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How to Find Dates of Public Holidays using Excel

Last updated on December 24, 2009

Chandoo

Lets celebrate these holidays in PHD Style. By learning few excel formulas that you can use to find out dates for some of the popular public holidays like – labor day, memorial day etc.

When is Labor Day (US) in 2010?

Labor day (the US variant) is celebrated on first Monday of every September. It occurs on Sep 6th in 2010.

Using excel date formulas, you can easily find out the labor day’s date for any given year.

Here is the formula I have used:

=DATE(2010,9,CHOOSE(WEEKDAY(DATE(2010,9,1)),2,1,7,6,5,4,3))

How this formula works?

The formula finds the weekday of first of September (WEEKDAY(DATE(2010,9,1))) and then uses this information to return one of the possible dates for first Monday.

You can use similar logic to find dates for other holidays like Thanksgiving day (both US and Canada), Memorial Day and Martin Luther King Day.

Is there a long weekend for New Years Day in 2011?

You can use excel to answer questions like whether there will be a long weekend for a given holiday. A long weekend occurs when the holiday is on either Thursday or Monday. So for example, you can check the long weekend condition for January 1st, 2011 like this:

=IF(OR(WEEKDAY(DATE(2011,1,1))=6,WEEKDAY(DATE(2011,1,1))=2),”Long weekend”,”No long weekend”)

How this formula works?

That is your homework. Go figure!

Download Example Worksheet and Learn by Playing with the Formulas

I have prepared a simple worksheet with 8 examples to calculate the dates for Thanksgiving dates, New years Day of Week, Martin Luther King Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Indian variants of Independence and Republic Days. Go ahead and download the example workbook and play with it.