A public holiday is an official, government-recognised non-working day for the general population. For your employees, this may mean an additional mandatory day off which is included in their general paid time off allowance. You can configure how Public holidays impact the allowance in Absence Policy Settings.
Creating a new calendar
A public holiday calendar in Zelt is associated with a country. When you go to Company Settings → Absence → Public holidays, you will already see the list of countries your company is using. Here you can add more from a list of templates or create your own list.
The "New calendar" drawer asks you to choose a mode upfront:
Country: pick a country and Zelt creates a calendar for it. The calendar name is auto-filled from the country you select but you can customise it.
Custom: create a blank calendar with any name, for use cases not covered by a standard country calendar.
Seeding holidays from an external source
For country-based calendars, a new "Seed from..." button appears in the calendar detail view. This replaces all holidays in the calendar with data fetched from an external source: either Nager.Date or Google Calendar. Use this to quickly populate or refresh a calendar rather than adding holidays one by one.
Year navigation inside a calendar
Inside a country-based calendar's holiday list, a year chip now appears above the table. Clicking it lets you navigate directly to that country's calendar for a different year (e.g. switch from 2026 to 2027) without going back to the list. These are calendar years, which may differ from your absence policy years.
Country dropdown is filtered
When assigning a holiday calendar on a contract section in the profile, the country dropdown now only shows countries that have a calendar actually set up in your company.
Public holidays in the absence table
If Public holidays are enabled in the absence policy and are auto-booked, requests for these days appear alongside regular absence requests in the Time → Requests table. Each public holiday row shows a "Public holiday" status badge. These requests are auto-approved by default.
Employees can request cancellation of a public holiday (e.g. if they work on a bank holiday and want to reclaim the day). That request will show as pending until actioned, just like any other cancellation request.
Public holidays on the calendar
Clicking a public holiday event on the company or team calendar opens a detail drawer showing:
The date of the holiday
The country (for country-based calendars)
The holiday calendar name it belongs to
A searchable list of employees who observe that holiday