Northern Ireland's common school calendar
Reviewed 2026-09-08 · TermMinder
In England and Scotland, school term dates are set council by council, which is why the official GOV.UK and mygov.scot pages hold no dates and send you to your local authority. Northern Ireland is different. The Department of Education publishes one calendar for the whole region. If you are a parent in Belfast, Derry or Enniskillen, the breaks are the same. But the calendar comes with built-in flexibility, and understanding that flexibility is the key to using it well.
One published calendar
The Department's school holidays page lists what it calls the "non-operational dates for schools" in each academic year.
For 2026/27, schools resume after the summer holiday on 1 September 2026. The Halloween break is 29 and 30 October 2026. Christmas and New Year run from 21 December 2026 to 1 January 2027. The mid-term break is 11 and 12 February 2027, St Patrick's Day is 17 March, and Easter runs from 25 March to 2 April 2027. May Day falls on 3 May and the Spring Bank Holiday on 31 May. The summer holiday begins on 1 July 2027.
That July finish is the most striking feature for anyone used to English dates. In Kent, for example, the summer term runs to 21 July 2027, three weeks after Northern Ireland's schools have closed.
The other difference is the shape of the breaks. In 2026/27 both the Halloween and the mid-term break are two days, not the week that English councils give at half term. The summer break is correspondingly long, covering all of July and August.
Schools keep their own discretion
The common calendar is not quite the whole story, and the Department says so itself. Its page notes that "schools can operate on these dates at their own discretion to suit their individual circumstances."
More importantly for parents, it adds: "Schools also have the discretion to take a number of staff training and school development days. Pupils do not attend on these days and such days are likely to differ from school-to-school."
These school development days are Northern Ireland's version of INSET days. Each school decides where to place them, which means two neighbouring schools can share every holiday on the common calendar yet still close to pupils on different days. The only place to learn your child's development days is the school itself, through its website, app or newsletter.
Extra closures in 2026/27
This year brings additional closure days granted at regional level. The Department's page explains that, "exceptionally, during the 2026/27 academic year, recognising the need for schools to engage with the significant TransformED NI programme of reform of teaching and learning, the Minister has granted three additional closure days, one per term." They are 25 September 2026, 25 January 2027 and 4 May 2027.
These sit on the Department's page beneath the main table, so checking the official list each year, rather than relying on memory of last year's pattern, is worth the minute it takes. The 4 May closure, for instance, comes the day after the May Day bank holiday, turning a long weekend into a four-day one.
How to use the calendar well
Treat the Department's page as your foundation and the school's communications as the finishing layer. The common calendar tells you the Department's published non-operational dates; the school tells you the handful of extra days or exceptions when your child stays home.
A sensible routine is to note the full common calendar when it is published, then add the school's development days as they are announced at the start of each term. Because the holidays themselves are uniform across the region, booking travel or childcare around them is more predictable than in England, where each council sets its own half term.
When a Northern Ireland calendar is published, TermMinder shows the Department's dates and keeps development days marked as school-level decisions rather than region-wide dates. Use the finder to locate the available calendar, save it on this device or add its public ICS feed, and configure alerts in your calendar app. The phone-calendar guide explains the subscription options.