California court holidays: every day the courts are closed, 2026 to 2030

Subscribe to these closures

Rather than checking a page, put the closures in your calendar once. This feed carries all 5 years above as all-day entries, marked free rather than busy so it will not make you look unavailable, and each entry says whether its year is verified or projected.

Your calendar decides how often it re-checks, so a correction can take a day or two to appear. The feed covers 2026 through 2030, the same years as the tables above. Only 2026 has a published Judicial Council calendar; the later years are projections, and the feed stops at 2030 rather than put more of them in your calendar.

Running a library, chapter or firm page where readers ask for this table? Put it on that page instead of linking out, with the court holiday widget. One script tag or a WordPress plugin, and the dates stay maintained here.

Is court open on a given day?

The 14 closures first, then the days that look like closures and are not. A deadline counted across a day in the second list lands early, which is survivable. Counted across a day in the first list, it lands late.

Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve are not judicial holidays in their own right, and in most years the courts are open on both. They still appear as closures in some years, because a judicial holiday falling on a Saturday must be observed the preceding Friday (Cal. Rules of Court, rule 1.11): Christmas 2027 falls on a Saturday, so the closure is Friday, December 24, and New Year's Day 2028 is observed Friday, December 31, 2027. Check the year, not the name.

The days that trip people up

Farmworkers Day moves in 2027. It was Cesar Chavez Day on March 31 until AB 2156 renamed it in March 2026, and SB 1394 (Stats. 2026, ch. 708) moves it to April 10 starting January 1, 2027 (Gov. Code § 6700). The courts close March 31, 2026, then April 10 from 2027, shifted off a weekend under Cal. Rules of Court, rule 1.11. In 2027 that is Friday, April 9, and March 31 is an ordinary court day. The Judicial Council's published 2027 list agrees: Friday, April 9. The 2027 sheet has the full year.

Columbus Day is a federal holiday and California courts are open. Lunar New Year, Diwali, Genocide Remembrance Day (April 24) and Admission Day (September 9) are California state holidays but not judicial holidays. The courts are open and the clock keeps running (CCP § 135, Gov. Code § 6700).

Federal courts in California count holidays under FRCP 6(a)(6) instead, which starts from a different list: Columbus Day is on it, and several of the days on this page are not. federalcourtdeadlines.com lists the federal legal holidays and how each one moves a federal deadline.

Those five are the errors this engine was built to avoid. Native American Day is the one it initially got wrong: an early version treated the fourth Friday in September as a court day. Section 135 does not except it, the official Judicial Council calendar shows the courts closed, and the engine now closes it.

Individual superior courts may also close by emergency order under Government Code § 68115. See Rowan v. Kirkpatrick (2020) 54 Cal.App.5th 289. Those closures cannot be predicted and are not in this list. Re-verify against the published Judicial Council calendar each year, which is the controlling source.