How to count working days for RTA notices in 2026

A working day under the Residential Tenancies Act is Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays and the regional anniversary day for wherever the rental property sits. Miss a single regional anniversary in your count and a service date, a remedy deadline, or a rent-arrears strike can land on the wrong day. This guide lists every 2026 national holiday and all 18 regional anniversary dates, and shows exactly how they shift a real calculation.

These are the same dates Rentally uses internally to calculate service dates, remedy deadlines, actionable dates, and strike eligibility, cross-checked against Employment New Zealand's official public holiday and provincial anniversary schedule.

What counts as a working day

A working day excludes Saturdays, Sundays, the 11 national public holidays, and whichever regional anniversary day applies to the property. It doesn't exclude anything else. Half-days, office-closure days, and company shutdowns that aren't statutory public holidays still count as full working days for RTA purposes.

Calendar days are different, and the Act uses both depending on what's being counted. The 14-day notice to remedy runs on calendar days, but the actionable date at the end of it shifts forward to the next working day if it lands on a weekend or holiday. The 3-strikes rule uses working days for the 5-day arrears threshold, but calendar days for the 90-day window those three occasions must fall inside.

Why this matters for notices and arrears

Working days show up at nearly every deadline in a NZ tenancy:

• Service of notice. An email sent after 5pm is received the next working day, not that same evening.
• The 5-working-day arrears threshold that triggers a strike under section 55(1)(aa).
• The actionable date at the end of a 14-day remedy notice, which shifts forward if it falls on a non-working day.
• Bond lodgement, which runs on a working-day deadline after bond is received.

A landlord using a generic online business-day calculator will usually get the national holidays right and the regional anniversary wrong, because most calculators aren't built with NZ's 18-region anniversary system in mind at all.

Every 2026 national public holiday

These 11 dates are non-working days everywhere in NZ, regardless of region.

Matariki is worth flagging on its own. Unlike every other holiday on this list, its date isn't fixed or calculated from a weekday rule. It follows the Māori lunar calendar and is set by a statutory schedule gazetted years in advance, running on a Friday every year but landing on a different date each time.

Every 2026 regional anniversary date

This is the part most landlords miss entirely. Several regions share an anniversary with a larger neighbour rather than having their own.

Five regions, Auckland, Northland, Waikato, Bay of Plenty, and Gisborne, all observe Auckland Anniversary Day rather than having a separate day of their own. Landlords searching "Northland anniversary day" and finding nothing region-specific often assume there isn't one, and skip it in their count entirely.

Worked example: same due date, two regions

Take two identical tenancies with rent due on the same day, Monday, 12 January 2026, one property in Auckland and one in Wellington. Both landlords are counting the 5 working days that would trigger a strike under section 55(1)(aa) if the rent stays unpaid.

Same due date, same rule, one calendar day apart. The Wellington landlord who counts five weekdays without checking the regional calendar lands on Monday 19 January, which is actually Wellington Anniversary Day and doesn't count. The strike, and any notice issued off the back of it, would be a day early and open to challenge.

Which region's anniversary applies

It's the property's region, not where the landlord lives or where the property manager's office is. This follows the same principle Employment New Zealand applies generally: the anniversary that applies is tied to where the work, or in this case the tenancy, is actually located, not where the person responsible for it happens to be based.

Landlords with properties spread across more than one region need to track each property's regional anniversary separately. A notice sent from an Auckland-based landlord for a Christchurch property runs on Canterbury's calendar, not Auckland's.

Common mistakes when counting working days

• Using a generic business-day calculator that only knows national holidays and has no concept of NZ's regional anniversary system.
• Assuming the anniversary follows the landlord, not the property. It's always the property's region.
• Missing a shared anniversary for Northland, Waikato, Bay of Plenty, Gisborne, Manawatu-Whanganui, or Tasman because there's no region-specific date to search for.
• Reusing last year's dates. Every regional anniversary and Matariki move to a different date each year.
• Treating Matariki as fixed on the calendar. It's set by statutory schedule and changes annually.

How Rentally helps

Rentally does the counting, logging, and drafting. You review. You decide. You send. Every property has a region set when it's added, and every service date, remedy deadline, actionable date, and strike calculation is worked out automatically against that property's specific holiday calendar, national and regional, including Matariki's statutory date each year. Landlords with properties in more than one region don't need to track separate calendars themselves.

Rentally is built around the Residential Tenancies Act 1986, NZ-only, and starts at $9 a month for the first two properties.

Written by

Ron Venturina

Founder, Rentally

NZ founder building Rentally so self-managing landlords don't lose money to the same RTA admin gaps my parents did. Working days, strikes, Healthy Homes, IRD expenses, all sorted in one app.