Nepal
Nepal's public calendar is dominated by religious festival rather than a small statutory list, and it is keyed to the Bikram Sambat calendar that runs about 57 years ahead of the Gregorian one. The national new year - Baisakh 1 - falls on 13 or 14 April.
The calendar
Nepal does not use the Gregorian calendar for civil or religious purposes. It uses Bikram Sambat, which runs roughly 56 to 57 years ahead: while most of the world is in 2026, Nepal is in 2083 BS. Because the two calendars drift slightly against each other, a BS date does not map to a single fixed Gregorian date. The clearest example is the new year - Baisakh 1 falls on 13 April in some years and 14 April in others.
The year in festivals
Rather than a short list of named public holidays, Nepal has a year that is structured by religious observance. The seasons of the year each bring their own major festivals.
- Winter (January-February) - Losar and Gyalpo Lhosar, the Tamang and Himalayan new years; Sonam Losar; Maghe Sankranti, the harvest festival in mid-January.
- Late winter (February-March) - Maha Shivaratri, the great night of Shiva, and Prajatantra Diwas, democracy day, in February.
- Spring (March) - Holi, the festival of colour, and Ghode Jatra, which is a holiday in the Kathmandu valley specifically.
- Mid-April -Nepali New Year on 13 or 14 April, the climax of Bisket Jatra.
- May - Buddha Jayanti, the birth of the Buddha, in early May.
- Autumn (September-October) - Dashain, the fifteen-day festival that is the high point of the Nepalese year.
Dashain and the new year
The two festivals that most define the Nepalese year are Dashain and the new year, and they bookend it. Dashain is the biggest religious festival, a fifteen-day autumn celebration of the triumph of good over evil, marked by the tika ceremony in which elders apply a red mark to the foreheads of the young. The new year, Baisakh 1, opens the year afresh. Between them they bracket the whole cycle, and most Nepalis would name Dashain rather than the new year as the festival of the year.
Bisket Jatra and the new year
The new year is not one uniform celebration. In the Kathmandu valley it is dominated by Bisket Jatra, the nine-day chariot festival of Bhaktapur and Thimi, with tug-of-war over the chariot of Bhairava, processions through the valley towns, and the display of the red banner at the start of the solar year. Elsewhere in the country the day is marked by families and communities in their own ways. Nepal is multicultural, and the new year is genuinely plural - but the mid-April window in which the various community new years fall is the shared shape of the season.
Major holiday briefs on this page
- Nepali New Year (Baisakh 1) - 13or 14 April, and Bisket Jatra
- Dashain - the fifteen-day autumn festival
- Losar - the Tamang and Himalayan new year
- Holi - the festival of colour
- Maha Shivaratri - the great night of Shiva
- Vesak - Buddha Jayanti