Massachusetts school holidays

Massachusetts is the clearest example of the New England pattern: 180 required days, a late start, a late finish, and two full vacation weeks in the middle of the winter and spring. Springfield Public Schools goes back first on August 24, 2026, Worcester Public Schools on August 31 and Boston Public Schools on September 8, with Boston's pre-K and kindergarten pupils starting on September 10.

Finishing dates are tentative in a way they are not further south. Worcester is scheduled out on June 17, 2027, Boston on June 22 and Springfield on June 25, and Springfield's date already has five snow days built into it. Boston's last day assumes no cancellations at all, and in 2025-26 it slipped into late June. Treat any June plan in this state as provisional.

Thanksgiving is short. Boston closes only for November 26 and 27, 2026, while Worcester and Springfield take November 25 to 27. Nobody in Massachusetts takes the full week.

The December break differs at the front end. Boston and Worcester run December 24, 2026 to January 1, 2027. Springfield starts three days earlier on December 21 and runs to January 5, giving Springfield families a fortnight where Boston families get nine days.

February vacation is the same week in all three districts, February 15 to 19, 2027. So is April vacation, April 19 to 23, 2027. Those two weeks are effectively statewide, which is what makes Massachusetts different from almost everywhere else on this site: families here get two guaranteed midyear weeks rather than one.

April vacation week contains Patriots' Day and the Boston Marathon, which is the single busiest combination of school holiday and city event anywhere in New England.

Because February and April vacations are synchronized statewide, both weeks are genuinely full. Cape Cod is quiet in February and busy in April, the Berkshires are the reverse, and Boston itself is busy in both. Marathon Monday, April 19, 2027, will make central Boston hotels expensive and hard to find, so book that week months ahead or plan around it.

The compensating advantage is that March is empty. No Massachusetts district on this page takes a March break at all, so a New England trip in the first three weeks of March avoids school-holiday pricing entirely.

This page covers Boston Public Schools, Worcester Public Schools and Springfield Public Schools.