UK school term dates, as a dataset
No government body publishes school term dates for the United Kingdom. Schooldates collects them from each school, trust and local authority, and serves them as JSON.
Every date carries the URL it was read from, the day it was last checked, and whether it is legally binding for that school.
Covering 2026-27, 2027-28, 2028-29, 2029-30. Collected from 243 calendars published by schools, trusts and councils.
Endpoints
Read-only, no key needed to try. Full specification: OpenAPI 3.1.
basis field says which applied and whether it binds that school. This one publishes
its own 2026-27 and falls back to Bristol's calendar for 2027-28./v1/trusts. Each says whether a calendar is held for it.Who this is for
The query each one runs.
Pricing
| Plan | Calls | Price | For |
|---|---|---|---|
| No key | 120 an hour | £0 | Trying it out |
| Free | 500 a month | £0 | One site, one school |
| Starter | 10,000 a month | £19 a month | A product feature |
| Business | 250,000 a month | £99 a month | Production traffic |
| Bulk | Whole dataset, delivered | On application | Warehousing and resale |
Keys are issued by email: contact@schooldates.co.uk. Send the
plan you want and what you are building. Send the key as
Authorization: Bearer <key> or X-API-Key.
Rate limit state comes back on every response in x-ratelimit-limit,
x-ratelimit-remaining and x-ratelimit-reset.
Attribution you must carry
Every plan, including the free one, requires visible attribution to schooldates.co.uk wherever the data is displayed:
Where you show a specific school's dates, also name the school, trust or council given in that record's
provenance.source_url. Both notices are returned on every response in
meta.attribution, so there is nothing to hard-code.
Terms are on the licensing page.
Automated clients
Pages on this site are open to everything, including AI assistants and search crawlers. The API is not:
bulk crawlers, model trainers and SEO tools are asked for a key, and
robots.txt tells them to stay off /v1/.
Everything else — browsers, curl, your own integration — gets 120 calls an hour
without a key.
What is not in it
No head teacher names or any other named individuals, on any plan. No childminders, whose names and addresses Ofsted redacts. No snow days or other short-notice closures. No coordinates for Northern Ireland, whose grid references would need a transform we do not hold.
Where a date has not been found, the API says so rather than estimating one.