Islamic Holidays 2027 and 2028

There are two canonical Islamic holidays, both called Eid: Eid al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan, and Eid al-Adha during the pilgrimage season. Everything else above is an observance rather than a festival, and a few are kept quietly by fasting rather than celebrating.

Isra and Mi’raj appears twice in the 2027 column because it genuinely falls twice that year, in January and again in December. That is the eleven-day drift at work: a holiday landing in early January comes round again before the Gregorian year is out.

The dates follow the Umm al-Qura calendar, the calculated calendar Saudi Arabia publishes and most printed calendars use. Your local mosque may announce a date one day either side, which is normal and explained below. The full calendar below has every year in full, plus the twelve Hijri months.

Ramadan is a month, not a day, and for most Muslims it is the centre of the year. From first light until sunset, adults who are able give up food, drink and intimacy, and try to give up the smaller habits too: the sharp reply, the wasted hour, the phone. Children, travellers, the sick, the elderly, and women who are pregnant, nursing or menstruating are exempt, and those who can make the days up later do.

The rhythm of the month is domestic. Families eat suhoor before dawn, break the fast at sunset with iftar, traditionally with dates and water, and many pray taraweeh at the mosque at night. Reciting the Qur’an and giving charity both rise sharply. Ramadan is the month in which the Qur’an began to be revealed, which is why it carries the weight it does.

Ramadan lasts 29 or 30 days, and it is the fast, not the calendar, that ends it: the month closes when the next new crescent is sighted.

The Night of Decree falls in the last ten nights of Ramadan and is described in the Qur’an as better than a thousand months. Its exact date is deliberately unspecified, which is the point: Muslims are encouraged to search for it across the odd nights, so the whole final stretch of the month is spent in prayer. Most communities mark the 27th night as the likeliest, and that is the date printed on calendars, but the tradition is to treat any of the last ten as a candidate. Some spend the final ten days in i’tikaf, a retreat in the mosque.

Eid al-Fitr, the Festival of Breaking the Fast, arrives the morning after Ramadan ends and is one of the two festivals Islam actually prescribes. It begins with a communal prayer, held early, often outdoors or in a hall because no mosque is big enough. Before that prayer every household is expected to pay Zakat al-Fitr, a small fixed charity calculated per person, so that nobody in the community is short on the day itself.

Then it is a holiday in the ordinary sense. New clothes, visits to relatives, food all day, and money or gifts for the children, which in many cultures is called Eidi. It is commonly kept for up to three days where the calendar allows. The greeting is “Eid Mubarak”, blessed Eid.

In the final month of the year, Dhu al-Hijjah, around two million people travel to Mecca for the Hajj, the pilgrimage every Muslim who is physically and financially able is expected to make once in a lifetime. The rites run over several days and retrace the story of Ibrahim, Hajar and Isma’il.

Its high point is the Day of Arafah, the ninth of the month, when pilgrims stand on the plain of Arafat from noon until sunset in open prayer. For the rest of the Muslim world, who are not there, the day is widely kept as a fast, and it is one of the most valued fasts of the year. Arafah is the day before Eid al-Adha, which is why the two always appear together on a calendar.

Eid al-Adha, the Festival of the Sacrifice, is the larger of the two Eids and marks Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son at God’s command, and the ram sent in the son’s place. Like Eid al-Fitr it opens with a communal morning prayer.

What distinguishes it is the qurbani, or udhiyah: a sheep, goat, cow or camel is slaughtered according to the rules of the faith, and the meat is divided three ways, between the family, relatives and neighbours, and the poor. That last third is the heart of the day, and it is why Eid al-Adha is the point in the year when many families in difficulty receive meat they could not otherwise buy. Muslims who live where slaughter is impractical usually pay a charity to carry it out on their behalf, often in another country.

Eid al-Adha runs across four days in total: the tenth of Dhu al-Hijjah and the three that follow.

The first of Muharram opens the Hijri year, counted from the migration of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE. The migration, the hijra, is the event the whole calendar is named after, and it was chosen as year one because it was the moment the Muslim community became a community rather than a persecuted group.

It is not a party. There is no prescribed ritual and no fireworks tradition. Most Muslims mark it with reflection, or simply note it and carry on. Muharram is also one of the four sacred months of the Islamic year, alongside Rajab, Dhu al-Qadah and Dhu al-Hijjah.

Ashura is kept very differently by different Muslims, and it is worth being precise about it.

For Sunni Muslims, it is a recommended fast. The tradition holds that it is the day God delivered Musa (Moses) and his people from Pharaoh, and the Prophet encouraged fasting it, usually together with the ninth or eleventh of the month.

For Shia Muslims, Ashura is the most solemn day of the year. It marks the killing of Husayn ibn Ali, the Prophet’s grandson, at Karbala in 680 CE. It is a day of mourning, with public processions, recitations of the events at Karbala, and black clothing. The specific practices vary between countries and communities.

