Catholic School Holidays 2026: Complete Term Dates Guide

Catholic school holidays 2026 don’t follow one national calendar — each diocese sets its own dates, and how closely they track the public school calendar varies enormously by state. We checked term dates directly against the official pages of the largest Catholic education system in every state and territory covered on this site. Two states (Victoria and South Australia) run Catholic schools on a calendar that’s identical to public schools. Three (NSW, Queensland and the ACT) have real, verified gaps of anywhere from one day to a full week. Here’s exactly what differs, state by state.

Catholic school term dates 2026 — every system compared

Dates shown are start – finish for students. Where a system publishes separate staff and student return dates, we’ve noted both. Full detail, including breaks, public holidays and student-free days, is below for each state, plus dedicated deep-dive guides for the Hunter region and Darling Downs.

New South Wales: Catholic schools start nearly a week before public schools

Sydney Catholic Schools and the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle both publish the identical calendar — a strong sign that NSW’s Catholic dioceses coordinate a common term structure statewide, unlike some other states. Term 1 starts Tuesday 27 January, a full six days before NSW public schools start on Monday 2 February, though both systems finish Term 1 on the same day, Thursday 2 April. From Term 2 onward the gap narrows to one or two days at the start of each term, and every term finishes on the same date across both systems.

If you’re in the Hunter region specifically, our Newcastle school holidays guide covers the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle in full, including its student-free days.

Victoria: Catholic and state calendars are identical

Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic Schools (MACS), which runs 291 schools across the archdiocese, publishes term dates that match the Victorian Department of Education calendar exactly — Term 1 (27/28 January – 2 April), Term 2 (20 April – 26 June), Term 3 (13 July – 18 September) and Term 4 (5 October – 18 December) all line up day for day. If you have children in both a state and a Catholic school in Victoria, this is the one state on this list where you genuinely don’t need to track two calendars.

Queensland: Term 4 finishes a full week earlier than state schools

Brisbane Catholic Education’s Term 1, 2 and 3 dates sit within a day or two of the Queensland state calendar — but Term 4 is the exception that matters. BCE finishes the year on Friday 4 December, a full week before Queensland state schools finish on 11 December. The same early finish shows up at Toowoomba Catholic Schools too (also 4 December), suggesting it’s a QLD-wide Catholic pattern rather than a one-off. If you’re coordinating holiday bookings or vacation care with a family in a state school, this is the date most likely to catch you out.

Worth noting: BCE and Toowoomba Catholic Schools aren’t quite identical to each other either — Toowoomba’s Term 2 starts a day later (21 April vs BCE’s 20 April). Even within Queensland’s Catholic system, checking your specific diocese matters. Our Toowoomba school holidays guide covers the Darling Downs diocese in full.

South Australia: Catholic and state calendars are identical

Like Victoria, Catholic Education South Australia (CESA) — covering the Archdiocese of Adelaide and the Diocese of Port Pirie — runs on exactly the same term dates as SA state schools: Term 1 (27 January – 10 April), Term 2 (27 April – 3 July), Term 3 (20 July – 25 September) and Term 4 (12 October – 11 December). CESA’s own published public holiday list matches the state list too, including Adelaide Cup Day and the same Easter-falls-mid-Term-1 quirk covered in our SA guide.

Western Australia: closely tracks the state calendar, with a change coming in 2027

Catholic Education Western Australia (CEWA) runs more than 150 schools and generally follows the WA Department of Education’s term dates closely, with minor school-by-school variation for staff development days. One change worth knowing about ahead of time: CEWA has announced it will introduce a three-week mid-year break for its schools starting in the 2027 school year — a genuine structural change from the current calendar, not just a date shift. For 2026, CEWA schools operate under the existing WA-aligned structure; check your specific school’s newsletter or CEWA’s own site for exact dates, since the Department’s own future-term-dates page (which we used to verify our WA school holidays guide) doesn’t publish Catholic-specific variations.

Tasmania: close to the state calendar, with a one-day gap at each end of Term 1

Catholic Education Tasmania (CET) tracks the state DECYP calendar closely but not exactly. Term 1 starts a day later for Catholic students (Friday 6 February vs the state’s Thursday 5 February) and finishes a day earlier (Thursday 16 April vs Friday 17 April) — effectively one fewer day of Term 1 at each end. Term 2 and Term 4 are identical to the state calendar. Term 3 has its own quirk: staff return Monday 27 July, but students don’t return until Tuesday 28 July, one day after the state’s Monday 27 July student return.

ACT: the only system that splits Term 1 by year level

Catholic Education Canberra Goulburn (CECG) — 56 schools spanning the ACT and a large stretch of southern NSW from Pambula to Crookwell to Lake Cargelligo — has the most distinctive Term 1 start pattern of any system we checked. Years 7, 10, 11 and 12 start on Monday 2 February; Years 8 and 9 start a day later, on Tuesday 3 February. This isn’t a new-vs-continuing-student split like ACT public schools use — it’s a straightforward split by year group, and it applies every year regardless of whether a student is new to the school.

CECG’s Term 4 also finishes early, like Queensland’s Catholic systems: Friday 11 December, a full week before ACT public schools finish on 18 December, and Years 10–12 finish even earlier than that. If you have a CECG student and a public-school sibling, Term 4’s finish is the date to double-check.

Why Catholic and state calendars diverge at all

Catholic education in Australia is organised diocese by diocese, not as a single national or even single state system — each diocese’s Catholic Education Office sets its own calendar, taking the state Department’s dates as a starting reference but making independent decisions about staff development days, religious observances, and (in Queensland and the ACT) an earlier Term 4 finish. That’s also why dioceses within the same state can differ from each other, as the one-day Term 2 gap between Brisbane and Toowoomba shows. There’s no shortcut around checking your own diocese — and within that, your own school, since individual schools sometimes add a pupil-free day or two beyond the diocesan minimum.

Independent and other non-Catholic private schools

Everything above covers systemic Catholic schools — those run through a diocesan Catholic Education Office. Independent Catholic schools (run by religious orders rather than the diocese directly) and non-Catholic independent or faith-based schools set their own calendars entirely separately, and can differ by a week or more from both the state and diocesan calendars, particularly around Term 1’s start and Term 4’s finish for exam and boarding-transition reasons. Always check your specific school’s published calendar rather than assuming it follows either the state or diocesan dates.

How to find your specific school's dates

• Start with your diocese’s Catholic Education Office website — every system in the table above publishes a dedicated term dates page, updated when dates change.
• Then check your specific school’s calendar or newsletter — individual schools can add pupil-free days beyond the diocesan minimum, and some publish more granular dates (exam periods, orientation days) than the diocese-wide page shows.
• If you’re new to a diocese (having moved states, or from overseas), don’t assume Catholic dates mirror the local state school calendar — as this page shows, that’s true in Victoria and South Australia but false, sometimes by a full week, in NSW, Queensland and the ACT.

For each state’s public school calendar, see our guides to NSW, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania, and the ACT. If you’re new to Australia and still working out how school enrolment, OSHC and the term system fit together, our homepage indexes the rest of our settling-in guides.

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