What Are Uruguay’s Public Holidays in 2026? A Complete Employer and Payroll Guide

Uruguay recognizes 15 statutory holidays in 2026, but only five carry mandatory double pay under Article 18 of Ley 12.590. The other 10 feriados laborables carry no premium-pay obligation. Uruguay still shifts three of those dates to a Monday in some years under Ley 16.805, in the wording given to it by Ley 17.414, and in 2026 all three already land on a Sunday or a Monday, so every 2026 holiday falls on its exact calendar date.

2026 totals: 5 feriados no laborables (1 falls on a Saturday), 10 feriados laborables (1 falls on a Sunday), 15 total statutory holidays. Effective weekday impact: 4 mandatory paid holidays, 9 optional holidays.

What Extra Planning Do Uruguay’s 2026 Holidays Require?

Which 2026 Uruguay Holidays Fall on Weekends?

July 18 (Constitution Day, a feriado no laborable) falls on a Saturday in 2026, and April 19 (a feriado laborable) falls on a Sunday. For standard Monday-to-Friday employees, both produce no operational disruption and no substitute day off. Article 2 of Ley 16.805 exempts July 18 from the Monday shift altogether, alongside January 1, January 6, May 1, June 19, August 25, November 2, December 25, Carnival and Semana de Turismo. Article 1 observes a shiftable holiday on its own date whenever that date is a Saturday, a Sunday or a Monday.

Uruguay’s approach is among the simplest in the region, and the least generous to employees on this specific point. Colombia transfers most holidays to the following Monday under Ley 51 de 1983, and Argentina designates certain holidays as feriados trasladables with built-in rollover. Article 2’s exception list leaves only three of Uruguay’s 15 holidays inside Article 1’s reach, April 19, May 18 and October 12, and Article 1 never moves a date that already falls on a Saturday, a Sunday or a Monday. All three land on a Sunday or a Monday in 2026, so nothing moves this year.

Which Holidays Create the Highest Bridge-Day Risk for PTO Requests?

January 1 (Thursday, a feriado no laborable) and January 6 (Tuesday, a feriado laborable) are separated by just two business days in 2026, Friday January 2 and Monday January 5, creating the year’s first bridge-day cluster and a strong incentive for employees to request both days off. Uruguayan staff call this hacer puente, taking an adjacent workday off to connect a mid-week holiday to the weekend. It carries no legal mandate under Ley 12.590 and no MTSS directive.

August 25 (Tuesday, a feriado no laborable) is the highest-impact bridge scenario of the year. Independence Day is mandatory, so employees cannot be required to work without double pay, and the adjacent Monday carries maximum PTO pressure. Engineering leaders should treat the week of August 24-28 as a four-day week and consider granting Monday, August 24 as a company-wide day off.

Why Do Uruguay’s Public Holidays Split Into Two Legal Categories?

Global HR platforms including Deel, Remote, and Papaya Global often list all 15 dates as equivalent “public holidays,” stripping out the premium-pay distinction that separates a double-pay day from a normal workday. If you are exploring Uruguayan employment broadly, our guide on how to hire in Uruguay covers the full compliance picture beyond holidays.

Ley 12.590 creates a two-tier system that most international payroll platforms collapse into a single category: five feriados no laborables with mandatory double pay, and ten feriados laborables where employers can require normal work at normal pay. Misclassifying a laborable day as no laborable doubles labor cost for that employee on that day under Article 18, while the reverse creates an MTSS (Ministry of Labor and Social Security) compliance exposure.

What Are the Five Feriados No Laborables?

Article 18 of Ley 12.590 names five feriados no laborables: January 1, May 1, July 18, August 25, and December 25. The statute states directly: “Los días 1º de enero, 1º de mayo, 18 de julio, 25 de agosto y 25 de diciembre de cada año, todo trabajador percibirá remuneración como si trabajara; en caso de trabajar, recibirá doble paga.” On each date, every worker receives regular pay as if they had worked, and if they actually work, they receive double pay: two times the regular rate total, not three. Some multinational payroll teams mistakenly stack a base wage plus two additional premiums, creating a triple-pay scenario with no basis in Uruguayan statute.

When a feriado no laborable lands on a Saturday or Sunday, Uruguayan law provides no transfer mechanism and no day-in-lieu entitlement. The holiday occurs on the weekend, the employee receives standard pay under Article 18, and no substitute Monday off materializes. The full 2026 calendar table above maps all five dates to their exact day of the week.

