Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Election Day Is a Legal Holiday in New Hampshire. A 1913 Law Makes It a Crime to Require Factory Work on a Legal Holiday.

The biennial election has been a legal holiday since 1891. State offices and courts stay open through it, and at least eight bills on the subject have died since 2014. A statute that matches a 1911 Massachusetts act word for word still forbids requiring work in a mill or factory on “any legal holiday,” with one narrow exception. Breaking it is a misdemeanor for a person and a felony for a company.

New Hampshire holds its general election on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November of every even-numbered year, and state law calls that day a legal holiday. It has said so since 1891, when a one-sentence act titled “An Act to Make Election Day a Legal Holiday” was approved on March 19. The holiday lives on in RSA 288:1, between Columbus Day and Veterans Day, as “the day on which the biennial election is held.”

Almost nothing follows from it. The 2026 holiday list for state employees does not include the day, and the courts do not close for it. No statute this newsroom could find sets aside an hour for a worker to vote. Of the eleven legal holidays on the list, the biennial election is the only one that appears on neither the executive branch’s 2026 holiday calendar nor the Supreme Court’s.

One consequence with a criminal penalty did survive, in the labor code. RSA 275:28, enacted in 1913 and carried forward word for word, says no employee “shall be required to work in any mill or factory on any legal holiday,” except for work that is “both absolutely necessary and can lawfully be performed on the Lord’s Day.” The next section makes a violation a crime: a misdemeanor if the violator is a natural person, a felony if it is “any other person.” A corporation is not a natural person.

The holiday has a paper trail that runs back to at least 1887 and almost no effect. The labor law carries a criminal penalty and no published enforcement record this newsroom could find.

A holiday since 1891

An 1887 act carried nearly the same title but reached only bills, notes and contracts that came due on election day. In 1891 the Legislature dropped the limit. Chapter 21 of that year’s laws reads, in full: “The day of each biennial election in this state fixed by the constitution is hereby made a legal holiday to all intents and purposes in the same manner as other days are now made by law legal holidays.”

In 1899 the holidays were gathered into one list: Thanksgiving, Fast Day, Labor Day, “the day on which the biennial elections are held,” February 22, May 30, July 4 and Christmas. That list, amended many times since, became RSA 288:1. Fast Day is no longer on it. RSA 288:2 mentions Fast Day anyway, in a sentence that fixes the status of Martin Luther King, Jr. Civil Rights Day in state employee contracts by pointing at a holiday the list no longer contains.

At least two general rules attach to the label. When a statute sets a date for filing a document or paying a fee and the date lands on a legal holiday, the filing is timely if it arrives the next business day (RSA 21:35, II). An employer may not push an employee past the legal limit on daily hours “in order to make up lost time by reason of a legal holiday” (RSA 275:31). By itself the label closes nothing this newsroom could find. The one closure the holiday chapter orders is narrower: publicly funded schools may not hold regular classes on Veterans Day (RSA 288:4). Granite State Report noted the election-day entry in a September 19, 2026 article about its records-request tools, which count business days from the same list.

The state works through it

The Department of Administrative Services issues the holiday list for state employees each year. Its memorandum for 2026, dated November 13, 2025, names ten days. The biennial election, which falls on November 3, 2026, is not one of them. A note at the bottom of the memo tells employees that Columbus Day and Juneteenth “are NOT paid holidays for State employees” and that “State offices will remain open.” The note says nothing about the election.

The Supreme Court sets the judicial branch’s calendar by order. Administrative Order 2025-04 names twelve holidays for 2026. Columbus Day, Juneteenth and the day after Thanksgiving are on it. The election is not.

The state’s personnel rules show how the two lists part ways. Rule Per 1301.01 entitles full-time employees to “all designated calendar holidays prescribed by law or the chief executive with approval of council.” Rule Per 1301.02 then names ten days. Two days that RSA 288:1 calls legal holidays are missing from the ten: Columbus Day and the biennial election. The 2025-2027 contract between the state and the State Employees’ Association is built the same way, with “all holidays prescribed by law” in one paragraph and a list of ten in the next.

