Holidays in Hesse 2025: How to plan your days off optimally!

In 2025, public holidays in Hesse will fall on working days, giving employees the opportunity to take advantage of long weekends through clever vacation planning. There are a total of 21 public holidays in Germany, but only ten public holidays are celebrated in Hesse. This gives employees an opportunity to enjoy extensive free time with just a few days of vacation.

At the beginning of 2025, students in Hesse can look forward to a week of school holidays for the Hesse Week after the New Year. The first day of school after the holidays is on Monday, January 13, 2025. The school holidays in Hesse have already been set until 2030, which makes long-term planning easier.

Important public holidays and school holidays

On Monday, January 6, 2025, many people in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg will have the day off due to Epiphany. The next public holiday in Hesse is Good Friday, which will be celebrated on April 18, 2025. This is followed by Easter Monday on April 21st, while the Easter holidays begin on April 7th.

Another worker-friendly holiday is Labor Day, which falls on a Thursday on May 1, 2025, allowing for a long weekend. Employees in Hesse can take four days off three times in a row with just one day of vacation, until the summer. Ascension Day will be celebrated on May 29, 2025 (Thursday), followed by Corpus Christi on June 19, 2025 (Thursday), and Whit Monday falls on June 9, 2025.

The only public holiday until Christmas 2025 in Hesse is German Unity Day, which falls on a Friday, October 3rd. The school holidays for 2025 have already been set and include:

• Weihnachtsferien 2024/25: 23. Dezember 2024 bis 10. Januar 2025
• Osterferien 2025: 7. April bis 21. April 2025
• Sommerferien 2025: 7. Juli bis 15. August 2025
• Herbstferien 2025: 6. bis 18. Oktober 2025
• Weihnachtsferien 2025/26: 22. Dezember 2025 bis 10. Januar 2026

Christmas 2025 will be celebrated on December 25th (Thursday) with the first holiday and on December 26th (Friday) with the second holiday. Furthermore, New Year's Day 2026 also falls on a Thursday.

As hessenschau.de reported, the holidays in 2025 will be employee-friendly overall, as both Christmas holidays come right before a weekend. May 1st also falls on a Thursday, which invites bridge days. It is also mentioned that a longer vacation period around Christmas is possible with just a few vacation days, specifically from December 20, 2025 to January 4, 2026, which results in 16 days off from work with only seven vacation days required.

The statutory holidays in Hesse are New Year's Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Labor Day, Ascension Day, Whit Monday, Corpus Christi, German Unity Day and Christmas Day. Hesse is one of the federal states with the fewest public holidays in Germany, as it only has ten public holidays compared to Bavaria, which has twelve public holidays. It is important to mention that until 1994 the day of repentance and prayer was an additional holiday in Hesse, but it was canceled.