Bermuda government passed a major amendment to the Act that allowed stores to finally open. It required that employers give their staff at least seven days (written) notice of a need for their service; it also required that employers inform those employees of their right to refuse, and prohibited any sort of disciplinary action or dismissal for employees who did refuse.