Make your annual leave go further
Find the best days to book off by combining annual leave, weekends and public holidays.
Best leave combinations
Browse country guides
Our featured 2027 guides show dated calculations, holiday inputs and local caveats. The wider directory keeps other supported destinations available.
What does “maximizing leave” mean?
Choose a country, your state or region, a planning year, the leave days you can book, your preferred trip length and your workweek pattern (standard Monday–Friday, 4-day Monday–Thursday, Sunday–Thursday or Tuesday–Saturday). The planner counts each ordinary working day in your selected workweek as leave, then bridges those workdays across your scheduled weekly rest days and the selected calendar’s public holidays.
Your results are presented in two distinct modes: Mode 1 (Combined full-year schedule) uses dynamic programming to assemble a non-overlapping annual plan within your leave budget, while Mode 2 (Individual break alternatives) ranks standalone single breaks by efficiency multiplier (consecutive days off divided by leave days booked).
A real example: Ireland, 2027
4 leave days → 9 consecutive days off (2.25× multiplier)
Book 30 March–2 April 2027 (Tuesday–Friday). With Easter Monday on 29 March 2027 and the weekends of 27–28 March and 3–4 April, your break runs 27 March–4 April 2027 (return to work: Monday 5 April 2027).
9 days = 4 leave days + 1 workday public holiday + 4 weekend days. Good Friday is not assumed off in Ireland because it is not a statutory public holiday. See Ireland’s 2027 dates and local rules.
Open this 4-day Ireland example in the planner →Start with a worked 2027 country guide
Regional & sub-national 2027 calendars
Public holidays differ by nation, state, province or Land in the UK, Germany, Australia, Canada and the US. Open a regional calendar directly:
Statutory leave vs. public holidays, bank closures & replacement days
Statutory annual leave is your legal minimum paid vacation entitlement (for example 25 workdays in Denmark, France, Sweden and Austria, or 20 workdays in Germany, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands). Public holidays are calendar dates set by law or collective agreement, which are distinct from bank closure days (such as 5 June or 24 December in Denmark) and employer-specific or collective-agreement days (such as French RTT, Danish feriefridage or Swedish klämdagar).
Where a country’s law requires an employer-assigned replacement day when a public holiday falls on a rest day (such as in Belgium) or when you switch to a non-Monday–Friday workweek where a holiday falls on your scheduled rest day, the planner does not silently invent a substitute date—check your contract and adjust your booking accordingly.
How the ranking, workweek maths and annual schedules work · Official sources & dataset notes