Bridge Day Vacation Optimizer
A single vacation day placed next to Ascension Day buys you a four-day weekend. Placed badly, it buys you one day. This tool loads the real public holiday calendar for your country - and your German Bundesland, Swiss canton or Spanish comunidad, because those genuinely differ - then works out every stretch of consecutive days off you can build and ranks them by how much time each vacation day actually earns you.
Your whole allowance for the year
Caps how long one stretch may be
In Germany these are called Brückentage.
How the optimizer actually works
A day is free if it's a weekend day or a public holiday that applies where you live. Consecutive free days form a block, and between two blocks sits a gap of ordinary workdays. Booking every workday in the gaps between two blocks welds them into one unbroken stretch away from work - that is precisely what a bridge day is.
So every plan worth considering starts and ends on a free day, and there are only about a hundred such blocks in a year. The tool enumerates all of them exhaustively rather than guessing, scores each by days off ÷ vacation days spent, and shows you the whole ranked list - not just one “best” answer, because the best answer depends on whether you want one long holiday or several long weekends.
The whole-year plan is a harder problem: choosing several non-overlapping breaks that together fit your allowance and maximise total time off. That's solved exactly with dynamic programming over (calendar day × budget remaining), not with a greedy “take the best ratio first” pass - greedy genuinely loses here, because a cheap high-ratio bridge can block a longer break that was worth more overall.
Public holiday dates come from Nager.Date, a free open-data holiday API. Only holidays typed as Public are counted - bank, school, optional and observance days are ignored, because those don't reliably close a workplace. The calendar is loaded for the previous and following year too, so the Christmas-to-New-Year bridge isn't chopped in half on 1 January.
Questions fréquentes
Was sind Brückentage - and why does a Brückentage 2027 Rechner need my Bundesland?
Brückentage are the individual working days wedged between a public holiday and a weekend: taking them off 'bridges' the two into one long break. Germany is the reason a state selector matters. Fronleichnam (Corpus Christi) is a public holiday in Bayern, Baden-Württemberg, Hessen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Rheinland-Pfalz and Saarland - and an ordinary working Thursday in Berlin or Hamburg. Heilige Drei Könige is a holiday only in Bayern, Baden-Württemberg and Sachsen-Anhalt. A calculator that ignores your Bundesland will hand you a plan you cannot actually book, so this one asks.
How do klämdagar and inneklemte dager differ from German Brückentage?
The idea is identical - a 'squeeze day' (klämdag) or 'wedged-in day' (inneklemt dag) is a lone workday trapped between free days - but the calendar changes the answer completely. Norway treats both Skjærtorsdag (Maundy Thursday) and Langfredag as public holidays, so Norwegian Easter delivers ten days off for only three booked days. Germany has only Karfreitag, so the same stretch costs four. Sweden's calendar is weaker than it looks because several holidays fall on fixed dates and are regularly wasted on a weekend - the tool counts those wasted days for you explicitly.
What does the efficiency multiplier mean?
It's total consecutive days away from work divided by the vacation days you actually spend from your allowance. Booking the Friday after Ascension Day gives you Thursday through Sunday - four days off for one vacation day, a 4.00x multiplier. A plain week off with no holiday nearby is nine days off (weekend, five days, weekend) for five booked, or 1.80x. Anything at 2.5x or above is a genuinely good bridge.
Does the whole-year plan use up all my vacation days?
It uses as many as it can put to good use without breaks overlapping, and tells you how many are left over. It also labels each break honestly: some picks are real bridges leaning on a public holiday, and some are plain weeks off added to spend the remainder of your allowance. Those are marked 'no public holiday - a standard week off' rather than dressed up as clever optimization.
My employer counts Saturday as a working day - can I still use this?
Yes. The 'Your weekend' selector switches between Saturday & Sunday, Friday & Saturday (common across the Gulf and parts of the Middle East) and Sunday only. Everything downstream - which days are free, what each bridge costs, the whole-year plan - recalculates from that choice.
Can I put the plan straight into my calendar?
Yes. 'Download .ics' exports one all-day event per vacation day you need to book, each annotated with which break it belongs to and which public holiday it bridges to. That file imports into Google Calendar, Outlook and Apple Calendar, so you can check it against your team's schedule before you file the leave request. There's also a plain-text copy button for pasting into a leave request email.