Remote workers and public holidays across time zones are a genuinely confusing combination. Your company is headquartered in London, you live in Lahore, your teammate is in Toronto — and today is a holiday in exactly one of those places. Do you work? Does anyone? Welcome to the modern puzzle of distributed teams and mismatched calendars.
Whose holiday counts?
There is no universal rule, which is why this causes so much confusion. In practice, most remote employers follow one of three models:
- Company-location model: Everyone observes the holidays of the country where the company is based, regardless of where individuals live. Simple, but it can feel odd celebrating another country’s holidays.
- Employee-location model: Each person observes the public holidays of the country they live in. Fairer individually, but the team is rarely all off at once.
- Hybrid or flexible model: A core set of shared holidays plus a number of floating days each person can allocate to their own country’s observances.
None of these is legally mandated in most cases — it is a policy choice. The problems start when the policy is unwritten and everyone assumes a different model.
The time-zone twist
Time zones add a second layer of complexity. A public holiday in Australia begins while it is still the previous working day in the Americas. For a few hours each day, one part of a distributed team is on holiday while another is mid-shift. Handoffs, deadlines and meetings scheduled across that boundary need care: the Sydney colleague’s Tuesday holiday is the New York colleague’s Monday evening.
Smart teams handle this with shared calendars that show every team member’s local holidays, clear handoff notes before holiday absences, and a norm of checking the calendar before scheduling across borders. The technology is trivial; the discipline is what matters.
What remote workers should clarify
- Which country’s holidays do I observe? Get the answer in writing during onboarding.
- How many days is that, exactly? Holiday counts vary enormously — from around 8 in the UK to nearly 20 in some countries.
- What happens on my local holidays? If the company does not observe them, can you use annual leave or floating days?
- Who covers urgent work? Agree on-call expectations for days when part of the team is away.
The upside nobody mentions
There is a genuine perk hidden in the confusion: remote workers in holiday-rich countries sometimes end up with more total days off than their colleagues, and nobody minds because everyone chose their location. The employee-location model, for all its complexity, is arguably the fairest — you get the holidays of the place you actually live, which are the ones that matter to your daily life.
Public holidays for remote workers work fine once the policy is explicit. If yours is not, ask the question now — preferably before the next mismatched holiday strands a deadline between time zones.
Finally, remember that public holidays affect support functions too: if your company’s payroll or IT team is on holiday, plan around their absence as well as your own.
Planning tips
A good habit is to review the holiday list at the start of each quarter, mark the dates that affect your work or family plans, and note any bridge days where taking one extra day creates a long weekend. Remember that rules for pay, closures and observances differ by country, region and employer.
Use this guide as a starting point, compare it with the official source for your location and check again closer to the date, since announcements and local arrangements can change. Sharing the dates early with family, colleagues and customers also avoids last-minute surprises.