The department has told the Legislature what the difference is worth. In the fiscal note to a 2022 bill that would have closed public offices on every legal holiday and added the state primary to the list, it said the change meant closing state offices “an additional day every odd number calendar year (Columbus Day) and additional three days every even numbered calendar year (Columbus Day, the State Primary and the General Elections).” It put the indirect cost at “up to $2 million per holiday.” The county association gave its own figure in the same note: $950,000 across the ten counties for one paid day off.

The mill law of 1913

Twenty-two years after the election became a holiday, the Legislature gave legal holidays force in one kind of workplace. Senate Bill No. 23, “An act relative to work in mills and factories upon legal holidays,” was introduced by Senator Gaffney on January 22, 1913 and sent to the Committee on Labor.

The text was not new. Massachusetts had approved an act with the same title, the same first section and the same fine on March 17, 1911.

The House Journal records an attempt to soften it. On May 15, 1913, Mr. Clifford of Franklin offered an amendment that would have barred required holiday work only “as a condition of retaining his employment” and would have struck the words “is both absolutely necessary and.” The bill and the amendment were laid on the table. Six days later the journal reads: “Mr. Clifford withdrew his amendment.” The bill passed without it and was approved the same day, May 21, 1913.

The penalty in 1913 was a fine “not exceeding five hundred dollars.”

How a $500 fine became a felony

New Hampshire’s Criminal Code classifies every offense, including those written outside the code. One of its rules, RSA 625:9, III, makes a crime defined outside the code a felony “when committed by a corporation or an unincorporated association if the maximum fine therein provided is more than $200.” The mill law’s fine was $500.

In 1973 the Legislature replaced the mill law’s penalty with one sentence, in an act whose title describes a revision of fine-only statutes under the Criminal Code. That sentence is RSA 275:29, and it took effect at 11:59 p.m. on October 31, 1973.

In dollars, the ceiling moved a long way. A corporation convicted of a felony may be fined up to $100,000 (RSA 651:2, IV(b)). For an individual, a misdemeanor that a statute does not classify is presumed to be class B, which carries no jail and a fine of up to $1,200. The presumption gives way if one of the code’s exceptions applies, such as notice from the prosecutor that the state will seek class A penalties, and class A raises the ceiling to $2,000 and up to a year in jail (RSA 625:9, IV; RSA 651:2, II(c) and IV(a)).

Massachusetts still has a holiday-work law for mills and factories, and it is still a fine. General Laws chapter 149, section 45 punishes requiring mill or factory work on a legal holiday with “a fine of not more than fifteen hundred dollars.”

An exception that points at a repealed law

The statute permits required holiday work that is “both absolutely necessary and can lawfully be performed on the Lord’s Day.” Both halves have to be true. The second half once had a chapter to measure against: RSA chapter 332-D, “Sunday Business Activities,” which the bill that repealed it described as “the law prohibiting Sunday business activities.”

The Legislature repealed that chapter in 2016. House Bill 1227 became chapter 313, was signed on June 24, 2016 and took effect on August 23, 2016. As introduced, the bill also would have repealed RSA 275:32 through 275:35, the Sunday-work and day-of-rest sections that sit a few lines below the holiday law in the same chapter. The final version left those sections in place. Neither version mentions RSA 275:28. Its exception still measures holiday work against Sunday law, and the chapter that restricted Sunday business is gone.

Questions without a ruling

The words of RSA 275:28 leave at least four questions open, and this newsroom found no court decision applying the section to any of them.

What does “required” mean? The 1913 House had narrower language in front of it, a condition-of-employment test, and that language was withdrawn. Which workplaces are a “mill or factory”? Chapter 275 defines neither word. The Supreme Court read similar words narrowly in a different labor statute: in a 1936 workers’ compensation case it held that a store with an elevator was not a “shop, mill, factory, or other place” covered by that act (Davis v. W. T. Grant Co., 88 N.H. 204). What work is “absolutely necessary”? The statute does not say. And does a 1913 labor law reach every day on the legal holiday list, including the ones a factory treats as an ordinary Tuesday? The text says “any legal holiday,” and the biennial election was already on the list when the law passed.