Mawlid marks the birth of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, generally kept on 12 Rabi al-Awwal. Where it is celebrated it is warm and public: recitations of the Prophet’s life, poetry in his praise, communal meals, sometimes street decorations and processions. It is a public holiday in a large number of Muslim-majority countries.

It is also the one day on this page that Muslims disagree about. Because the celebration developed some centuries after the Prophet’s lifetime, some scholarly traditions, including the Salafi one, hold that it should not be observed as a festival at all. Both positions are long-standing and widely held, so whether a given community marks Mawlid tells you something about that community rather than about Islam as a whole.

Isra and Mi’raj, often placed on 27 Rajab, commemorates the night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem and the ascension through the heavens, the night on which the five daily prayers were given. It is usually marked with night prayer and with retelling the story rather than with celebration.

Shab-e-Barat, the night of the fifteenth of Shaban, is observed in South Asia, Turkey and parts of the Middle East as a night of forgiveness, spent in prayer and often in visiting the graves of family. Like Mawlid, it is kept in some traditions and not in others, and it falls about two weeks before Ramadan begins.

A Gregorian year always spans two Hijri years. 2027 runs from the middle of 1448 AH into 1449 AH, which turns over on 6 June.

Everything shifts about eleven days earlier. Ramadan 2028 starts in January, so 2028 contains the start of the fast but Eid al-Fitr arrives in February rather than March.

What each of these days actually marks, and how it is observed, is covered in the guide to the Islamic holidays.

2026 ran from the middle of 1447 AH into 1448 AH, which began on 16 June. For what is coming, see 2027.

The highlighted rows are the four sacred months, named as such in the Qur’an, during which fighting was traditionally forbidden. The month names are older than Islam and most describe the season or the custom they originally fell in, which is a little ironic given that a lunar calendar means they no longer keep to any season at all.

A Hijri month begins when the new crescent moon appears after sunset, and runs until the next one, which takes 29 or 30 days. Twelve of those come to about 354 days. The Gregorian year is about 365. The gap of roughly eleven days is the whole story.

Most calendars solve this by inserting something: the Gregorian adds a leap day, the Hebrew calendar adds a whole leap month to keep Passover in spring. The Islamic calendar deliberately does neither. The Qur’an rejects the pre-Islamic practice of adding months to keep the pilgrimage in a convenient season, so the year is left as it is and every Islamic date walks backwards through the Gregorian year, completing a full circuit in about 33 years.

That is why Ramadan is sometimes a summer fast of nineteen hours in northern Europe and sometimes a winter fast of ten, and why nobody can have a fixed birthday in both calendars.

Every date on this page is calculated. Not every community starts the month by calculation, and this is the reason two families in the same city can celebrate Eid a day apart.

There are three established approaches. Some communities require a local sighting of the crescent with the naked eye before the month begins. Others follow the announcement from Saudi Arabia. Hajj takes place there, so its dates necessarily follow the Saudi announcement, and some communities extend that to the rest of the year. Others do not, and whether one country’s sighting should settle the month elsewhere is itself long debated. Others use astronomical calculation, which is what makes a printed calendar possible at all and what the tables above use.

None of these is a fringe position, and the disagreement is old. The practical rule is simple: use a calendar to plan, and confirm with your local mosque in the last few days. For the two Eids, the announcement usually comes the evening before.

The dates in the tables follow the Umm al-Qura calendar, the calculated calendar published by Saudi Arabia and the basis for most printed Islamic calendars, most calendar apps, and the school and government schedules of a lot of the Muslim world.

Umm al-Qura decides whether a month has 29 or 30 days by a geometric rule based on the moon’s position at sunset over Mecca, rather than by whether anyone actually saw it. That makes it predictable years ahead, which is what a calendar needs to be. It also means it can differ by a day from what is announced for religious purposes, including in Saudi Arabia itself, where the religious dates still rest on testimony of a sighting. Both things are true at once, and it is the ordinary reason a date shifts.

The standard greeting for both festivals is “Eid Mubarak”. “Eid Sa’id” (happy Eid) and, in the Gulf, “Kul ‘am wa antum bi-khayr” are also common. During Ramadan, “Ramadan Mubarak” or “Ramadan Kareem” both work. None of these require you to be Muslim to say them, and they are almost always welcome.

Both Eids are public holidays across the Muslim world. In the United States and most of Europe they are not federal holidays, though some school districts with large Muslim populations, New York City and Philadelphia among them, close for them. Elsewhere, Muslim families usually take the day as annual leave, and a request for the two Eids is the single most useful accommodation an employer or a school can offer, particularly since the date is only confirmed a day or two ahead.

If you are teaching this, our schools resources and the Islamic studies for kids guide cover how to introduce the year to a class.