Ethiopian Public Holidays

About Ethiopian Public Holidays

Businesses operating in Ethiopia need to plan around public holiday closures, and getting the dates wrong means missed deadlines and confused clients. HR teams building work calendars face the same challenge every year. For the diaspora, tracking celebrations like Timkat or Fasika is a way of staying connected to home, and for tourists timing their visit around a major Orthodox feast or an Islamic festival, the exact dates matter a great deal. Because Ethiopia's holidays come from three different calendar systems at once, none of them line up neatly from one year to the next.

Ethiopia observes Orthodox Christian, Islamic, and national public holidays. The Orthodox dates follow the Ethiopian calendar, which itself traces back to ancient Ge'ez traditions, so Gena (Ethiopian Christmas) falls on January 7 and Timkat (Ethiopian Epiphany) on January 19 by the Gregorian calendar, while Fasika (Easter) moves each year based on a separate calculation tied to the Ethiopian lunar cycle. Islamic holidays including Eid Al-Fitr, Eid Al-Adha, and Mawlid shift annually because they follow the Hijri lunar calendar, which gains roughly eleven days on the solar year. National non-religious holidays like the Victory of Adwa, which marks Ethiopia's defeat of Italian colonial forces in 1896, sit at fixed Gregorian dates.

The calendar lists each holiday with both its Ethiopian calendar date and its Gregorian equivalent for the current year. You can filter by category to see only Christian Orthodox, only Islamic, or only national holidays. The moveable dates are calculated fresh each year so the list stays accurate without you needing to cross-reference multiple sources.