Two in seven

A wheel that slips one notch a year

An ordinary year is fifty-two weeks and one day long. That leftover day pushes every fixed date one position further into the week, and a leap year pushes it two. Romania's National Day was a Monday in 2025, is a Tuesday in 2026, will be a Wednesday in 2027, then jumps straight to Friday in 2028, over the day added in February.

Twelve of the seventeen days Romanian labour law declares non-working are tied to a date: 1 and 2 January, Epiphany, Saint John the Baptist, 24 January, 1 May, 1 June, 15 August, Saint Andrew's Day, 1 December and the two days of Christmas. Each of them lands on a weekend between six and eight times over the next twenty-five years, which is almost exactly two years in every seven.

The other five move with Orthodox Easter, the calendar this count follows, and behave completely differently. Good Friday and the two Mondays that follow Easter and Pentecost can never fall on a weekend. Easter Sunday and Pentecost Sunday are Sundays by definition, so two of the days lost each year are lost by design rather than by accident.

The calendar, row by row

Each row is a holiday, each column a year. The red bands running diagonally downwards are the drift itself: a fixed date advances by one weekday each year and passes through the weekend every five or six years.

Twenty-eight calendars

The bar is the length of the legal list, split into what ends up on a working day, in blue, and what falls on a weekend, in red. The green tick marks the countries whose law moves a lost day onto a working day.

Romania has three more days written into law than Bulgaria and half a day fewer actually free.

Bulgaria comes first with 11.96 free working days a year, starting from 13.84 days on the statute book. Romania starts from 16.84 and arrives at 11.44. The three extra days in Romanian law melt on the way to the real calendar.

England has eight public holidays, less than half Romania's list, and loses none of them: when a day falls on a weekend, a substitute weekday becomes free instead, usually the following Monday. The result is a small calendar that stays whole. Even so, Romania keeps three and a half days more than England, because it starts from so much higher up.

Ireland solved the problem from the other end: half of its ten days are pinned to a Monday rather than to a date, so they have nowhere to fall. Ireland loses the least of the whole group, 1.20 days a year, and when it happens the employee is owed a paid day off within the month, an extra day of annual leave or an extra day's pay. Lithuania loses the most, 6.28 days a year, because three of its public holidays — Easter, Mother's Day and Father's Day — are Sundays by definition.

A working week, without a single extra day

If Romanian law moved every weekend holiday to the next free working day, the 16.84 days on paper would become 16.84 genuinely free days. Against today's calendar the gain would be 5.40 days a year, more than a full working week, without adding anything to the list in the labour code.

The spread between years is wide. In 2027 eight days fall on a weekend and nine free working days remain, the worst of the whole stretch; in 2028 thirteen remain. Added together, the twenty-five calendars from 2026 to 2050 send 135 Romanian public holidays into a weekend.

The switch above applies the rule to any of the twenty-eight countries, including the ones that already have it.

Any day, for twenty-five years

The same arithmetic applies to every date in the calendar, including the one you were born on.