Who actually publishes the state calendars that set a deadline?

Inside a federation the national list is the one that matters least. The office you are dealing with keeps a calendar set by a state, a province, a court or a bank, and its answer to "are you open on Monday" comes from there, not from the capital.

This page is about those sub-national calendars: who publishes them, why they diverge from each other and from the national list, and how to build a calendar for one specific office without guessing. It prints no dates for any state or province, and by the end it should be clear why any page that does is not helping.

That withholding is deliberate. The dates belong to the publisher, and what travels is the method for getting them.

What to take away

At the sub-national level there is no single publisher. The legislature, the executive, the personnel office, the court administrator and the banking regulator each publish something, and each governs a different kind of deadline.
A calendar belongs to an office, not to an organization. Two offices of the same body in two states keep two calendars.
Substitution rules and counting rules are published documents in their own right. Neither can be inferred from a list of dates.

Who publishes, and what each publication governs

Publisher	Typical form	What it actually governs	Where to find it
The state or provincial legislature	A statute listing observances and formulas	The legal category of holiday within the state	The state's legislation site
The governor, premier or executive	An annual proclamation or order	Days added or moved for that year; office closures	The executive's official notices
The personnel or human resources office	An employee calendar for the year	When state employees are off; the page most people find first	The state personnel department
The court administrator	A court closure schedule	When filings can be made and how deadlines run	The court system's own site, per court
The banking regulator or reserve bank branch	A banking days schedule	Value dates, settlement and payment deadlines	The regulator or the payment system
Municipalities and school boards	Local closure notices	Local offices and schools only	Each body separately

Two named examples. The California Department of Human Resources posts the state employee holiday calendar for each year. The Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles posts its own court holidays, and that list governs a filing there.

For payments, Federal Reserve Financial Services publishes holiday schedules for the Fedwire Funds Service and FedACH Services; these are payment-system calendars, not universal schedules for every bank. California Government Code § 6700 lists California state holidays, and 5 U.S.C. § 6103 lists federal holidays. A calendar shows how a publisher applies the rules to its office; it does not make one office’s list control every court, bank, or agency.

The personnel calendar is the trap. It is the most visible and the least likely to govern your deadline, because it describes when state employees are off, which is not the same as when a court accepts a filing or when a bank settles a payment.

Publishers and what they govern

Publisher

Legislature: Legal holiday category
Governor or premier: Year's added or moved days
Personnel office: State employee days off
Court administrator: Filing days and deadlines
Banking regulator: Value dates and settlement
Municipalities and school boards: Local offices and schools

What it governs

Legislature: State legislation site
Governor or premier: Executive official notices
Personnel office: State personnel department
Court administrator: Court system's own site
Banking regulator: Regulator or payment system
Municipalities and school boards: Each body separately

Where to find it

Legislature
Governor or premier
Personnel office
Court administrator
Banking regulator
Municipalities and school boards

Why the same day differs across an internal border

Each state or province chooses its own observances. A national observance reaches a state calendar by the state's own enactment or by reference to the national list.

How a national day reaches a state

How does the state adopt the national observance?

Yes

By enactment: waits for the state to act

By reference: carries automatically

If by enactment, a national change may not carry until the state acts, but if by reference, it carries automatically. So two neighboring states can differ on a day both nominally observe, in the year it was moved.

Beyond that, states add days of their own, drop national days, and apply different substitution rules when a fixed date lands on a weekend. California Government Code § 6701 provides weekend-observance rules for specified holidays; do not assume that rule applies to another state or to every California court or bank.

The federal version is the one most often cited. Under 5 U.S.C. § 6103, a holiday that falls on Saturday is observed on the Friday before, and one that falls on Sunday is observed on the Monday after, for employees on a standard workweek. States copy it, change it, or ignore it.

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) publishes its Federal Holidays guidance, including the “In Lieu Of Holidays” section, explaining how an in-lieu day is determined for federal employees. It depends on the employee’s own schedule, not the date alone.

A state may have its own rule for its own employees, and its courts may apply yet another.

Courts define the counting as well as the days

A court deadline is not "N days, skipping the court's holidays."

Court rules define period computation. They set which day is day one, what happens when the last day falls on a weekend or holiday, and what "holiday" means for that court.

For federal civil cases, Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 6(a) sets out the method for computing time; Rule 6(a)(6)(C) includes a day declared a holiday by the state where the district court sits in the definition of “legal holiday.” Federal Rule 81 addresses the rules’ applicability to particular proceedings; see Rule 81.

