Berlin School Holiday Calendar (2026/2027): Every Ferien Date, Plus the 8 March Exception

The Official Rule

Berlin’s school holiday calendar, the Ferienordnung, is set directly by the Senatsverwaltung für Bildung, Jugend und Familie, the state’s education administration, and it’s a completely separate document from the list of Berlin’s public holidays. Both involve days without school, which is exactly why the two get mixed up, but only one of them is published as a single Ferien calendar.

These dates are already confirmed and have been for a while. The Senate’s Änderung der Ferienordnung für das Land Berlin, dated 30 August 2024, fixes the calendar for six full school years at once, 2024/2025 all the way through 2029/2030. If you want to plan a summer trip, a work sabbatical, or a childcare arrangement two or three years out, the Senate’s own published schedule already has the answer, no need to wait for a year-by-year announcement.

One entry doesn’t look like the others. The Friday after Ascension, 7 May 2027, isn’t a full holiday week, it’s a single Unterrichtsfreier Tag granted under Berlin’s civil-service working-time rules (AZVO), bridging the Thursday Ascension public holiday into a long weekend. Berlin’s Pfingstferien (Whitsun break) is similarly short, just Tuesday and Wednesday, 18 and 19 May 2027, tacked onto the separate Whit Monday public holiday that applies across all of Germany. If you’ve moved from a southern state, this is worth noticing: Bavaria’s own Ferienordnung turns the same stretch of the calendar into a full eleven-day break, 18 to 28 May 2027. Berlin’s students are back in class on 20 May.

The Day That Isn’t on the Ferien List: 8 March

8 March, International Women’s Day, is a statutory public holiday in Berlin, but you won’t find it anywhere on the Ferienordnung. That’s not an oversight, it’s a structural difference. The Ferienordnung only lists block holiday periods and the odd single bridge day; individual public holidays are governed separately, under Berlin’s Feiertagsgesetz. Schools, most offices, and most shops close on 8 March exactly as they would on any other public holiday, it just doesn’t show up when you’re scanning the school calendar for days off.

Berlin’s House of Representatives made this change through a law passed on 30 January 2019, becoming the first German state to give 8 March statutory holiday status, a decision partly motivated by Berlin otherwise having fewer public holidays than most of the country. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern followed in 2023, becoming the second and, so far, the last. That leaves 14 of Germany’s 16 states, Bavaria included, without it. Even with 8 March added, Berlin’s total of 10 public holidays a year still trails Bavaria’s 13.

For the 2026/2027 school year, 8 March falls on a Monday. It sits well outside any of the Ferien blocks in the table above, so it functions as a genuinely extra school-free (and work-free) day that families arriving from Bavaria, or from most of the rest of the country, won’t already have built into their mental calendar. Put it on your own planner directly rather than relying on the school’s Ferien PDF to flag it.

Using This Calendar for Work Planning

The practical challenge isn’t finding the dates, the Senate makes those genuinely easy to find years in advance. It’s that Berlin’s calendar adds up to roughly twelve weeks a year without school, split across six separate blocks plus the odd bridge day, while a typical employee’s annual leave runs 25 to 30 days. That gap doesn’t close itself, and every other working parent in the city is trying to book the same weeks off at the same time.

A few things make the planning easier once you know them. First, because the Ferienordnung is published years ahead, you can request annual leave for next year’s summer holidays now, well before your employer’s leave calendar fills up. Second, treat 8 March as a fixed entry on your own calendar rather than the school’s, since it’s the one date that won’t show up on any Ferien overview. Third, check your child’s specific eFöB facility for its own Schließzeit (closing period): many afterschool Hort setups across Germany close for a stretch of a week or two during summer even while the eFöB system technically covers the whole break, so the two aren’t automatically the same thing in practice.

Ferienbetreuung: Care During the Holidays

Berlin’s afterschool system, eFöB (Ergänzende Förderung und Betreuung), the Grundschule-era successor to what most of Germany still calls Hort, is built to cover the Ferien automatically rather than treating them as a separate service.

Two caveats worth knowing before you rely on this. Applications for a regular, ongoing eFöB place need to go in at least three months before your child’s care is meant to start, well before the school year begins, so the two-month holiday-only window isn’t a substitute for that if you actually want year-round coverage. And even where eFöB technically runs through the holidays, individual Grundschule sites can still schedule their own short Schließzeit inside summer specifically, so it’s worth asking your child’s own eFöB coordinator directly rather than assuming full coverage across all seven or eight weeks.

What Real People Say

Parents new to Berlin consistently describe the same two-step realization: first, that the school holiday calendar and the public holiday calendar are genuinely separate documents, and second, that nobody hands you that distinction up front, you find out by accidentally checking the wrong one. Expat-focused guides to raising children in Germany describe the underlying arithmetic bluntly, roughly twelve weeks of school holidays against 25 to 30 days of parental leave, and frame the gap as something every working family has to actively plan around rather than something that resolves itself.

On the care side, the recurring piece of advice is to treat eFöB’s official Ferien coverage and your own child’s actual facility schedule as two different things to verify separately. Even where a Grundschule’s afterschool program formally extends through the holidays, a specific site’s own short summer closing window can still catch families out if nobody asks about it directly, so parents who’ve been through a full year in the system tend to recommend confirming your own school’s Schließzeit early rather than assuming the citywide rule applies without exception at your address.

Step by Step

1. Bookmark the Senate's own Ferienordnung, not a single-year summary site It's published years in advance and is the source every other calendar site is quoting from anyway.
2. Mark the six 2026/2027 Ferien blocks on your own calendar Autumn (19-31 Oct 2026), Christmas (23 Dec 2026-2 Jan 2027), winter (1-6 Feb 2027), Easter (22 Mar-2 Apr 2027), Whitsun (18-19 May 2027), and summer (1 Jul-14 Aug 2027).
3. Add 8 March separately It's a real day off school and most workplaces, but it will never appear on the Ferien list itself.
4. Request annual leave for next year's Ferien blocks as early as your employer allows Since the dates are already public, there's no reason to wait until the school year starts to ask.
5. Confirm your specific eFöB facility's Schließzeit directly Don't assume citywide holiday coverage means your child's own site has zero closed days.
6. If you need holiday-only care and have no regular eFöB place, apply at service.berlin.de at least two months ahead Choose the 7:30-13:30 or 7:30-16:00 module depending on your work schedule.

Compliance Note

This page lists Berlin’s official school holiday dates for the 2026/2027 school year and the current status of 8 March as a public holiday, current as of mid-2026. It is not legal advice. School holiday dates and public holiday law can change, always confirm current dates directly with the Senatsverwaltung für Bildung, Jugend und Familie before finalizing travel, leave, or childcare plans.