School holidays and shared custody: how the split works

Week numbering does not pause during the holidays: week 8 stays even whether there is school or not. Many parenting agreements, however, set a different split for school breaks.

The three most common arrangements

• Continuity — the even/odd rhythm carries on unchanged. It is the simplest, but it can hand the same holidays to the same parent several years running.
• Half of each period — every break is cut in two, with the first and second halves alternating from one year to the next.
• Alternating by period — one parent takes the autumn and winter breaks, the other Christmas and spring, and the order reverses the following year. Summer is often handled separately, by fortnights or by month.

What the zones are for

Metropolitan France is split into three zones — A, B and C — whose winter and spring break dates differ. The autumn, Christmas and summer holidays are the same across all zones.

Two parents living in academies from different zones therefore work from different reference dates. The agreement is worth being explicit about which zone applies: usually the one of the child's school.

The thing to watch

A holiday period almost always spans several ISO weeks of differing parity. Two weeks of autumn break, for instance, cover one even week and one odd week. If the agreement says "the rhythm continues", the split is mechanical. If it says "half each", the switchover date has to be defined.

Our school holidays page shows, for each period and each zone, the number and parity of the weeks covered.