What Are the Ten Feriados Laborables?

Employers can legally require work on all ten feriados laborables at standard single-day pay, with zero premium obligation, per MTSS guidance on the absence of a special provision in Ley 12.590 for these dates. The complete list: January 6 (Epiphany), Carnival Monday and Tuesday, Holy Thursday and Good Friday during Semana de Turismo, April 19 (Desembarco de los 33 Orientales), May 18 (Batalla de Las Piedras), June 19 (Natalicio de Artigas), October 12 (Día de la Raza), and November 2 (Día de los Difuntos).

If the employee works, they earn their normal single day’s wage with no premium. If the employer voluntarily grants the day off, the employer still owes the employee’s full regular wage for that day: it functions as a paid absence, not an unpaid one.

Cultural practice diverges from legal minimums. Most Uruguayan employers grant Carnival and Semana de Turismo off as a near-universal norm, and many collective bargaining agreements formalize the expectation. Uruguay’s consejos de salarios framework classifies the IT sector under Group 20, Subgroup 02, and any holiday obligation beyond the statutory minimum for these employees sits in that group’s collective agreement, so read the current one before you budget.

How Do Carnival and Semana de Turismo Disrupt Q1 and Q2 Operations?

Carnival Monday and Tuesday (February 16-17, 2026) and Semana de Turismo (March 30-April 5, 2026) carry a combined four official feriados laborables, but Uruguayan tech teams routinely treat both windows as full-week disruptions regardless of the narrower legal requirement.

What Should Teams Expect During Carnival Week?

Monday, February 16 and Tuesday, February 17 are both feriados laborables, so employers face zero premium-pay obligation for either date. Neither day is protected time off under Ley 12.590, and neither is a normal working day in practice, so confirm in writing which of your Uruguayan team members are taking them before the week arrives. Avoid scheduling critical-path deliverables for the week of February 16.

How Does Semana de Turismo Replace Holy Week?

The 2026 Semana de Turismo runs Monday, March 30 through Sunday, April 5, and only Thursday, April 2 and Friday, April 3 are official feriados laborables. What most of the hemisphere calls Semana Santa, Uruguay designates as Semana de Turismo, and the same secular naming runs through the rest of the calendar: January 6 is Día de los Niños and December 25 is Día de la Familia in Uruguay’s official designations.

Granting the full week off is common practice in Uruguay’s tech sector even though the statutory requirement covers only two days. Many companies require employees to use 2-3 days of annual vacation leave for Monday through Wednesday, with the company granting Thursday and Friday as paid holidays. Employment contracts should specify the arrangement, full company closure, partial vacation deduction, or skeleton-crew rotation, before an employee’s first Tourism Week.

What Belongs on a Q1-Q2 Workforce Continuity Checklist?

A first-year Uruguayan employee has approximately 35 total non-working days (15 holidays plus the 20-day vacation entitlement Ley 12.590 grants from year one), compared with a typical US tech employee’s 26 days (11 federal holidays plus roughly 15 days of PTO). Two of Uruguay’s 15 holidays land on a weekend in 2026, so 33 of those 35 days come out of a standard 260-day work year, which leaves 227 productive days in Uruguay against 234 in the US, a 3.0% reduction.

Uruguay’s statutory vacation and holidays add up to 35 non-working days, 9 more than the typical US baseline.

Five steps keep that gap from becoming a delivery surprise:

1. Audit Q1-Q2 holiday exposure against project milestones. Map every holiday between January and June against sprint cycles and build buffer into the affected sprints. Do not commit those sprints at full story-point capacity.
2. Build a coverage matrix for each multi-day disruption window. Cross-train at least one non-Uruguayan backup per critical function: on-call rotation, deployment approval, incident response.
3. Set holiday communication protocols and async handoff procedures. Define response-time SLAs during reduced-capacity periods and publish them in writing.
4. Align sprint and release timelines to avoid delivering into a void. Do not schedule major releases during Carnival week or Semana de Turismo, and treat the Monday after Semana de Turismo (April 6) as a re-onboarding day with no deliveries scheduled on it.
5. Distribute the full 2026 Uruguay holiday calendar to all cross-functional team leads by Q4 2025. Teams that discover Semana de Turismo in March are already behind.