A search of New Hampshire Supreme Court opinions in the CourtListener database for the statute’s operative words returned no decision applying it. The Department of Labor lists RSA 275:28 and 275:29 among the laws it “administers and enforces.” As read on October 4, 2026, its wage-and-hour questions page and its protective-legislation poster say nothing about holiday work in mills or factories. Granite State Report did not ask the department how it reads the section before publishing, and nothing this newsroom found on the department’s website says.

New Hampshire counted 67,800 manufacturing jobs in August 2026, by the preliminary estimate of the state and federal labor statistics agencies, a little under one nonfarm job in ten. That count includes office staff, so it is not a count of people who work in a mill or factory. And the statute is not limited to elections. On its face it covers Columbus Day, Veterans Day, Washington’s Birthday and every other day on the list.

Eight bills, none passed

Lawmakers have tried to make the election holiday mean something. Between 2014 and 2025 at least eight bills proposed to close public offices on election days, add primaries to the list, or give workers time to vote. None became law.

The first of them, in 2014, would have added one sentence directly after the mill law: “An employer shall permit employees to take leave on the state biennial election day in November of even-numbered years for the purpose of voting.” The public hearing was called to order at 2:13 p.m. on January 16, 2014 and adjourned at 2:23. The committee voted 18-0 to recommend killing the bill, and the House did. Its report gives the reason in one sentence: “The committee determined that current law already fulfills this need.” The report does not name the law.

One version got through a chamber. On January 8, 2020 the House voted 211-148 for a bill whose operative line read, “All employers shall, when practicable, allow employees up to 3 hours away from work to cast ballots on biennial general election days.” The Senate laid it on the table on June 16, 2020, and it died there. A 2022 bill for three paid hours lost in the House, 195-158. The 2025 bill came out of committee with a 9-7 recommendation to pass and was defeated on the House floor on March 13, 2025, 166-205.

National scorekeepers do not agree on where that leaves New Hampshire. As read on October 4, 2026, the Movement Advancement Project’s democracy map files the state under “does not have Election Day as a public holiday.” A Fox Business explainer published November 3, 2025 listed New Hampshire among nineteen states where, on Election Day, “all local government offices, aside from election-related ones, remain closed.” Each is half right. The statute calls the day a legal holiday. The state’s own calendars show its offices open.

What a worker can use

None of this gives a voter the day off. These are the provisions that do apply, each taken from the statute itself. This is a reading of the text, not legal advice.

• Polling hours. At state elections the polls must open no later than 11 a.m. and may not close before 7 p.m. (RSA 659:4). Cities and towns set their own hours inside those limits, so one polling place’s hours are not the next one’s.
• Absentee voting for work. A person “who is unable to appear at any time during polling hours at his or her polling place because of an employment obligation” is treated as absent and may vote by absentee ballot. The statute counts caring for children or infirm adults as employment, paid or not (RSA 657:1, I).
• Proof of identity. Since September 30, 2025, an absentee applicant must verify identity before a ballot is issued: a copy of a photo ID sent with the application, a notarized signature on the application, or a photo ID shown in person to the clerk (RSA 657:17-c).
• Deadlines. A clerk mails ballots for verified requests received by noon on the day before the election and hands them out in person until 5 p.m. that day (RSA 657:15, I). With narrow exceptions, a completed ballot must reach the clerk by 5 p.m. on election day (RSA 657:22).
• Mills and factories. An employee told that holiday work in a mill or factory is mandatory can point to RSA 275:28 and to the agency that lists it, the Department of Labor. The section excepts work that is both absolutely necessary and lawful on Sunday. Whether the department or a prosecutor would act is a question no public record this newsroom found answers.

The statute book says two things at once. The day of the biennial election is a legal holiday, and requiring mill or factory work on a legal holiday, outside one narrow exception, is a crime. The state’s calendar says it is a Tuesday.

— Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Statutory text is quoted from the New Hampshire General Court’s posted Revised Statutes Annotated and from the printed session laws of 1887, 1891, 1899 and 1913. Legislative action is taken from the General Court’s bill texts, dockets and committee files and from the 1913 journals of the House and Senate. State holiday schedules are taken from the Division of Personnel’s memorandum and the Supreme Court’s administrative order. Employment figures are from New Hampshire Employment Security and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Granite State Report is a newsroom, not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice.

Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.