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; it deliberately does not run further, because the Judicial Council has not published those years.

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 holiday falling on a Saturday is observed the preceding Friday: 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

March 31 is now Farmworkers Day. It was Cesar Chavez Day until AB 2156 renamed it, an urgency statute effective March 26, 2026 amending Gov. Code § 6700. The date did not move and the courts still close, so nothing about the count changes. Only the name did.

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).

Those five are the errors this engine was built to avoid. Native American Day was the one it initially got wrong, because statutory analysis and the published calendar disagreed. The official Judicial Council calendar controls. Courts do close on the fourth Friday in September, and the engine was corrected to follow the calendar rather than the analysis.

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.