Bavaria's School Holidays Aren't Public Holidays, and Mixing Them Up Costs You Planning Time

The Official Rule

Assuming Bavaria’s school holiday calendar and its public holiday calendar are the same list, or close enough, is a genuinely easy mistake, and one that can throw off actual family planning if you’re not careful about which calendar you’re checking.

Bavaria’s school holidays and its public holidays are set separately, under different legal frameworks entirely. Bavaria’s own State Ministry for Education and Culture publishes the Ferienordnung, the binding school holiday schedule, as its own distinct calendar, separate from Bavaria’s gesetzliche Feiertage, statutory public holidays, which follow their own separate legal basis. Both involve days without school, which is exactly why they’re easy to confuse, but they’re genuinely two different calendars worth checking independently.

For the 2026/2027 school year specifically, the dates are already confirmed and published. muenchen.de’s official calendar overview and kalenderpedia.de’s calendar reference both confirm these five holiday periods, running from the Christmas break through summer, the full academic year’s school-free stretches are all known well in advance.

These dates aren’t released on short notice, Bavaria actually plans years ahead and publishes everything at once. The Bekanntmachung, official announcement, of the Bavarian Kultusministerium covering the Ferienordnung and school-free Saturdays for the 2024/2025 through 2029/2030 school years was published all at once on December 21, 2022, meaning families who know to check this specific ministry publication can genuinely plan multi-year trips, childcare arrangements, or work schedules well ahead of time, rather than waiting for year-by-year announcements.

A shared national framework sits behind each state’s specific holiday total. The Kultusministerkonferenz, Germany’s conference of state education ministers, agreed on October 15, 2020, on a common arrangement giving each state roughly 75 total holiday days per school year, including up to twelve Ferien-Samstage, holiday Saturdays. Bavaria’s own Ferienordnung is the specific, binding way this shared national framework actually plays out for your child’s calendar.

What Real People Say

Families new to Bavaria describe genuinely confusing their first attempt at planning around “holidays” specifically because they initially checked the public holiday calendar rather than the separate school Ferienordnung, several specifically recommend bookmarking the Kultusministerium’s own page directly rather than relying on a general holiday calendar that might conflate the two.

Families planning trips or childcare well in advance describe real relief at discovering the multi-year Ferienordnung publication, several specifically mention being surprised that dates years out were already confirmed and locked in, once they knew to look at the Ministry’s actual published schedule rather than assuming this information wouldn’t be available until closer to each school year.

Step by Step

1. Check Bavaria’s Kultusministerium page directly for the Ferienordnung, not a general public holiday calendar, these are genuinely separate schedules.
2. Confirm your specific school year’s dates, for 2026/2027: Christmas (24 Dec–8 Jan), Frühjahrsferien (8–12 Feb), Easter (22 Mar–2 Apr), Pentecost (18–28 May), and summer (2 Aug–13 Sept).
3. Plan multi-year trips or arrangements with confidence, Bavaria publishes its Ferienordnung years in advance, covering multiple school years at once.
4. Don’t confuse a specific holiday period with a public holiday that might fall near it, they follow separate legal frameworks even when dates are close together.
5. Cross-check with holiday-care planning early, since school holidays and standard work schedules rarely align without some arrangement in place.

Compliance Note

This page lists Bavaria’s official school holiday calendar for the 2026/2027 school year, current as of mid-2026. It is not legal advice, and while Bavaria’s Ferienordnung is published years in advance, always confirm current dates directly with the Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Unterricht und Kultus before finalizing plans.