School Start Dates in Europe 2026/2027: Country by Country

No single date, three ways to decide it

Anyone expecting a shared European calendar will be disappointed: there’s no school start date that applies to every country. Eurydice, the European comparison tool covering 39-40 school systems, does find three recurring ways of deciding that date. In the first, a central authority picks a single date for the entire country. In the second, the decision is decentralized, handled by regions, local authorities or individual schools, inside national guidelines on the number of teaching days or hours. In the third, several authorities share the job, with a central government setting a framework that gets adapted locally.

There’s also a less obvious but useful distinction: in some countries the official “start of the school year” date matches the first day of class; in others it’s only the start of an administrative period, and actual lessons begin a few days later. That’s the case in Greece, where the official opening (the agiasmos, a blessing ceremony) and the first day of regular classes can fall on different dates.

Who decides, country by country (2026/2027)

Country	Indicative date, 2026/2027	Who decides
France	September 1, 2026 (mainland France)	Ministry of National Education
Poland	September 1, 2026	Ministry of National Education
Greece	opening around September 11, regular classes September 14, 2026	Central Ministry of Education
Germany	between late July/early August and mid-September 2026, depending on the state	The 16 Länder, coordinated by the KMK
Spain	September 7-10, 2026, depending on the autonomous community	The autonomous communities
United Kingdom	mid-August (Scotland) to early September 2026 (England, Wales)	Local authorities and devolved nations
Netherlands	late August to early September, three regions	Ministry (guide dates), final call by the school
Sweden	August 17-19, 2026, depending on the municipality	The municipality (huvudman), inside the Skolverket framework
Italy	September 1-August 31 framework, class start date set by the region	The regions, inside the national framework

The dates in the table hold only for the 2026/2027 school year: they change every year (more on why below), while the criterion behind them, who decides, stays stable.

Practical example: a family moving from Munich to Milan in late August finds two different systems. In Bavaria, the return date depends on the turn assigned by Germany’s five-group state rotation: for the 2026/2027 school year, Bavarian classes resumed among the last in Germany. In Italy, it’s the region that decides instead, inside the national framework running from September 1 to August 31.

The centralized model: one ministry, one date

In France, the 2026 rentrée scolaire was set by the Ministry of National Education at September 1, 2026 for mainland France, across all three of the country’s holiday zones (zones that stagger mid-year breaks, not the September rentrée itself, which stays the same for the mainland). Corsica has its own rentrée a few days later, and the overseas territories follow independent calendars. This strong national framework doesn’t come from nowhere: France has a tradition of administrative centralization rooted in a history covered in the Recap on the French Revolution, when the state rewrote the rules of political life on a national scale.

In Poland, the Ministry of National Education decides in the same way: for the 2026/2027 school year, teaching began on September 1, 2026 across the whole country, with only winter break staggered across three regional turns. In Greece, the central Ministry of Education sets an official opening traditionally close to September 11 (the date shifts if it falls on a Saturday or Sunday): for 2026/2027 it fell on Friday, September 11, 2026, with regular classes starting the following Monday, September 14, 2026.

The regional model: every territory its own

In Germany, education is a responsibility of the 16 Länder, not the federal government: summer holiday dates are set long-term by the Kultusministerkonferenz (KMK), the conference of the Länder’s culture ministers, through a five-group rotation introduced in 1964 (the Hamburg Agreement) to keep German families from all going on holiday at the same time. Summer holidays last at least six weeks and can start anywhere between June 20 and September 15 depending on the state; Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg are traditionally among the last to break for summer, for a historical reason tied to the 1964 harvest season.

In Spain, the constitution gives the autonomous communities full authority over the calendar for non-university schools: for 2026/2027 the return to class fell between September 7 and 10, 2026 depending on the community, with differences between school levels too (in Catalonia, for example, September 8 for most stages but September 14 for vocational training). In the United Kingdom, the official government portal says so without mincing words: dates vary across the country, and finding them means checking with the relevant local authority. In England, local authorities decide (with extra autonomy for academies); in Wales, the Welsh government decides centrally; in Scotland, 32 local councils each choose their own dates, typically in mid-August, notably earlier than the rest of the UK; in Northern Ireland, the Education Authority publishes recommended dates that most schools follow.

The mixed model: a framework, the final call elsewhere

In the Netherlands, the Ministry of Education (OCW) publishes “guide dates” for three regions, but individual schools can depart from them without asking the ministry’s permission. In Sweden, the national agency Skolverket only sets a framework, the school year must start in August and end in June, while the exact start and end date of each term is decided by the “huvudman,” the school’s operator, which in most cases is the municipality: in autumn 2026, for example, Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö went back to class on August 17, while Örebro opened on the 19th.

Italy: a national framework, a calendar set by region

Italy is a hybrid case between the two extremes. Nationally, the school year runs from September 1 to August 31, with a minimum of 200 days of teaching activity between September 1 and June 30. Inside that framework, it’s the regions that set the detailed school calendar, the start date of classes, the length of the Christmas break (typically two weeks) and the Easter break (typically one week), adapting the calendar to local needs. Italy’s twenty regions administer a territory unified as a single state in the nineteenth century: the story of that process is told in the Recap on Italian unification.

Why the dates change every year

None of the criteria described above produces a date that stays fixed over time. In France, each school year’s calendar is set by its own ministerial decree; in Greece, the “around September 11” opening shifts if that date falls on a Saturday or Sunday; in the Netherlands and Sweden, guide dates or municipal dates are redefined year by year. That’s why the figures in this Recap are explicitly anchored to the 2026/2027 school year: they’re a concrete example of how each rule works, not a fact valid forever. It’s the same principle that, in other fields, leads the European Union to write shared rules for all 27 countries instead, as with artificial intelligence and the EU AI Act: on the school calendar, by contrast, every source consulted shows a decision made inside each individual country, never a single shared European rule.