School Holiday Zones: Which One Applies to You

Which zone is my city in — the question behind most of these searches

Zones follow the académie, not the region or the department, and the mapping surprises people. Zone A holds eight académies — Besançon, Bordeaux, Clermont-Ferrand, Dijon, Grenoble, Limoges, Lyon and Poitiers. Zone B holds eleven: Aix-Marseille, Amiens, Lille, Nancy-Metz, Nantes, Nice, Normandie, Orléans-Tours, Reims, Rennes and Strasbourg. Zone C holds only five — Créteil, Montpellier, Paris, Toulouse and Versailles — but they include the whole Paris region, which is why zone C is by far the largest by pupil numbers and the smallest by académie count.

Toulouse is the case that trips everyone up: geographically in the south-west, next door to zone A's Bordeaux, but administratively in zone C alongside Paris. Corsica has its own zone and the six overseas académies each have their own calendar, with rhythms that follow the local climate rather than the metropolitan one — Réunion breaks in October for its first-period holidays while metropolitan France is at the Toussaint, and French Polynesia has a September break that no metropolitan zone shares.

Germany runs the same idea five times harder

The German summer break is staggered across all sixteen Länder by a rolling agreement of the Kultusministerkonferenz, and the spread is far wider than the French one. In 2027 the earliest Land to break up is Hesse on 28 June and the latest is Bavaria on 2 August: thirty-five days between the first bell and the last. The rota moves each year, so a family that was early one summer is late the next, and no Land is permanently favoured.

Portugal splits its calendar a different way again: not by region but by school level. The 2026 summer break opens on 6 June for pupils in the ninth, eleventh and twelfth years, on 13 June for the fifth to eighth and the tenth, and on 1 July for pre-school and the first four years — three dates published as three separate rows, which is exactly how the ministry publishes them and exactly how they are shown rather than being flattened into one summer.

A decree is not a rule, so the calendar shows its own expiry date

Public holidays can be computed for the year 2100 because they follow rules. School holidays cannot: a ministry picks the dates, publishes them two or three years ahead, and sometimes moves them. There is nothing to calculate, only something to import — and an import expires. The page therefore leads with two dates it would be easier to hide: when the snapshot was taken and how far forward it reaches. The current copy was taken on 27 August 2026 and carries 909 periods running to 10 September 2029.

Seven countries have a single authority publishing machine-readable dates and are covered: France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg and Portugal. The rest are not, and choosing one of them says so and says why rather than showing an empty list that reads like a bug. Spain sets the calendar per autonomous community, the United States per school district — and there are around thirteen thousand of those. An empty answer with a reason is more useful than a confident answer with no source.

Frequently asked questions

Do the three French zones get the same amount of holiday?

Yes. In 2026-27 each of zones A, B and C gets 66 days spread over the same six periods; only the February and April dates differ. The zones exist to stagger road and resort traffic, not to give any region more time off. If a zone ever appeared to get more, that would be a data error rather than a policy.

Are the dates in the calendar official?

They are a dated copy of official data, which is not the same thing. The French rows come straight from the education ministry's open data; the German, Austrian, Swiss, Belgian, Luxembourgish and Portuguese rows come from an aggregator of official calendars. Both can be superseded by a decree published after the snapshot was taken. Check with the school before booking anything that cannot be changed — the calendar says as much on the page itself.

Why is there no Spanish or Italian school calendar?

Because there is no single authority publishing one. Spain devolves the school calendar to its seventeen autonomous communities, each of which issues its own order, and Italy does the same by region with further latitude for individual schools. Aggregating twenty or so regional decrees by hand would produce a table that looks authoritative and goes stale invisibly — the opposite of what a reference page should do. Until a machine-readable official feed exists, the honest answer is to name the authority you need to ask.