Public holiday

Cloud Plugin

Configure public holidays for your employees with working contracts.

Public holidays can be edited at Administration > Public holidays.

Public holidays can are considered in employee working time calculations:

If a public holiday falls on a weekday that is a regular working day for the employee, their expected working hours for that day are fulfilled automatically
Any timesheet entries recorded on a public holiday are counted as overtime

Public holiday groups

Public holiday groups help manage location-specific holidays for organizations with employees in different regions.

Default group

The ‘Standard’ group is shown by default in the public holiday administration. This group applies to all employees without a specific group assignment.

Multiple locations

For organizations with employees in different locations:

Create location-specific groups using the Create button
Assign the relevant public holidays to each group

Managing public holidays

Select your desired group from the dropdown menu. If you have a single location, use the ‘Standard’ group.

Creating holidays

You have two options to add public holidays to the selected year:

The button for adding single holidays.

The button for bulk importing pre-defined holidays.

Import feature

The import dialog provides a worldwide location database.

Names of public holidays are not translated: switch Kimai to the language that you want to import
Search for your country: the database uses all names in English, do you would type germany instead of Deutschland to find it
Search for the region: e.g. NorthRhineWestphalia (not Nordrhein-Westfalen)
Review and import all holidays for the selected region

The imported data has been calculated automatically, is not subject to any liability and needs to be verified after import.

Import provider

The data source used by the import dialog is selected with the Public holidays setting in System → Settings.

Yasumi — the default & recommended option. The holidays are calculated inside your Kimai installation, no external service is contacted. Yasumi offers countries as well as regions, so you can import the holidays of a single federal state or province.
Google — only recommended if Yasumi does not return any results for your country. Google offers countries only, there are no regions to choose from. The holidays are downloaded from public Google calendars, which means your server needs to be able to reach www.google.com.

Changing the provider does not touch the public holidays that were already imported. The setting only affects the next import.

Editing public holidays

By editing single public holidays you can:

Change full-day to half-day or vice-versa
Delete unwanted holidays
Add new custom holidays

Permissions

Name	Description
`edit_public_holidays`	Grant access to the `Public holidays` page to configure and import public holidays at `Administration > Public holidays`

Read how to assign these permissions to your user roles in the permission documentation.

FAQ Admins

If you see an error message like this you are missing the OS library tzdata-legacy:

Failed importing public holidays for year 2026 with: DateTimeZone::__construct(): Unknown or bad timezone (Australia/West)

The error will be fixed in the future without that step, but for now you need to install it e.g. with apt install tzdata-legacy.

Absence – Managing absences
Working times – Contract management and working times