Nager.Date Holidays API
Nager.Date Holidays API is a free, open-source REST API that provides public holiday data for over 100 countries, including Nigeria, enabling applications to programmatically determine which dates are national public holidays and automatically account for them in scheduling, delivery, business logic, and calendar functionality. The API returns structured lists of public holidays for a specified country and year, with holiday names in English and local languages, dates, and classifications.
Nigerian public holidays covered by Nager.Date include all federally designated public holidays: New Year's Day (January 1), Workers' Day (May 1), Democracy Day (June 12), Independence Day (October 1), Christmas Day (December 25), and Boxing Day (December 26), as well as variable-date Islamic holidays including Eid el-Fitr (end of Ramadan), Eid el-Adha (Feast of Sacrifice), and Maulid al-Nabi (Prophet's birthday). The Islamic holiday dates are calculated approximately — as the exact dates depend on lunar moon sighting which can vary by one or two days from calculation — but Nager.Date provides the expected observed date as an approximation.
For Nigerian scheduling applications — appointment booking systems, delivery management platforms, HR tools for leave management — knowing which dates are public holidays allows the application to correctly exclude non-working days from business day calculations. A Nigerian e-commerce platform calculating expected delivery dates needs to account for public holidays when computing working-day delivery windows; an appointment booking system for clinics or professional services needs to block holiday dates from the booking calendar automatically.
Payroll applications for Nigerian businesses use public holiday data to correctly calculate overtime pay for employees who work on public holidays, which under Nigerian labor law is compensated at a higher rate than regular working days. Automated payroll systems that integrate Nager.Date can flag worked days that fall on public holidays and apply appropriate compensation rates without manual calendar checking by HR staff.
The API is completely free to use with no authentication required, no rate limiting documentation for reasonable use, and no account registration needed. A simple HTTP GET request with the country code (NG for Nigeria) and year returns a JSON array of holiday objects. This simplicity makes integration achievable in minutes — Nigerian developers can add public holiday awareness to their applications with a few lines of code using any HTTP client in any programming language.
The open-source nature of Nager.Date means that the holiday data underlying the API is publicly maintained and can be verified or corrected through the GitHub repository. For Nigerian developers who find inaccuracies in the Nigerian holiday dates — particularly for the annually variable Islamic holidays — the open-source model allows community correction of the data rather than relying on a proprietary provider to maintain accuracy.
HR and attendance management systems for Nigerian companies use public holiday data to automatically generate yearly holiday calendars for employees, configure attendance tracking systems to treat public holidays as non-working days, and enable leave management systems to correctly count only working days against employee leave balances. These automations depend on accurate, programmatically accessible public holiday data for each calendar year.
Multi-country support makes Nager.Date valuable for Nigerian businesses with operations or customers in multiple countries. A Nigerian company operating across West Africa can use the same Nager.Date API to retrieve holiday calendars for Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, and other countries, building multi-country business calendar awareness into a single integration. Similarly, Nigerian-developed SaaS products sold to customers in multiple countries can use Nager.Date to localize their scheduling and business calendar functionality for each customer's country context.