UK Bank Holidays

In the UK, “bank holiday” is the commonly used term for both bank and public holidays; The days on which most businesses and non-essential services close. Most companies when measuring and reporting on activity, want to know how weekdays, weekends and bank holidays affect their performance. Depending on where in the UK you are and what period you are reporting for this can be tricky with the bank holidays changing several times over the last hundred years.

Bank holidays are holidays when banks and many other businesses are closed for the day. Public holidays are holidays which have been observed through custom and practice. From the direct.gov.uk website

These can be divided into two groups, re-occurring bank holidays and special royal proclamations.

Reoccuring Bank Holidays

Royal Proclamations

SQL Implementation

Calculating Easter Sunday

CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[CalculateEasterDay] ( @Year int )
RETURNS date AS
BEGIN
    /*
    A modified version of the MS-SQL algorithm posted on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computus#Software.
    Which itself is Based on the Anonymous Gregorian Algorithm, also known as the Meeus/Jones/Butcher algorithm.
    */
    DECLARE @a int, @b int, @d int
        ,@MC int = @Year %  19 -- 19 Year Metonic Cycle
        ,@SR int = @Year % 100 -- Secular Remainder
        ,@SN int = @Year / 100 -- Secular Number
    ;
    SELECT
        @a = ((19 * @MC + @SN - (@SN / 4) - ((@SN - ((@SN + 8) / 25) + 1) / 3) + 15) % 30),
        @b = ((32 + 2 * (@SN % 4) + 2 * (@SR / 4) - @a - (@SR % 4)) % 7),
        @d = @a + @b - 7 * ((@MC + 11 * @a + 22 * @b) / 451) + 114
    ;
    RETURN DATEFROMPARTS(@Year, @d / 31, (@d % 31) + 1);
END;
GO

So after all that, can we just be thankful, that so far, Cornwall’s attempts to make St. Piran’s Day a bank holiday in Cornwall, have been unsuccessful. Otherwise, we would need to calculate per region.