Ghana public holidays 2026, and what they do to payroll and leave.
The dates as they stand in a live Factura holiday calendar, checked against the Ministry of the Interior's declarations. Below the table: how a holiday affects a leave application, and how the calendar works when your sites do not all close on the same days.
The 2026 calendar
Thirteen days. Eight of them fall on a Friday, which matters more for shift cover than for payroll.
| Date | Day | Holiday |
|---|---|---|
| 1 January | Thursday | New Year's Day |
| 9 January | Friday | Constitution Day — the statutory date is Wednesday 7 January; the President declared Friday 9 January as the day observed |
| 6 March | Friday | Independence Day |
| 20 March | Friday | Eid al-Fitr |
| 3 April | Friday | Good Friday |
| 6 April | Monday | Easter Monday |
| 1 May | Friday | May Day |
| 27 May | Wednesday | Eid al-Adha |
| 3 July | Friday | Republic Day — the statutory date is Wednesday 1 July; the President declared Friday 3 July as the day observed |
| 21 September | Monday | Founders' Day — restored to 21 September (the birthday of Dr Kwame Nkrumah) by the 2025 amendment; it falls on a Monday in 2026, so no substitute day was needed |
| 4 December | Friday | Farmers' Day — the first Friday in December |
| 25 December | Friday | Christmas Day |
| 28 December | Monday | Boxing Day, observed. 26 December falls on a Saturday in 2026 |
These are the rows in a live Factura holiday calendar for 2026, checked against the Ministry of the Interior's declarations. The calendar is maintained by the company that owns it, so check yours against the government's published list before you plan a year around it.
Founders' Day is 21 September, not 4 August. The Public Holidays and Commemorative Days (Amendment) Act, 2025 repealed the 4 August holiday, restored 21 September as Founders' Day and restored 1 July as Republic Day. The Ministry of the Interior declared Monday 21 September 2026 a public holiday. For the Eid al-Fitr holiday, Saturday 21 March was Shaqq Day and the President declared Monday 23 March as an additional holiday.
The observed date is the date in the calendar. Factura does not shift a holiday to the following Monday on its own — whoever maintains the calendar enters the day the business actually closes, as with Boxing Day above.
What a holiday does to payroll and leave
Less than people expect on the payroll side, and more than people expect on the leave side.
- Leave applications can skip public holidays.
- A holiday inside a leave range need not be counted against the employee's balance. In Factura this is a setting on the absence code, so annual leave can exclude public holidays while another category counts every calendar day.
- Half days are handled at the boundary.
- Where a leave request starts or ends on a half day, the day count checks whether that day is a holiday before deciding whether half a day comes off the balance.
- Pay for work on a public holiday follows your policy.
- The engine does not impose a holiday rate. If you pay a premium for holiday working, it is set up as a pay component with your own rule and computed in the run like any other earning.
- Monthly pay is unaffected by the count of holidays.
- A month with three public holidays pays the same basic as a month with none. Holidays reach payroll through attendance, overtime and leave, not through the salary itself.
Holiday calendars in Factura HRMS
One list is rarely enough. A head office, a factory and a site on a different shift pattern do not close on the same days.
- Calendars are named, and there can be severalEach holds its own list of dates, so a location or a group of employees can have its own set of closures.
- Each employee is assigned oneThe employee's calendar is what leave and attendance read, so the same leave request costs different balances for people on different calendars.
- Dates are entered with a start and an endA single day or a multi-day closure are the same thing to the system.
- Next year is set up before you need itThe 2026 dates above sit alongside 2025 in the same calendar. Leave applied for in December against a January date already knows the answer.
Leave, attendance and the holiday calendar are part of the same system as payroll, so a holiday you enter once is the same holiday the leave balance and the pay run see. If that is the part you want to look at, the Factura HRMS page walks through leave, attendance and a full pay run end to end.
See a real pay run, end to end
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