Spring bank holiday 2027

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

The spring bank holiday is the last Monday in May and applies throughout the United Kingdom. It exists because of an earlier tidying-up exercise: until the 1960s the holiday was Whit Monday, the day after Pentecost, which moved with Easter and could land anywhere from mid-May to mid-June. Businesses disliked the unpredictability, a fixed late-May Monday was trialled from 1965, and the Banking and Financial Dealings Act 1971 made the arrangement permanent. The religious holiday has effectively been replaced by a secular one that happens to sit near it.

The last-Monday rule places the date between 25 and 31 May. It is always a Monday, so no substitute day is ever required, and it lines up in most of the country with the school half-term week — which is why it is the busiest week of the year for domestic holiday lets and the second busiest for cross-Channel traffic.

When royalty gets in the way

This is the holiday the state borrows when it needs one. In 2002, 2012 and 2022 the spring bank holiday was lifted out of May and set down in early June alongside an additional one-off holiday, so that the country had a four-day weekend for the Queen's golden, diamond and platinum jubilees. Each move was made by royal proclamation. Nothing similar has ever been done to the early May or August holidays, which makes the late-May Monday the least reliable British date to hard-code into a scheduling system.

What the day looks like

Late May weather is good enough for the outdoor calendar to be crowded. The Hay Festival runs over the week in Powys, the Chelsea Flower Show sits just before it, and on Cooper's Hill outside Gloucester competitors throw themselves down a one-in-two slope after a wheel of Double Gloucester cheese. Shops open, transport runs a reduced timetable, and the roads towards Devon, Cornwall and the Lake District do what they always do.

The day leaves the working-day count in all four nations. In practice, budget and reporting deadlines set for the end of May are the ones that trip people up, since a month-end falling on the last Monday is not a working day anywhere in the country.