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Detecting Public Holidays in Jira Automation

Hana Kučerová

Recently I was asked by one of our customers to detect public holidays in the automation flow. They wanted to react on work items created during the holidays and inform their customers that they are not available.

As you probably know, it is complicated to work with calendars in Jira natively. You can create calendars in Jira Service Management and use them to pause your SLAs, but you cannot do much more with the holidays. And if you don't have Jira Service Management—only Jira—there's no easy way to store this information.

Also, there is no option to get information about public holidays in the automation functionality itself. While smart values like plusBusinessDays() or .businessDays automatically exclude weekends, they cannot detect local public holidays.

Solution using Rovo

I used the relatively new “Rovo action” in automation with an easy prompt:

Is {{issue.created}} a public holiday in the Czech Republic? Answer in English Yes or No; do not add anything else to the answer.

Then I added a “{{smart values}} condition” to compare {{rovoResponse}} with Yes.

If today is a public holiday, the automation flow can continue with some action.

Comments

Tomislav Tobijas

Cool idea @Hana Kučerová ! 👏

I know Bill talked about this and created an article about it here: Automation concepts – Increment a Date While Skipping Holidays > it's using automation without Rovo, but it seemed to be stable enough.

By the looks of it, Rovo config. you've built looks much easier to create and is probably good enough, as you said 🙂

Josh

Nice use of the Rovo action, Hana. For anyone who needs the same check to give the same answer every time (for example, before sending a message to a customer), here is a native option with no AI and no outside API: the Create lookup table action.

1. Add a Create lookup table action, for example named holidays. Put one row per public holiday: key = the date as yyyy-MM-dd (for example 2026-12-24), value = the holiday name. A table can hold up to 200 rows, so several years fit.

2. Add a smart values condition:
First value: {{holidays.get(issue.created.convertToTimeZone("Europe/Prague").format("yyyy-MM-dd"))}}
Condition: is not empty

3. Put your action after it, and you can even include the holiday name in the message with the same smart value.

Two things to watch. Convert the created date to your local time zone before formatting it, otherwise a work item created just after midnight local time can be checked against the wrong day. And the table only lives inside that one rule, so if several rules need it you have to copy it, and someone has to update the dates once a year (moving holidays like Easter change every year).

The Rovo version is much less upkeep; the table is the safer choice when a wrong Yes or No would cause trouble.

Docs: https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-automation-actions/ (Create lookup table) and https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-smart-values-date-and-time/ (convertToTimeZone, format)

dikartashev

I made an app just for that: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/566776470/business-days-holidays-for-jira

Advantages over the native routes:

Same answer every time, no AI involved
No holiday list to maintain: public holidays for 207 countries and their regions, calculated for any year, Easter included
Company closures, extra working days and holidays your team works through are set once on an admin page and shared by every rule
Time zones handled: the timestamp is converted to the calendar's time zone before the check
Tells you why a day is off: {{fetchedJiraBdcheck.reason}} is weekend, holiday or closure, and {{fetchedJiraBdcheck.nextBusinessDay}} gives the "back on" date for the reply
Free for up to 10 users

For this case: Check business day for {{issue.created}}, then a condition that {{fetchedJiraBdcheck.reason}} equals holiday.

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