Karnataka Public Holidays 2026

Understanding Karnataka's Holiday Calendar in 2026

Karnataka's Department of Personnel and Administrative Reforms issued notification No. DPAR 16 HHL 2025 on 17 November 2025. It carries Notification-I declaring 20 general holidays for state government offices, an annexure listing 21 restricted holidays from which an employee may avail any two, and Notification-II declaring the same 20 days as public holidays statewide under section 25 of the Negotiable Instruments Act, 1881.

Both notifications open with the same sentence, and it is the most consequential line in the document: all second Saturdays, all fourth Saturdays and all Sundays are declared holidays in addition to the 20 listed dates. Karnataka's calendar cannot be read as a list of 20 days. The weekly and fortnightly closures are part of the declaration, and an establishment that runs a six-day week is working days the state has declared closed.

The general and NI Act lists are identical for 2026, so offices and banks close on the same 20 dates. The single divergence is 1 April, the annual closing day, which Notification-II declares a holiday for commercial and cooperative banks only.

Kodagu district gets three local holidays no other district observes: Kail Muhurtha on 3 September, Tula Sankramana on 18 October, and the Huttari harvest festival on 26 November. These are declared in Notification-I itself, not by district order.

For payroll, commercial establishments fall under the Karnataka Shops and Commercial Establishments Act, 1961, and factories under the Factories Act separately. IT and ITeS establishments in Karnataka have historically operated under exemptions on working hours and holidays, so check whether any notification applies before finalising the calendar.

National Holidays in Karnataka

Republic Day on Monday, January 26, Independence Day on Saturday, August 15, and Gandhi Jayanti on Friday, October 2 appear in both notifications. Independence Day falls on a Saturday in 2026, and on the third Saturday, so it is not absorbed by the second and fourth Saturday rule and does cost a working day for six-day establishments.

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Jayanti on Tuesday, April 14 is a general holiday. Souramana Yugadi falls on the same date, and the notification records that it is left off the restricted list for that reason rather than being dropped.

Karnataka-Specific Holidays

Makara Sankranti is declared on Thursday, 15 January in 2026, not 14 January. Karnataka follows Uttarayana Punyakala, the moment of the sun's northward transit, and in 2026 that falls a day later than the date most national calendars print. An employer working off a pan-India list will close on the wrong day.

Ugadi is the Kannada new year and falls on Thursday, March 19 in 2026, marking the start of Chaitra. Maharashtra's Gudi Padwa falls on the same day, one of the few dates where the two state calendars align.

The Dasara stretch is Karnataka's biggest. Mahanavami and Ayudha Puja fall on Tuesday, October 20 and Vijayadashami on Wednesday, October 21. Ayudha Puja matters operationally: tools, machinery and increasingly office equipment are ceremonially cleaned and left idle, so manufacturing and workshop operations genuinely stop rather than merely closing on paper. Mysuru sees very heavy travel that week.

Deepavali is a single declared day in Karnataka in 2026. Balipadyami on Tuesday, November 10 is the only general holiday of the cluster, because Naraka Chaturdashi falls on Sunday 8 November and the notification expressly leaves it off the list for that reason.

Basava Jayanti on Monday, April 20 and Kanakadasa Jayanti on Friday, November 27 are Karnataka-specific general holidays that employers in other states work straight through.

Four widely observed days are absent from the general list because they fall on days already closed: Maha Shivaratri on 15 February, Maharshi Valmiki Jayanti on 25 October, Kannada Rajyotsava on 1 November and Naraka Chaturdashi on 8 November all fall on Sundays, and Mahalaya Amavasya on 10 October falls on a second Saturday. The notification names all five explicitly. Kannada Rajyotsava is the most publicly visible of the five, and in 2026 it buys no working day at all.

Restricted Holidays in Karnataka

Karnataka publishes 21 restricted holidays for 2026 and permits an employee to avail any two. It is a long optional list, not a short one, and it carries several days that other states declare outright: Sri Ramanavami on 27 March, Krishna Janmashtami on 4 September, Guru Nanak Jayanti on 24 November and Holi on 2 March are all optional here.

Holi diverges outright. Karnataka lists it on Monday, 2 March, which is not the date northern states use: Delhi and Madhya Pradesh declare 4 March. An organisation running one Holi date across offices in both regions will be wrong in one of them.

The list is heavily weighted toward the last third of the year. Eleven of the 21 fall between 21 August and 26 November, seven of those on a Friday or a Thursday adjacent to a general holiday. If restricted-day requests are going to collide anywhere, it is in that stretch.

Four observances were deliberately kept off the restricted list because they coincide with a general holiday, and the notification says so: Souramana Yugadi on 14 April, Buddha Purnima on 1 May, Rig Upakarma and Tiruvonam on 26 August, and Swarna Gowri Vrata on 14 September. Tula Sankramana on 18 October is likewise omitted for falling on a Sunday, though it remains a full local holiday in Kodagu.

Huttari on 26 November appears twice in the notification: as restricted holiday 20, available to any employee statewide, and as a local holiday in Kodagu, where it is a full closure. Kodagu employees do not spend an optional day on it.

HR & Payroll Guidance for Karnataka, 2026

The second and fourth Saturday rule has to be configured before anything else. It changes the working-day count for every month of the year and it interacts with the holiday list: Holy Saturday on 4 April falls on a fourth Saturday and Mahalaya Amavasya on 10 October on a second Saturday, so neither costs anything, while Independence Day on the third Saturday does.

Bengaluru's workforce is the most geographically mixed of any Indian city. A single team may include people from Kerala, Tamil Nadu, the Northeast and North India, none of whom share the same instinct about which days should be off. Karnataka's list governs the establishment, but expectations inside the team will not match it, and the mismatch is sharpest on Rama Navami, Janmashtami and Guru Nanak Jayanti, which are full holidays in the states many employees come from and merely optional here.

Kodagu has to be calendared separately. Three declared local holidays, one of which is also a statewide restricted day, is enough divergence that a single Karnataka calendar will be wrong for a Madikeri office on at least two working days.

The 1 April bank closing is a payroll date, not an office date. Commercial and cooperative banks are shut for annual closing while government and private offices work, so remittances and clearing scheduled for the first working day of the financial year will not settle.

Publish the restricted list in January rather than letting people discover it in March. With 21 options, a two-day cap, and eleven of them clustered in the last third of the year, advance visibility is what keeps the August-to-November stretch from becoming a queue.