Holiday calendars
One calendar per country, country presets, how the right one is picked per employee, and what happens without one
A holiday calendar is a set of public-holiday dates for one country. When a policy excludes holidays, the dates on the employee's own calendar are the ones skipped.
Creating a calendar
At Admin → Holidays, click New calendar, pick a country, and name it — the country picker prefills the name and, if SquadBear ships a prepared set for that country (24 countries for 2026–2027, including PL, DE, AT, CH, NL, GB, the Nordics and Baltics — see public holiday calendars), the field shows how many holidays it'll add. There's one calendar per country per workspace.
Country presets
SquadBear currently ships one prepared set: Poland, 2026, 14 dates — the fixed public holidays plus the moveable ones (Easter, Easter Monday, Pentecost, Corpus Christi) already resolved to that year's actual date. A preset is a starting point, not a finished calendar: applying it fills in that country's known dates, and an admin adds or removes individual holidays from there, including future years the preset doesn't cover yet. Countries without a prepared set start with an empty calendar under the chosen country code, ready to fill in by hand.
How the right calendar is picked
Each employee resolves to one calendar: their own country override if they have one, otherwise the workspace's default country. There's no fallback to a broader region or a "closest match" — the country code has to match a calendar exactly. A holiday only affects day-counting if the policy's Exclude holidays setting is on; otherwise dates count as ordinary working days regardless of what's on the calendar.
No matching calendar
If an employee's resolved country has no calendar at all, nothing is excluded for them — their requests simply don't skip any holiday dates, and the request preview carries a warning naming the missing country so it doesn't pass unnoticed. The request still goes through; it just isn't getting a holiday exclusion until a calendar exists.
Worked example
Northlake is based in Poland, so its default calendar already has the 2026 Polish preset — 14 dates, seeded automatically when the workspace was created. They then hire a developer based in Germany and set a country override on her profile (People → Manage people → [employee] → Edit → Country). Since there's no German calendar yet, her requests don't exclude any holidays and carry the missing-calendar warning until an admin creates one at Admin → Holidays — starting empty, since no German preset exists — and adds Germany's public holidays one by one.