Dataset & exports

Coverage at a glance

The 349 school records cover 8 cities (Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur). A "school-year record" is one school for one academic year — the same school in a later year is a separate record, which is why the count is larger than the number of schools.

Public exports

1. JSON export — school calendars

/data/schools-compact.json is a compact JSON array of every school record. It is the same file the comparison tool fetches, trimmed to what a comparison needs so it stays small:

[
  {
    "i": "ae-dubai-5567",          // school id
    "n": "Arcadia Global School",  // school name
    "c": "Dubai",                  // city
    "u": "mixed",                  // curriculum family
    "y": "2026-2027",              // academic year
    "e": [                         // events
      ["school_holiday_summer", "Summer break", "2026-08-01", "2026-08-24"]
    ]
  }
]

Event tuple: [category, label, startDate, endDate], with dates as YYYY-MM-DD and both ends inclusive. Categories are school_holiday_* (summer, winter, spring, autumn, other), public_holiday, staff_pd, term_start, term_end and exam_window. The long-form file used to build these pages — with source URLs, verification status and prose notes — lives in the site's source tree and is not published.

Each record also carries a verification status internally: of the 349 records, 330 are taken from an official authority or school source, 6 were parsed from a school document and are flagged as such on their pages, and 13 are listed without verified dates.

2. iCalendar feeds — the .ics family

1,582 feed files, all built from the same event list and all in plain RFC 5545 iCalendar. Every event is an all-day event with an exclusive DTEND and a reminder 15 hours before it starts (09:00 the previous morning).

• Permanent feeds — 1062 files. /feeds/{slug}.ics: 112 region and national calendars, 11 country aggregates where a country has no single national calendar, and 349 individual schools. The URL never changes; a new school year appears in it automatically. Per-type children (/feeds/usa/ohio/summer.ics) filter the same feed to one kind of break. Listed in full at /feeds/.
• Per-language feeds — 520 files. /es|de|fr|zh|ja/feeds/{slug}.ics: the region and country feeds again, with the calendar name, description, region prefix and event names rendered in that language. Event names fall back to the source language where no translation exists yet.
• Single-year files — 483 files. /{region}/school-holidays-{year}.ics and /schools/{id}.ics. One-off imports that cover one school year and are not updated. Prefer a permanent feed.
• School year overviews — 349 PDFs. /schools/{id}/year/overview.pdf: one page per school with the year's bands drawn as vector shapes and every date repeated as selectable text.

Update frequency

• Feeds: rebuilt when the underlying data changes, and the files advertise a daily refresh interval (REFRESH-INTERVAL:P1D) so subscribing clients re-check once a day. A date corrected in the source appears in an existing subscription without re-subscribing — events keep a stable UID and carry a SEQUENCE that is raised on change.
• Data: 349 school records were last collected on 2026-09-14. Regional calendars carry their own verification date, shown on each region page and on the feed itself as LAST-MODIFIED. There is no fixed schedule; corrections are made when they are reported or found.
• Found an error? The contact form takes a correction with the official source that supports it.

How to cite this dataset

A plain-text citation:

Global School Calendar. (2026). School and holiday calendar dataset [Data set]. Retrieved from https://globalschoolcalendar.com/data/

BibTeX:

@misc{globalschoolcalendar,
  title        = {Global School Calendar — school and holiday calendar dataset},
  author       = {{Global School Calendar}},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://globalschoolcalendar.com/data/}},
  note         = {Accessed: add the date you retrieved it}
}

When you cite a specific region or school, cite the page you took the dates from as well — every page names its own official source, and that source is usually the more appropriate citation (for example the German Kultusministerkonferenz for a Bundesland's holiday dates).

Before reusing this data, read the licensing page. No blanket redistribution licence is granted: the dates are compiled from third-party official sources with their own terms, and those terms — not a licence from this site — govern reuse.

Related: Licensing · Methodology · Calendar feed directory