API discovery: France’s public-service catalog lists the Jours fériés API as a fully open DINUM service. Its OpenAPI definition is pleasantly small: request /{zone}/{annee}.json and receive a JSON object whose ISO dates map to holiday names. The critical parameter is not the year; it is the zone.
Try it
Use it as a preflight for a France-facing release, workshop, or customer deadline. Before an agent proposes a date, have it fetch the statutory holidays for the relevant zone and flag collisions in a planning note. For example, the 2026 metropolitan response includes 2026-07-14. That is a reason to ask a better question, not a reason to declare everyone free or unavailable.
Copy-paste agent instruction
Before proposing a France-facing deadline, ask me which API zone applies. Fetch https://calendrier.api.gouv.fr/jours-feries/{zone}/2026.json for that exact zone, list any statutory holiday within three days of the proposed date, and cite the returned date and label in the planning note. Do not infer individual availability, office closure, leave, or employment rules from the API. Ask me to confirm the team calendar before changing a deadline.Test caveat
The catalog warns that some local and professional observances are not represented, and a statutory holiday can be worked under different conditions. Choose the zone explicitly; do not substitute the metropolitan endpoint for all of France. The published definition describes the response shape, not a rate limit, service-level guarantee, or anyone’s attendance. This publication fetched the documented JSON shape but did not load-test the service or validate it against a team calendar.