Federal holidays 2024: How many days off do we get, what's closed in Florida this year?

C. A. Bridges, USA TODAY NETWORK - Florida
·3 min read

How many holidays get you a day off work in 2024?

That's not the same question as "how many federal holidays are there in 2024," though, because you'll still have to go to work on a couple of them.

These are the 11 official U.S. federal holidays this year:

  • New Year's Day: Monday, January 1st

  • Martin Luther King Jr. Day: Monday, January 15th (3rd Monday in January)

  • Presidents' Day: Monday, February 19th (3rd Monday in February)

  • Memorial Day: Monday, May 27th (last Monday in May)

  • Juneteenth National Independence Day: Wednesday, June 19th

  • Independence Day: Thursday, July 4th

  • Labor Day: Monday, September 2nd (1st Monday in September)

  • Indigenous Peoples' Day/Columbus Day: Monday, October 14th (2nd Monday in October)

  • Veterans Day: Monday, November 11th

  • Thanksgiving: Thursday, November 28th (4th Thursday in November)

  • Christmas: Wednesday, December 25th

People working in the Washington, D.C. metro area get an extra one every four years: Inauguration Day, January 20.

Of those 12, Floridians get a day off for nine of them.

Is Presidents Day a paid holiday in Florida?

No, although you might get a great deal on a mattress.

President's Day began as Washington's Birthday and was celebrated on Feb. 22 but was changed to the third Monday in February in 1971 to make consistent three-day weekends. The suggestion had been made in the 1960s to combine it with Abraham Lincoln's birthday (Feb. 12) but while that was never made official, retailers began using the name "President's Day" to advertise their long weekend sales and the name stuck.

As far as the federal calendar is concerned, though, it's still Washington's Birthday.

What is closed on federal holidays?

While it's a federal holiday and mail delivery and other government offices and services will be closed, if you're not a federal employer you won't get the day off. Congress has never declared the day a national holiday and Florida has not added it to the state's list of legal holidays. Many school districts will be closed, though.

Is Juneteenth a paid holiday in Florida?

Juneteenth commemorates the day the last enslaved people in the U.S. (in Galveston, Texas) were finally told they were free on June 17, 1866, two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Celebrations began the next day and the holiday, also known as Freedom Day, Jubilee Day or Emancipation Day, spread across the country as African Americans migrated away from the South. President Biden made it a federal holiday on June 17, 2021.

However, if you are not a federal worker, it's not a day off in the Sunshine State. Florida — along with states like California, Hawaii, Pennsylvania and more than two dozen others — doesn’t officially recognize the holiday and doesn’t include it on official calendars as a paid holiday. Some county commissions and city councils have declared Juneteenth a recognized holiday and closed offices.

Florida celebrates its Emancipation Day on May 20, commemorating the day emancipation was proclaimed in Tallahassee in 1865, but it also is not a paid holiday.

Florida actually recognizes 21 legal holidays, which mostly overlap the federal holidays with a lot of local commemorations when state offices will be closed.

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: When are the federal holidays in 2024? Here are your paid days off