Easter Monday 2027

Type of holiday: bank holiday, a non-working day.

Easter Monday is a bank holiday in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and is not one in Scotland. That single asymmetry is probably the most commonly misread fact in the whole British calendar. South of the border the Friday-to-Monday sequence produces a four-day weekend; in Scotland the Monday is an ordinary working day, banks open, and the Easter break is a long weekend of three days rather than four. Scotland's compensation comes at the other end of the winter, in the shape of 2 January.

Unlike Good Friday, Easter Monday is written into the schedule of the Banking and Financial Dealings Act 1971 for England and Wales, so its standing is statutory rather than customary. It falls the day after Easter Sunday, which places it between 23 March and 26 April depending on the year, and because it is always a Monday no substitute day is ever needed.

How it is spent

The day has no liturgical weight to speak of and has settled into being an outdoors holiday. Egg rolling down a slope survives in a handful of places, most visibly at Avenham Park in Preston. Country shows, steam fairs and the first serious garden centre trade of the year fill the rest of it. The Football League traditionally schedules a full programme, giving the same clubs a Friday and a Monday fixture, and National Hunt racing runs Easter Monday cards at several small courses.

Getting about

Easter Monday reliably produces the heaviest leisure traffic of the spring on motorways heading back from the coast, and it is also the day rail engineering works are most likely to overrun into. Shops open on normal bank holiday hours; large stores are unrestricted, having been closed or restricted the day before on Easter Sunday.

For working-day counts this site treats Easter Monday as regional. It is deducted when you count against England, Wales or Northern Ireland, and kept when you count against Scotland or against a UK-wide default. If you are working to a deadline with a Scottish court, a Scottish local authority or a Scottish employer, assuming a shared four-day break is the error to guard against — their week has already started while yours has not.