The same rule covers the weekend case. If the last day of a period falls on a Saturday, Sunday or legal holiday, the period runs to the next day that is not one of those. A deadline that lands on a Saturday carries to the next open day.

So a filing deadline in a federal court already embeds a state calendar, chosen by the location of the court rather than by the location of either party. The counting rule and the closure list arrive as one package, from one publisher, and using either without the other is a mistake.

Building a calendar for one office

Name the office, not the organization. The receiving office for the filing, the branch that settles the payment, the agency counter that stamps the form.
Find its official publisherand the calendar or notice issued for that specific court, employee group, or payment service; use the named examples above to identify the right kind of source.
Capture the scopewhich locations it covers, and whether it covers half days and early closures.
Capture the substitution rulein the publisher's words.
Capture the counting ruleif the office has one, as courts do.
Write the as-of dateand store a copy of the document.
Set the next checkwhen the annual proclamation is usually issued, and again before any deadline that crosses a day the publisher marked as declared or provisional.

Worked example, a U.S. district court. Step 1 names the office: the clerk's office where the paper is handed in, not the district as a whole. Step 2 finds the publisher: the court's own site for local closures, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts for federal court holiday information, and OPM's Federal Holidays guidance for the federal holiday list.

Step 3 fixes the scope. One district can sit in more than one courthouse, and a closure at one of them is not a closure of the court. Steps 4 and 5 are the substitution rule and the counting rule, both published. Step 6 records the as-of date, the day the copy was taken.

Step 7 sets the next check: the month the court posts the holidays for the next year, and again before any deadline that crosses a closure announced after you saved the list. That is the cadence that keeps a copied calendar usable.

Seven steps, an hour the first time and minutes after. The alternative is to trust a tool's "state calendar" setting, which is a copy of one of these publishers as of some date the tool will not tell you.

Seven steps for one office

Name the office, not the organization
Find its publisher from the table
Capture scopelocations, half days, early closures
Capture the substitution rule in publisher's words
Capture the counting rule if the office has one
Write the as-of date and store a copy
Set the next check before declared or provisional days

Two offices, two calendars, one deadline chain

A chain of dates can cross offices: a document prepared in one state, filed in a court in another, paid through a bank in a third. Each link follows the calendar of the office that owns it.

One deadline chain, three offices

Document prepared in one state
Filed in a court in another state
Paid through a bank in a third state
Each link follows its own office calendar

Apply one state's list across the whole chain. Errors land at the joins, where a day closed for one office and open for the next is counted twice or not at all.

The method for a chain, with slack in one named place and each link owned, is under subtracting business days. The four definitions hidden inside "business day", which a state calendar answers only partly, are under adding business days.

What this page will not do

It will not tell you which days a given state closes. The information is not secret. It is published by a body that can update it. Reproducing it here would freeze one version and strip its substitution and counting rules.

Take it from the publisher, with the fields above. Compare two states' lists the way the country-level publishing chain suggests: as documents with rules, not rows of dates.

A merged calendar cannot be taken apart again

The tempting simplification, once several layers apply, is to combine them into a single list of closed dates and keep only that.

Separate layers versus merged list

Separate layers

Which layer closed a day: Trivial to answer
Which layer moved a count: Trivial to answer
Which layers apply to another office: Trivial to answer
Combining at calculation: One operation, costs nothing

Merged list

Which layer closed a day: Unrecoverable
Which layer moved a count: Unrecoverable
Which layers apply to another office: Unrecoverable
Combining at calculation: Guesswork under pressure

Three questions decide a challenged count. Which layer closed a given day. Which layer changed when a count moved. And which layers apply to a different office covered by the same system. All three are trivial while the layers are separate and unrecoverable once they are not.

Keep each list as its own record with its publisher, its reach and the date you took it, and combine them at the moment of calculation. Combining is one operation and costs nothing; separating a merged list is guesswork, and the guess has to be made by whoever is already under pressure because a date is in dispute.

Common questions

The national list and the state list disagree. Which applies?

Whichever the receiving office follows, and the office's own publication says which. Neither list is senior in the abstract.

Is a state employee calendar good enough for a court deadline?

No. Courts publish their own closures and their own counting rules. The two calendars overlap heavily and diverge on exactly the days that decide a close deadline.

My tool offers a state setting. Can I rely on it?

Only if it names the publisher and the as-of date of the list it loaded, and only for the scope that publisher covers. A tool that says "state holidays" without saying whose is offering a personnel calendar at best.

How often do sub-national calendars change?

At least once a year, when the annual proclamation is issued, and unpredictably in between. A monthly or yearly working-day count built on a state list is a count as of the date the list was taken, and should say so.