Holidays in Vanuatu

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Vanuatu

An Archived Gazette Recovered a Forgotten New Hebrides Clock Change

Vanuatu's published time-zone history was corrected in 2020 after researchers traced daylight-saving rules back to government gazettes from the colonial New Hebrides Condominium. Joint Daylight Saving Regulation No. 59 of 1973 introduced a one-hour seasonal advance, while Joint Daylight Saving (Repeal) Regulation No. 10 of 1974 ended it. These rules had previously been absent from the IANA reconstruction.

The regulations used an unusual reference point: both changes were specified for twelve o'clock midday Greenwich Mean Time rather than for a round local midnight. On December 22, 1973, 12:00 GMT corresponded to 23:00 under the territory's UTC+11 standard time. Applying the extra hour sent the displayed clock directly to 00:00 on December 23, so the local 23:00 hour of December 22 never occurred.

The reverse transition was just as distinctive. At 12:00 GMT on March 30, 1974, clocks running one hour ahead were reaching 00:00 on March 31. Removing the daylight-saving hour returned them to 23:00 on March 30. The final hour of March 30 was therefore experienced twice.

The correction also fixed a later error in the database. An older reconstruction had placed Vanuatu's 1984 spring-forward transition on October 23, a Tuesday. The underlying legislation instead defined the change around midnight on the fourth Saturday, placing that transition on September 23. The archival work changed both the early-1970s history and one of the dates in the later daylight-saving sequence.

The Independent Republic Brought Seasonal Time Back, Then Abolished It

After independence in 1980, Vanuatu created its own statutory summer-time system through the Summer Time Act No. 35 of 1982, which commenced on September 1, 1983. The first advance occurred at the end of September 24, when midnight became 01:00 on September 25. During summer-time periods the effective offset was UTC+12 rather than the normal UTC+11.

The legislation produced recurring clock changes through the rest of the 1980s and into the early 1990s. The legal wording placed transitions at midnight local time on the fourth Saturday, which tzdb represents as 24:00 on that Saturday. This detail matters when assigning a transition to a calendar date: 24:00 Saturday is the same instant as 00:00 Sunday.

A 1991 amendment altered the later part of the schedule. The reconstructed legal sequence shows summer time ending in January 1992, beginning again in October 1992, and ending for the last time at midnight between January 23 and 24, 1993. At that final rollback, 00:00 on January 24 was followed by 23:00 on January 23, repeating the last hour of Saturday.

Parliament then enacted the Summer Time (Repeal) Act No. 4 of 1993, which commenced on May 3. By then the final seasonal hour had already been removed in January. Vanuatu's Interpretation Act now provides that references to time in legislation mean the standard time of Vanuatu, ordinarily eleven hours in advance of Greenwich Mean Time unless the President prescribes otherwise by statutory order. Government information likewise identifies the national time zone as UTC+11.

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