Holiday Bridge Planner | Longest Consecutive Days Off in Japan
Enter a date range and how many paid-leave days you have, and this tool finds the top 5 ways to place your leave around Japan's weekends and public holidays to create the longest possible streak of consecutive days off — useful for planning around Golden Week, Obon, or New Year. Everything runs in your browser; nothing is sent to a server.
The dates and leave days you enter are processed entirely in your browser and are never sent to a server.
Enter a date range and your available leave days, then press "Calculate".
How to use
- Enter the date range you want to build a streak of days off in — for example, Japan's Golden Week, Obon, or the New Year holidays.
- Enter how many paid-leave days you have available. If you're not sure how many days you've accrued, check them first with the Paid Leave Accrual Calculator.
- Press "Calculate" to see the baseline streak (using no leave at all) plus up to five ranked options showing exactly which days to take off.
How it works
How days off are counted
- Saturdays and Sundays are treated as days off. If your work schedule follows a different weekly pattern (e.g. shift work), this tool's weekend assumption will not match your case.
- Public holidays follow Japan's official holiday data published by the Cabinet Office (Naikaku-fu), including substitute holidays (furikae kyujitsu) and "national holidays" that fall between two other holidays. This is the same source used by the Business Day Calculator on this site.
- If weekends or holidays immediately before or after your chosen period are consecutive with it, they are included in the streak length shown — but paid leave can only be placed on days that fall inside the period you specified.
How the top options are chosen
- The tool finds every maximal stretch within your period where the number of workdays needing paid leave is at most your available leave days, ranks them by streak length (longest first), then by leave days used (fewest first), then by start date (earliest first), and shows the top 5.
- It always calculates the baseline (longest streak using zero paid leave) for comparison.
Data coverage
The holiday data covers 1955–2027. Dates outside this range return an error rather than a guessed answer — Japanese public holidays for years further out are not yet legally fixed. This tool's data will be updated when the coverage is extended.
Source
- Holiday data: Cabinet Office of Japan, "National Holidays" public dataset (https://www8.cao.go.jp/chosei/shukujitsu/syukujitsu.csv)
FAQ
Are the dates or leave days I enter sent anywhere?
No. All calculation happens locally in your browser; nothing is transmitted to any server.
I work a shift schedule with days off other than Saturday and Sunday — can I still use this?
This tool assumes Saturday and Sunday are your regular days off and cannot be reconfigured. If your schedule differs, treat the results as a general reference and adjust manually for your actual rest days.
Why are there multiple options?
Different placements of your paid leave can sometimes produce the same streak length. The tool prioritizes options that use fewer leave days, and among ties, the one starting earliest.
Where does the holiday data come from, and how current is it?
It's taken directly from the Japanese Cabinet Office's official public holiday dataset, including substitute holidays and "national holidays" between two other holidays. Coverage runs from 1955 through 2027; years beyond that aren't calculated because Japan's holidays that far out haven't been legally finalized yet.
My company's holidays differ from the standard weekends and public holidays — what should I do?
This tool assumes standard Saturdays, Sundays, and Japanese public holidays. It does not account for company-specific closures, summer breaks, or year-end/New Year shutdowns, so please cross-check the result against your employer's actual holiday calendar.
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