A Holiday Calendar is a set of rules describing the days your organization does not operate. You define it once and apply it to as many schedules as you like. When a scheduled run lands on a day the calendar covers, that run is skipped.

Files.com maintains built-in Holiday Regions carrying the public holidays of most countries, down to the sub-national level. A region matches your operating calendar only if your organization observes exactly the public holidays of one country. Many organizations do not, and a region that does not match gets the days wrong in both directions, stopping work on days you are open and running it unattended on days you are closed.

A stock exchange trades through some federal holidays and closes on days that are not public holidays at all. A manufacturer shuts the plant for a retooling week. A university stops between terms. A hospital network runs reduced staffing on days the rest of the country works. Most companies also add closures of their own, like a year-end shutdown or a floating holiday.

None of these days come from a country's holiday list, so no fixed set of regions can anticipate them. A Holiday Calendar is where you define them.

A built-in region covers whole days from a country's public holiday list, and Files.com keeps it current. A Holiday Calendar covers whatever you put in it, including partial days rather than only whole ones, and keeping it correct is your job.

Prefer a built-in region whenever one matches, and check for a sub-national region before creating a calendar of your own.

Building a Holiday Calendar

Start with the list of days you do not want scheduled work to run. Each one becomes a rule.

Choose each rule's date type from the way that holiday's date is determined each year.

Create the calendar before you need it on a schedule. Once saved, apply it to each schedule that needs to observe those days, and set that schedule's time zone if the calendar has partial-day rules.

Holiday Calendar Rules

A calendar has a name, unique within your site, and a list of rules. Each rule describes one holiday, and naming a rule is optional.

Rules are evaluated fresh each year rather than stored as fixed dates, so you never re-enter them in January.

A rule's date type says how Files.com works out the holiday's date for a given year. A Fixed Date uses a month and day you specify. A Moving Weekday uses a weekday's position within a month. A Calculated Date uses one of a fixed set of calculations.

A Fixed Date falls on the same month and day each year, like December 25. February accepts 29, and a February 29 rule produces no date in non-leap years.

A Moving Weekday falls on an occurrence of a weekday within a month, like the fourth Thursday of November or the last Monday of May.

Occurrences run first through fifth, and backward as last, second to last, and third to last. A fifth occurrence that does not exist in a month produces no date that year.

A Calculated Date comes from a calculation rather than a month and day you pick. The available calculations are Western Easter, Orthodox Easter, Orthodox Easter using the Julian calculation, and two Boxing Day adjustments.

A Day Offset between -366 and 366 moves the result earlier with a negative number or later with a positive one. Good Friday is Western Easter offset by -2, and Easter Monday is the same calculation offset by 1.

Observed Date Movement

A rule can shift when the holiday falls on a weekend, and the Boxing Day adjustment also shifts a Monday. The available movements are Sunday to Monday, weekend to the following Monday, weekend forward two days, weekend to the nearest weekday, and the Boxing Day weekday adjustment.

An observed movement replaces the original date rather than adding a second one. A holiday on Saturday moved to the following Monday is excluded on Monday and not on Saturday. When both dates matter, create two rules.

Full and Partial Days

A rule excludes the whole day by default. Setting a start and end time excludes only the hours in that window and leaves the rest of the day open. An early close, a late start, and a midday closure all use the same mechanism.

A window includes its start and stops just before its end. A window from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM skips runs from 1:00 PM through 4:59 PM, and a run at exactly 5:00 PM is not skipped.

The start must be earlier than the end, and overnight windows are not supported. To exclude time on both sides of midnight, use two rules on two dates.

Year Restrictions

A rule applies every year unless you restrict it. You can apply it from a year onward, up to a year, between two years, or only in specific years. All boundaries are inclusive.

Restrictions cover holidays your organization starts or stops observing. A holiday you adopt next year takes a rule restricted from that year onward, so it leaves this year's runs alone. A holiday you drop after this year takes a rule restricted up to this year, which retires it on schedule instead of leaving you to remember to delete it.

Time Zones

Holiday Calendars do not include a time zone. Dates and partial-day windows resolve in the time zone set on the schedule using the calendar. If that schedule sets no time zone, Files.com falls back to your site's default time zone. If neither is set, Files.com evaluates the calendar against UTC.

A window of 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM means Eastern on a schedule set to Eastern and Central on a schedule set to Central, so one calendar serves teams in different places without a second copy.

Where Calendars Apply

A saved calendar applies anywhere a Holiday Region does, and behaves exactly like a built-in region.

It is available to scheduled Automations, Syncs, Expectations, Scheduled Exports, and AI Tasks in every Workspace.

Interval and custom-schedule triggers accept a Holiday Region, whether or not the schedule also sets a time of day.

File activity, inbound webhook, and manual triggers do not, because they have no scheduled run to skip. Files arriving on a holiday are still processed. If files must not be processed on a holiday, schedule the work instead of triggering it on arrival, and the files wait in place until the next run the calendar allows.

Managing Holiday Calendars

Site Administrators create, edit, and delete calendars. Read-only Site Administrators can see calendars but cannot apply one to a schedule. Applying a calendar edits that schedule, and a read-only role cannot make changes of any kind.

Workspace Administrators and Folder Admins can apply an existing calendar to a schedule they manage but cannot create or change one. If you need a calendar that does not exist yet, ask a Site Administrator.

An edit takes effect immediately everywhere the calendar is referenced, including schedules in other Workspaces.

A calendar cannot be deleted while any schedule still references it, so a schedule cannot silently lose its holiday handling.

Examples

These three show the rule types combining for different kinds of operating calendar.

A Market Calendar

An investment management firm makes time-sensitive decisions from exchange data, so its schedules follow the New York Stock Exchange rather than the US federal calendar. The exchange trades on Veterans Day and Columbus Day, both federal holidays, so a US region would skip work on days the data still arrives. It closes on Good Friday, which is not a federal holiday, so the same region would run work on a day there is nothing to collect.

A calendar for that exchange uses all three date types. Christmas Day is a Fixed Date on December 25. Thanksgiving is a Moving Weekday, the fourth Thursday of November. Good Friday is a Calculated Date, Western Easter with a Day Offset of -2.

Two more rules carry adjustments. New Year's Day is a Fixed Date that moves to Monday when it lands on a Sunday. Juneteenth is a Fixed Date moving to the nearest weekday.

The same firm also tracks bank and fund calendars for Canada, Ireland, and Luxembourg, each different again. Build one calendar per market rather than one combined calendar. A combined calendar would exclude days that only one market observes, stopping work on days that market was open.

An Early Close

The same exchange closes at 1:00 PM on Christmas Eve rather than closing for the day. A full-day rule would skip the morning's transfers too, while the data is still arriving.

A partial-day rule from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM covers the closure and nothing else. A schedule running at 9:00 AM still runs. A schedule running at 3:00 PM is skipped.

Set the time zone on every schedule that uses this calendar. The window resolves in the schedule's own time zone, so a schedule left to fall through to the site default can evaluate 1:00 PM hours away from the exchange's afternoon.

A Commonwealth Business Calendar

Boxing Day, December 26, is a public holiday across the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and other Commonwealth countries. Its observed date shifts in ways no other holiday does, because Christmas Day sits immediately before it.

The Boxing Day options handle this. The observed movement shifts a weekend Boxing Day forward two days and a Monday to Tuesday, and the two Boxing Day calculations produce the adjusted date directly. Reach for those rather than trying to reproduce the behavior with a plain weekend movement.

A calendar for a business in one of those countries pairs a Fixed Date for Christmas Day with a Boxing Day rule carrying the adjustment, so the two holidays never resolve to the same weekday.