What Happens When Employees Work on a Uruguay National Holiday?

Uruguayan employees can legally refuse to work on any of the five feriados no laborables without facing disciplinary action, while an unjustified refusal on a feriado laborable is treated as a normal absence.

Can Uruguayan Employees Refuse to Work on a Feriado No Laborable?

Yes. Uruguayan employees can refuse to work on any of the five feriados no laborables without facing disciplinary action or any adverse employment consequence. Article 18’s language frames the default state as absence, not presence, and an employer who penalizes an employee for refusing faces an abusive-dismissal claim, a doctrine Uruguayan labour courts have built through consistent case law.

For feriados laborables, the calculus inverts. An employer can schedule normal work, and an employee who refuses without approved PTO commits an unjustified absence; repeated unjustified absences can constitute notoria mala conducta, authorizing termination without severance.

If a Uruguayan developer’s mandatory holiday coincides with a normal US business day, the employee’s statutory right to refuse applies regardless of the US team’s operational needs.

How Do You Calculate Uruguay Holiday Pay Step by Step?

Four scenarios exhaust every possible combination, using a senior engineer’s average Uruguay salary of $75,000 per year and a 260-workday year for a daily rate of $288.46. Ley 12.590 prescribes no divisor. Most Uruguayan payroll processors follow BPS reporting convention and divide by 30 calendar days, which produces a lower daily rate of $208.33; the 260-workday basis used here reflects actual working days and gives the higher of the two figures.

If all five mandatory holidays are worked, the additional cost totals 5 x $288.46 = $1,442.30 per employee, approximately 1.92% of annual salary. Non-compliance can lead to back-pay orders with interest accumulating for up to five years under Uruguay’s statute of limitations (Ley 18.091). Employers of record will refuse to process non-compliant payroll because it exposes them to co-employment liability, and reputational risk still flows to the client company.

How Do Uruguay’s Holidays Compare to Other Latin American Markets?

Uruguay’s holiday-pay structure sits at one extreme of a five-country comparison of public holidays across Latin America: fewest mandatory days, highest per-day cost.

Why Does Uruguay Have Fewer Mandatory Days but Higher Per-Day Cost?

Uruguay’s five mandatory premium-pay days are the leanest mandatory count in the comparison set, but a higher salary base amplifies the per-day cost: senior software engineers in Uruguay earn $65,000-$90,000 a year, with tech-sector wages rising 8-12% annually from 2022 to 2024 per Terminal.io’s 2024 Tech Salary Guide, VanHack, Deel’s Global Hiring Report, and CUTI’s salary survey.

Salary figures compiled from Terminal.io, VanHack, Deel’s Global Hiring Report 2024, and CUTI’s 2023 salary survey. The exposure column applies each country’s own premium rate to a daily rate of annual salary divided by 260 workdays, the same basis as the Uruguay pay table above, and it assumes every mandatory holiday is worked. Colombia’s surcharge sits in Código Sustantivo del Trabajo Article 179 in the wording Article 14 of Ley 2466 de 2025 gave it. Its parágrafo transitorio lets an employer phase the 100% rate in by steps: 80% from July 1, 2025, 90% from July 1, 2026, and full application of the article from July 1, 2027, and it leaves the employer free to take up the 100% rate from the law’s entry into force. Ten of Colombia’s 18 festivos in 2026 fall before that second step. Brazil figures exclude state and municipal holidays, which can add additional premium-pay days; Argentina’s count shifts annually by decree.

Uruguay’s five mandatory holidays give it the lowest annual premium exposure of the five markets, despite the highest senior-developer salary.

Brazil and Argentina both pay a worked holiday at double the day’s wage, under Article 9 of Lei 605/1949 and Article 166 of the Ley de Contrato de Trabajo. Mexico pays more. Article 75 of the Ley Federal del Trabajo gives the worker a double wage for the service performed on top of the wage already owed for the mandatory rest day, so a worked día de descanso obligatorio costs three times the daily rate. Uruguay’s five feriados no laborables carry no religious designation in their official legal framing, so accommodate individual religious-observance requests under general PTO policy.

How Do You Build a 2026 Uruguay Holiday Calendar for a Distributed HR Team?

A reliable 2026 Uruguay holiday calendar needs three components: the dated list synced into your HR system, contract language covering both holiday tiers, and a mid-year recheck against MTSS updates.

