New Year’s Day in the United States

Yes. New Year’s Day is the first of the eleven legal public holidays listed in 5 U.S.C. § 6103. Federal offices close, federal employees receive the day off with pay, and all fifty states observe it.

No federal law obliges private employers to give paid holiday leave. The Fair Labor Standards Act does not mandate paid holidays, so private-sector pay depends on the employer, although New Year’s Day is one of the most widely granted paid days in the country.

New Year’s Day is fixed to January 1, so it lands on a different weekday each year and moves through the whole week over a seven-year cycle.

Because the date is fixed rather than tied to a weekday, the federal observed-date rule applies. A Saturday New Year’s Day is observed on December 31 of the previous year, which means some years contain two observed federal holidays in the same calendar week.

January 1 became the start of the year in Britain and its American colonies in 1752, when the Calendar (New Style) Act moved the legal start of the year from March 25. Before that, the American colonies dated the new year from Lady Day in spring.

Congress placed New Year’s Day on the first federal holiday list in 1870, alongside Independence Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. The four were originally granted only to federal workers in the District of Columbia and were extended to all federal employees in 1885.