When is Melbourne Cup Day?

The race that stops a state (mostly)

The Melbourne Cup has been run at Flemington since 1861 and on the first Tuesday in November since the 1870s. Melbourne Cup Day has been a public holiday in Melbourne for almost as long, which is how a horse race came to be one of the most searched public holidays in the country. It is a Tuesday holiday for metropolitan Melbourne, declared under the Victorian Public Holidays Act.

Outside the metropolitan area the picture is less tidy. Many regional Victorian councils do not take Melbourne Cup Day. Instead they declare a local holiday for their own show, cup or agricultural event, gazetted each year, so a worker in a regional town may have a day off in October or September instead of on Cup Day. This site lists Melbourne Cup Day as a metropolitan holiday and flags it as regional; check your council's website if you are outside Melbourne.

The Cup Day long weekend

A Tuesday holiday is unusual, and it creates the most reliable bridging opportunity in the Victorian calendar: take the Monday off and you have a four-day weekend for one day of leave. Many Melbourne workplaces are quiet on the Monday for that reason, and some close entirely. The long weekend planner ranks the Cup Day bridge against the year's other combinations, and it is nearly always among the top picks.

Cup Day is also the peak of the Melbourne Cup Carnival, with Derby Day on the Saturday before and Oaks Day on the Thursday after, so the whole week is a busy one for hospitality and racing.

Other states

No other state has a Melbourne Cup public holiday. South Australia has Adelaide Cup Day in March, and several NSW and Tasmanian towns have their own local race day holidays, but for most of the country the first Tuesday in November is an ordinary day with a long lunch.