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Public holidays are cantonal

Switzerland has exactly one federal public holiday — 1 August. Everything else is set by the canton, and cantons genuinely differ: a day that is a holiday in Luzern is an ordinary working day in Zürich. The platform therefore treats public holidays as configurable per installation and per canton, never as a hard-coded list. An employee’s holidays follow the canton of their Standort.

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What a public holiday does

  • It is not a working day, so it does not consume vacation entitlement.
  • It reduces the Soll hours for that day.
  • It is excluded from working-day calculations — including the five-working-day SECO embargo in job distribution.

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Moving holidays

Easter-relative holidays — Good Friday, Easter Monday, Ascension, Whit Monday, Corpus Christi — are computed for the year rather than maintained by hand, so the calendar does not need re-entering every December.

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Managing the calendar

Under Settings → Public holidays, per canton and year:
  • Add or remove a day.
  • Mark a half-day (some cantons treat 24 or 31 December this way).
  • Add local holidays — patron saints’ days, Sechseläuten, cantonal fair days.

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School holidays

School installations need a second calendar: the term and holiday structure of the schools themselves. It drives when staff are expected on site, when leave can realistically be taken, and how annualised working time is distributed across the year. School holiday periods are maintained per location and year, and are visible in the absence calendar next to public holidays so a leave request is assessed against the right context.
School holidays are not automatically absence. Teaching staff are typically still employed and often still working; the calendar informs planning rather than creating entries.
When staff themselves are off site — and different groups return at different times — that is a school opening per staff group, not a school holiday: educators can be back a week before assistants and mentors.

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Municipality data

Swiss municipality reference data (the BFS Gemeindeliste) is kept current by a scheduled job. It backs address validation on employee records and the municipality codes required on payroll declarations — a wrong municipality code is a rejected declaration.

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Where holidays show up

Time tracking

Soll hours drop to zero, so a holiday does not read as an under-worked day.

Leave

A vacation request spanning a holiday consumes one day less of entitlement.

Payroll

Hourly-paid employees are treated per the cantonal and contractual rules.

Recruitment

The SECO embargo counts working days, excluding weekends and national holidays.