How Do You Sync Uruguay Holidays Into a Global HR Calendar?

Five steps keep a Uruguay holiday calendar current: import the dated list, flag the five double-pay days, block the two extended-disruption windows, decide which feriados laborables to observe, and communicate the finalized calendar before the year starts.

1. Import the full 2026 Uruguay holiday date list into your HR calendar system. Tag each entry with its legal classification. Uruguay abolished Daylight Saving Time in 2015 through Decreto 178/015 of June 29, 2015, which repealed Decreto 311/006, and remains on UTC-3 year-round, giving 7-8 hours of overlap with US Eastern time and 4-5 hours with US Pacific time.
2. Set payroll flags for the five double-pay days. Configure your payroll system or notify your EOR to apply the Article 18 premium for January 1, May 1, July 18, August 25, and December 25.
3. Block Carnival (February 16-17) and the Semana de Turismo work week (March 30-April 3) for reduced-capacity planning. Treat all five no laborables as non-negotiable closures, then decide the laborables against your own delivery calendar and the US federal holiday calendar.
4. Decide which feriados laborables your company will observe and document the decision in employment contracts. Review sector-level collective bargaining agreements for additional obligations.
5. Communicate the finalized 2026 holiday calendar to all managers by Q4 2025.

What Contract Clauses Cover Uruguayan Holiday Compliance?

Three clauses close most of the compliance gap: a Holiday Observance Clause naming the observed holidays with a definitive list delivered by January 31 each year, a Work on Mandatory Holidays Clause confirming double-pay compensation under Article 18, and a Coverage and Notification Clause requiring 48 hours’ notice if an employee cannot work a laborable date that is a regular US workday. Uruguayan employees also receive a statutory minimum of 20 days of paid annual leave from the first year, so contracts should address how vacation interacts with the holiday calendar, particularly during Semana de Turismo.

How Do You Catch Mid-Year Legislative Changes Before They Hit Payroll?

Two things move between calendar years. Article 1 of Ley 16.805 changes the observed date of April 19, May 18 and October 12 whenever one of them lands on a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday: a Tuesday or Wednesday date moves back to the preceding Monday, and a Thursday or Friday date moves forward to the following Monday. 2026 escapes it because all three fall on a Sunday or a Monday. 2027 does not: May 18 falls on a Tuesday and moves back to Monday, May 17, and October 12 falls on a Tuesday and moves back to Monday, October 11. April 19, 2027 is itself a Monday and stays put. Parliament can also amend the list itself. Set a mid-year review checkpoint against MTSS and Impo.com.uy, Uruguay’s official legal publication platform, to confirm no changes have been enacted since the last calendar update.

Frequently Asked Questions About Uruguay Holidays

Do Uruguayan employees get paid on feriados laborables if they don’t work?

Only if the employer grants the day off. Employers are not legally required to give the ten feriados laborables off, but if they do, the day is a paid absence, not unpaid leave.

Can a US company require a Uruguayan employee to work on Constitution Day if it falls on a Saturday?

No. July 18 is a feriado no laborable, so the employee can decline without facing discipline, whichever day of the week the date falls on. An employee who does agree to work it must be paid double under Article 18. In 2026 July 18 is a Saturday, so the question reaches only teams that roster weekend coverage.

Does an EOR handle the double-pay calculation automatically?

A compliant EOR applies the Article 18 premium automatically once a feriado no laborable is flagged as worked, but the underlying legal exposure and reputational risk stay with the client company if the arrangement is structured incorrectly.

How far in advance should a company finalize its Uruguay holiday calendar?

By Q4 of the prior year. Distributing the finalized calendar to managers by Q4 2025 gives sprint planners time to build Carnival and Semana de Turismo into Q1-Q2 capacity models before they hit the schedule.

Do vacation days and holidays overlap in Uruguay?

No. Uruguay’s 20-day statutory vacation entitlement is separate from the 15 statutory holidays; a first-year employee’s 35 non-working days combine both categories.

What happens if an employer misclassifies a feriado laborable as mandatory?

Misclassification inflates labor cost unnecessarily by paying a premium the law doesn’t require. The reverse error, treating a no laborable day as optional, creates MTSS exposure instead.

Ready to Hire in Uruguay Without the Holiday-Pay Guesswork?

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