California Court Holidays: 2026 and 2027 Verified Dates

2026 California Court Holiday Calendar

The 2026 California judicial holidays include three observance shifts around weekends: Independence Day moves to Friday, July 3, because July 4 falls on Saturday.

2027 California Court Holiday Calendar

The 2027 California court holidays include four observance shifts around weekends: Juneteenth, the July 4 holiday, the December 25 holiday, and the January 1, 2028 holiday all move to the adjacent weekday.

Days That Look Like Holidays but Are Not

The most common mix-up is October: Monday, October 12, 2026, is the federal Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples Day holiday, but it is not one of the California court holidays, and state courts are open. The judicial calendar closes instead for Native American Day, the fourth Friday of September — September 25, 2026, and September 24, 2027.

Federal-court schedules differ from state-court schedules too. The United States District Court for the Central District of California observes the federal list, not the California judicial list. Check the calendar of the specific court that will receive your filing before treating any date as closed.

How Court Holidays Move California Deadlines

The California court holidays in these tables affect a deadline in two ways. Court-day counts skip weekends and judicial holidays entirely, so a closure inside the interval pushes the result further from the hearing. Calendar-day counts include the closure, but it still controls where a landing date settles: Code of Civil Procedure section 12 supplies the base computation rule, and section 12a moves a period’s final date past a holiday to the next court day.

Direction matters. A forward-counted last day that lands on a holiday moves to the next court day, while a backward-counted filing date moves to the preceding court day. Notice periods stated in court days under Code of Civil Procedure section 12c, such as motion briefing under section 1005, exclude weekends and holidays on every leg of the count. The how-to-count-court-days guide walks through those rules step by step.

Worked Examples From the Holiday Calendar

Example 1 — a California court holidays 2026 closure inside the interval. Count 9 court days backward from a hearing on Tuesday, November 17, 2026. Skipping weekends and Veterans Day on November 11 lands on Wednesday, November 4; skipping the holiday as well lands on Tuesday, November 3, 2026. One judicial holiday moved the filing date one full court day — and a weekend-only count would have missed it entirely.

Example 2 — two holidays in one count. Count 16 court days backward from a hearing on Tuesday, March 2, 2027. The interval skips both Lincoln’s Birthday on February 12, 2027 and Washington’s Birthday on February 15, 2027, so the count lands on Thursday, February 4, 2027 rather than the early-February date a weekend-only count would produce.

Example 3 — a landing date on a closure. The December 25, 2027 holiday falls on Saturday and is observed on Friday, December 24, 2027, which is a court holiday. A forward-counted deadline landing on December 24 moves to the next court day, Monday, December 27, 2027. A backward-counted filing date landing there would instead move back to Thursday, December 23, 2027.

Each of these results comes from the same counting engine behind the site’s calculators, which reads the same California court holidays data shown above, so every skipped weekend and holiday appears in the output. Use the California motion deadline calculator to reproduce a count against your own hearing date and compare each skipped date with your own calendar.

Three Closure Clusters That Move Court Deadlines

The California court holidays 2026 and California court holidays 2027 calendars concentrate closures into three clusters. February 2027 stacks three closures within twelve dates — Lincoln’s Birthday on Friday, February 12, Washington’s Birthday on Monday, February 15, and César Chávez Day on Wednesday, March 31 — so any court deadline crossing mid-February lands later than instinct suggests.

The Thanksgiving cluster closes courts on Thursday, November 26, 2026 and Friday, November 27, 2026, a two-court-day pair that swallows a week’s slack for a Tuesday filing target. The year-end cluster pairs the observed December 24, 2027 closure with the observed December 31, 2027 closure, and the superior court holidays 2027 schedule closes courts on both. Every court-day count that crosses a cluster should go through the calculator before you commit a filing date.

Verification and Refresh Schedule

The California court holidays tables on this page were verified on July 15, 2026, against the Judicial Council’s published schedule, covering every statewide closure date through December 31, 2027. The site re-checks the schedule each December, when courts publish the next year’s list, and updates the tables and the calculators together.

Two cautions keep a holiday-based deadline safe. First, an observance shift can move a statutory date off its calendar anniversary — in 2027, four holidays sit on adjacent weekdays. Second, a local standing order can continue or shorten a hearing set beside a closure, and an order controls over any general schedule. Confirm the operative order before you rely on a date. When the council publishes the next schedule, this page and every calculator update in the same pass, so a court deadline computed in December already reflects the court calendar for the following year.