Eid Al Fitr (third day) 2027

Type of holiday: statutory public holiday, a non-working day.

The third day of Eid Al Fitr, 3 Shawwal, is the last of the days named for the festival in Cabinet Resolution No. 27 of 2024. By this point the celebration has wound down into something domestic, and the practical question in most households and offices has shifted to when normal life resumes.

The fourth day that may or may not appear

The resolution also grants the final day of Ramadan as a non-working day — but that day exists only in years when Ramadan runs its full thirty days. If the crescent of Shawwal is sighted after twenty-nine, there is no thirtieth of Ramadan and the break is three days rather than four. Nobody can know which it will be until the evening the sighting committee sits, which is why every UAE holiday calendar published in advance carries the phrase "subject to moon sighting" and why an employer's leave planner should treat the fourth day as possible rather than promised.

Coming back

The return is visible on the roads before it is visible anywhere else: the inbound carriageways from the northern emirates and from the Oman crossings carry the heaviest traffic of the period, and the airports handle a returning wave that arrives more sharply than the outbound one departed. Schools, free zones, courts and government service centres reopen together, which produces a queue of applications lodged in a single morning.

Deadlines either side of the block

Anything that fell inside the days off has effectively moved to this point. Interbank settlement resumes, filings that were submitted just before the break enter processing, and licence or permit applications that looked like a two-day matter turn out to have taken a week. Where a date matters, the safe approach is to count in working days rather than calendar days and to leave a day of margin at each end, since a one-day shift in the moon sighting shifts the entire block with it.

One last piece of arithmetic explains the whole cycle. Twelve lunar months run about eleven days short of a solar year, so next year's Eid Al Fitr will arrive roughly eleven days earlier in the Gregorian calendar than this one did, and the year after that eleven days earlier again. Over roughly thirty-three years the festival travels through every season. Anything scheduled annually against a Gregorian date will therefore drift into and out of collision with it.