How Much Do U.S. School Calendars Actually Differ?

There is no national school calendar in the United States, and no open dataset of one either. Calendars are set district by district — roughly 13,000 of them — and published as PDFs on district websites. That is why a question as ordinary as “when is spring break?” has no single answer.

We transcribe district calendars by hand from the districts’ own published documents. This page reports what that dataset shows so far: 16 districts across 9 states, enrolling 3,639,658 students.

The headline finding

Spring break 2027 in these 16 districts falls across 6 different weeks, running from March 8 - 12, 2027 through to April 22 - 30, 2027. The largest single cohort covers just 38.4% of the students involved. A family in Houston and a family in New York City are more than six weeks apart on the same question.

Spring break 2027 windows by district cohort
Spring break 2027	Districts	Students	Share
March 22 - 26, 2027	Los Angeles Unified, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Chicago Public Schools, Broward County Public Schools, Prince William County Schools	1,399,184	38.4%
April 22 - 30, 2027	NYC Public Schools	837,777	23%
March 15 - 19, 2027	Clark County School District, Dallas ISD, Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, Austin ISD	636,039	17.5%
March 29 - April 2, 2027	Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, San Diego Unified, Virginia Beach City Public Schools	307,205	8.4%
March 8 - 12, 2027	Houston ISD, Northside ISD	276,935	7.6%
April 5 - 9, 2027	Gwinnett County Public Schools	182,518	5%

Being in the same state tells you very little

In 3 of the 4 states where we track more than one district, the districts do not break on the same week as each other.

California — 2 districts, 2 different spring break weeks (March 22 - 26, 2027; March 29 - April 2, 2027)
Texas — 5 districts, 2 different spring break weeks (March 15 - 19, 2027; March 8 - 12, 2027)
Virginia — 2 districts, 2 different spring break weeks (March 22 - 26, 2027; March 29 - April 2, 2027)
Florida — 2 districts, all on the same week (March 22 - 26, 2027)

Neither does being in the same city

This is the result with the most practical consequence, because it is the one people assume cannot happen. Districts inside a single metropolitan area — same city, same airport, often adjoining neighbourhoods — break on different weeks.

In one metro area (Census CBSA 26420), 294,654 students are split across 2 different spring break weeks:

Houston ISD — March 8 - 12, 2027
Cypress-Fairbanks ISD — March 15 - 19, 2027

If you book a holiday on the strength of a neighbouring district’s dates, or on a statewide “spring break” figure, this is how you get it wrong.

Method, sources and limits

Calendar dates are transcribed by hand from each district’s own published calendar — the board-approved PDF or the district’s calendar page — and the source is cited on that district’s page. No aggregator is used as a source, and no district’s dates are ever inferred from a statewide window.

Enrollment comes from the NCES Common Core of Data, LEA directory, school year 2024-2025, retrieved via the Urban Institute Education Data API. These are 2024-2025 figures, not current-year ones. New York City has no single district record in CCD — it is 32 geographic districts, summed here.

The important limitation: this is not a representative sample.

These 16 districts are not a random sample of the roughly 13,000 in the United States. They are the districts whose official calendars we could actually retrieve and verify — which skews heavily towards large urban and suburban systems, and in practice is decided by whether a district’s website serves a machine-readable PDF. Of 24 large districts we attempted in one recent pass, only 2 yielded a usable source; the rest returned bot challenges, 403s, or calendars rendered only in JavaScript.

So every figure here describes these districts. None of it should be read as a national estimate, and we do not publish one. The spread is real and it is large, but “38.4% of American schoolchildren” is a sentence this dataset cannot support and will not be found on this page.

All figures are recomputed from the underlying dataset each time the site is built, so they stay in step with it as districts are added.

Explore the underlying calendars

Every district in this analysis has its own page with the full calendar and the cited source.