St Patrick's Day 2027

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

St Patrick's Day on 17 March is a bank holiday in Northern Ireland and in no other part of the United Kingdom. In England, Wales and Scotland it is an ordinary working day, which surprises a good many people, since it is marked in pubs and parades from Liverpool to Glasgow and searched for as though the whole country had the day off. The holiday follows the island rather than the mainland: it is also a public holiday in the Republic of Ireland, which is why the two jurisdictions on the island close on the same date.

The date is the traditional day of Patrick's death, placed by most accounts in the second half of the fifth century. He was a Romano-British teenager taken to Ireland as a captive, and returned later as a missionary bishop. The two objects that stuck to him — the shamrock used to explain the Trinity and the snakes he is said to have banished — are later embroidery rather than anything he wrote about himself.

Where the day is kept

Downpatrick in County Down, where Patrick is traditionally held to be buried, holds a cross-community parade and a service at the cathedral. Armagh, the ecclesiastical capital of Ireland, has processions attached to both of its cathedrals bearing his name. Belfast runs a city-centre parade and concert. The green colour, the shamrock in the buttonhole and the illuminated landmarks that now appear worldwide all trace back to the Irish diaspora rather than to the rural festival of a century ago.

Practical effect

In Northern Ireland, schools, banks, courts and council offices close, and the usual substitute day rule applies: if 17 March falls on a Saturday or Sunday, the following Monday becomes the bank holiday in its place. Shops mostly open. Elsewhere in the UK nothing closes at all — banks trade normally, payments clear normally, and anyone waiting on a document from a Belfast office rather than a Birmingham one is the only person who notices.

That split is why the working-day calculator on this site treats the date as regional. It is shown in the calendar and it is excluded when you count against Northern Ireland, but a UK-wide count keeps it, because for most of the country it is a working Wednesday like any other.