About & FAQ | BreakShare

What is BreakShare?

BreakShare helps a group of friends at different colleges figure out when they're all actually off school at the same time (Thanksgiving, winter break, spring break, whatever) so you can make plans instead of guessing. Add everyone's college, and it works out the overlapping date ranges automatically.

Groups vs. checking a school: what's the difference?

Groups are for planning with actual friends. You create a group and get a link (and a short code) to send to them. Anyone with the link can open the same group, add themselves, see the same overlap dates, and add meetups. Everyone's changes sync live across devices, and the group screen shows whether it's connected.

Check a school is a quick, no-setup lookup of a single school's break dates, with no group, join code, or saving involved.

Where do the break dates come from?

From a dataset built by pulling real dates off official academic calendars (registrar and provost pages) for each school, for the current academic year. It's not a live feed: schools revise their calendars, so always double-check the exact dates against your own school's registrar page before relying on them for travel plans. Don't see your school at all? You can add it manually with its own break dates. Those stay local to your group.

How does BreakShare count break dates?

Every date comes from the school's official 2026-27 academic calendar. A break covers the days students have no classes, which is not always the exact dates a school puts on its "holiday" list:

Each break includes the weekends on both sides. A Monday-to-Friday spring break is listed with the weekend before and after, since those are all days you're free.
Winter break starts the day after your last final exam and ends the day before the next term's classes.
Required January terms count as class time. At colleges whose calendar is built around a January term (J-term, Winter Study, Interim), winter break ends when it starts, and any days off between the January term and the spring semester are listed as their own short break. Optional winter sessions that only some students take (common at big universities) don't shorten winter break.
Thanksgiving starts on Wednesday only when classes are cancelled that day. Otherwise it starts on Thursday.
Single holidays aren't breaks. A lone Labor Day or Veterans Day isn't listed unless the school calls it a break. Short breaks of 1 to 4 days are usually long weekends.
Class dates, not housing dates. We don't use residence-hall move-out or office-closure dates.

Each school page links to the official calendar we used, so you can check any date yourself.

Recent updates

BreakShare is maintained by hand: dates are checked against each school's official calendar, and corrected when schools revise them.

October 29, 2026: Published two articles built from the whole dataset: what the spring break 2027 calendars show and how often friends at different colleges are off at the same time, from a comparison of every pair of US colleges on BreakShare.
October 28, 2026: Added 2027-28 break dates for 68 more colleges (231 in total), including Pitt, UW-Madison, VCU, Hofstra, Pomona, Reed, Macalester, Marshall, Liberty and the PennWest campuses. While checking them, corrected 2026-27 dates for 29 of the same schools, among them Saint Michael's (spring break), Union College (winter and spring), Xavier of Louisiana (winter, spring and Mardi Gras), Geneseo, UNC Greensboro and UMass Boston (winter), and added missing Easter and fall breaks.
October 27, 2026: Re-checked Ohio State, LSU, Oklahoma, Kansas, Baylor and TCU against their official calendars. All their dates were right; added LSU's Mardi Gras break (both years) and Baylor's Easter break.
October 21, 2026: Fixed the University of Pittsburgh: Thanksgiving break is the whole week for students (Nov 21 to 29; Nov 26 to 27 was the faculty and staff holiday), and spring break is Mar 6 to 14.
October 20, 2026: Added Wake Forest's 2027-28 break dates from its official 2027-28 calendar. Fixed High Point University: its source link pointed at a different school's calendar; it now uses High Point's own, which corrected its 2026-27 winter break (Dec 12 to Jan 5), added its fall break and Easter break, and added its 2027-28 dates.
October 19, 2026: Corrected 2026-27 dates for Belmont (winter), Northwestern (Thanksgiving, winter and spring), Purdue (winter), CU Denver (winter), Oberlin (spring) and UW-Stevens Point (winter) against their official calendars. Merged five schools that were listed twice (Cheyney, Lincoln (PA), UW-Oshkosh, UW-Stevens Point, UW-Whitewater); old links forward to the remaining page. Added 2027-28 dates for Northwestern and Lincoln (PA).
October 17, 2026: Added 2027-28 break dates for 61 more colleges (160 in total), including UC Berkeley, Illinois, LSU, Miami, William & Mary, West Virginia, Chapman, Old Dominion, Wayne State and the University of Maine campuses.
October 17, 2026: Added 2027-28 break dates for 34 more colleges (99 in total), including Duke, Davidson, Colgate, Cincinnati, Memphis and San Jose State.
October 16, 2026: Added 2027-28 break dates for 38 more colleges (65 in total), each checked against its official 2027-28 calendar.
October 15, 2026: Added 2027-28 break dates for the first 27 colleges that have published next year's calendar, each checked against its official 2027-28 calendar. School pages and groups now have a 2026-27 / 2027-28 switch.
October 12, 2026: Every school page now shows how its breaks compare with other colleges, the closest schools by distance and the days it shares off with them, colleges with the same spring break, and answers to common questions. Break calendar pages now group schools into sections you can open and close.
October 11, 2026: Added break calendars for spring break 2027, Thanksgiving 2026 and winter break 2026-27, built from every school's dates.
October 9, 2026: Added 83 more colleges, for 1,017 in total. Each was added only after both its winter and spring break were confirmed on its official 2026-27 calendar.
October 8, 2026: Every school page now links the official academic calendar its dates come from. Rechecked 47 schools whose dates looked unusual and corrected 43 of them.
October 6 to 8, 2026: Rechecked about 340 schools against their official calendars and corrected the break dates for 130 of them.
October 7, 2026: Added calendar export: download a school's breaks or add them to Google Calendar.
October 6, 2026: Added the "On break on" date search to All schools, and this page's explanation of how breaks are counted.
October 5, 2026: Redesigned the site.

Is my data private?

See the Privacy Policy for the full details, but in short: your name, college, schedule, and meetup info are visible to whoever else is in your group (that's the point), not to the public. Checking a single school's dates never leaves your own browser.

Something's wrong with my school's dates, or I found a bug

Let us know. See the contact link in the footer.