What are Holidays in salesforce?

Holidays in Salesforce are records of non-working days attached to one or more Business Hours records. When a Holiday is in force, SLA milestone clocks pause, escalation rules pause, and any feature that respects Business Hours treats the day as outside operating hours.

What a Holiday record looks like

• Name — “Independence Day”, “Christmas 2026”
• Date — single date or recurring
• Recurrence — once or annually (with optional recurrence pattern)
• Time — full day or partial (e.g. half-day Christmas Eve)
• Business Hours linked — which calendars observe this holiday

Setup → Company Settings → Holidays.

How Holidays affect SLA timers

If an Entitlement Process is using Business Hours “EMEA Support” with the Holiday “Christmas Day” attached:

Case opened: Dec 24 at 14:00 (EMEA timezone)
Milestone: First Response in 4 business hours
Holiday: Dec 25 — Christmas Day
Business Hours: 9-5 Mon-Fri

Clock counts: Dec 24 (14:00-17:00 = 3h)
Pauses: Dec 25 (Holiday — entire day)
Resumes: Dec 26 (assuming weekday) at 09:00
Deadline: Dec 26 at 10:00 (1 more business hour from Dec 24)

Without the Holiday record, the deadline would have fallen during the closed-day, causing breach alerts when no agent was scheduled.

Recurring vs one-off

• One-off: “Acme Corp Inventory Day — Nov 14, 2026”
• Recurring annually: “New Year’s Day — Jan 1, every year”
• Custom recurrence: every third Monday in May, etc.

Recurring holidays save admin work, but be careful with moving holidays (Easter, Diwali, Eid) — set those explicitly per year.

Linking to Business Hours

A Holiday can be linked to one or many Business Hours records:

This pattern matches reality — regional offices observe their local holidays plus shared global ones.

Partial-day holidays

A Holiday record can specify start and end times — useful for half-days (Christmas Eve closing at 13:00) or extended hours (late opening). The Business Hours calendar treats the holiday window as closed and the rest of the day as normal.

Apex behaviour

BusinessHours.add, BusinessHours.diff, and BusinessHours.isWithin automatically respect Holidays attached to the Business Hours record you pass in. You don’t need to subtract holidays manually.

Reporting / monitoring

Holiday is a standard SObject — you can query it, build a custom report, or surface a “Holidays this month” component on a service supervisor dashboard.

List<Holiday> upcoming = [
    SELECT Name, ActivityDate, IsRecurrence
    FROM Holiday
    WHERE ActivityDate >= TODAY
    ORDER BY ActivityDate ASC
    LIMIT 10
];

Common follow-ups

• Can different Business Hours have different holiday lists? — Yes — that’s the point of the link.
• Does case escalation skip holidays? — Yes, when configured against a Business Hours record that includes the holiday.
• Are holidays user-specific? — No — Business Hours holidays apply to whatever SLA references them, not per-user.

Verified against: Salesforce Help — Holidays. Last reviewed 2026-05-17 for Spring ‘26.