Your Manila Team Has Ten Days Off That Your Sydney Office Does Not

Offshore staff work on Australian public holidays as a matter of course. They are employed under the law of the country they live in, and Australia Day is an ordinary Tuesday in Manila. What they do not work is their own calendar, and the 2027 version of that has been public since 8 September.

President Marcos signed Proclamation No. 1427 that day. The Philippine Information Agency published the list: ten regular holidays, eight special non-working days. If you run a team in Manila, that document is your 2027 capacity plan, and you have almost certainly not opened it.

Outstaffer employs people across seven APAC markets, so holding two statutory calendars at once is the job we are paid for. Read the rest knowing that.

What the 2027 public holidays do to your working week

Eighteen non-working dates sounds ruinous. Most of it is noise. Six land on a Saturday in 2027, including Labor Day and Independence Day.

Twelve fall on a weekday.

Two of them are days your Australian office is also shut, New Year's Day and Good Friday. That leaves ten weekday dates when Sydney is trading and Manila is entitled to be at home. Maundy Thursday. Araw ng Kagitingan. National Heroes Day. All Saints' and All Souls'. Bonifacio Day. The Immaculate Conception. Then Christmas Eve, Rizal Day and New Year's Eve, which shut most of the last week of December.

Does the mismatch ever run in your favour?

Yes, and nobody rosters for it. Australia Day falls on a Tuesday in 2027, Easter Monday on 29 March, the King's Birthday on 14 June. All three are ordinary working days in the Philippines. Under the National Employment Standards your Australian staff have, in the Fair Work Ombudsman's words, "a right to be absent from work on a public holiday". Your Manila desk holds no such right on those dates, because they are not holidays where that person lives.

Three days a year when the only open part of your business is the offshore part.

The arithmetic on offshore staff and public holidays

There are 261 weekdays in 2027. Strip out the Australian public holidays landing on them and the working year sits near 250 days.

Outstaffer's published Employer of Record price is $250 per employee per month, so $3,000 a year. Across 250 working days that is about $12 a day per person.

Ten days lost to the Philippine calendar, three won back on ours, nets out at seven. Seven days at $12 is $84 a head, a year.

Eighty-four dollars.

That is the real size of the thing founders raise with me as a reason to keep a role onshore. The calendar is not the cost. The cost is finding out in the third week of December, with a client deadline on the 23rd and half the team entitled to be off since September.

Who carries the obligation for getting it right?

The legal employer. Holiday entitlement, premium pay for a day worked and leave accrual sit under Philippine law with whoever employs the person, the same distinction deciding whether a Philippines contractor arrangement holds up at all. Getting it wrong is the same family of error as dismissing someone under the wrong country's rules.

Seven days is an average, and the average hides the shape

Nine of the ten Philippine-only weekdays cluster in two places, Easter week in March and the stretch from 1 November to year end. If your revenue concentrates in the December quarter, you are not losing seven evenly spaced days. You are losing most of a fortnight in the weeks that decide your year.

That is a planning problem rather than a location decision, because the fix is a roster drawn up in October.

Related reading

• Brokers Wrote 81.6% Of New Home Loans. Who Checks The Work?
• Wages Up, Output Per Hour Flat: What The June Quarter Actually Cost You

Open the proclamation before you open the debate

Whether offshore staff work on Australian public holidays was never the interesting question. The interesting one is which ten days in 2027 you are committed to and have not told your clients about.

If you would rather someone else held both calendars, sign up and put one role through it. Or print the proclamation and mark it up yourself, which also works.

So: has anyone in your business opened next year's Philippine calendar, or does December find out on its own?