The Valencian School Year 2026-2027: Dates, Book Lists and the Deadlines Nobody Tells You About

The calendar is the easy half. The Generalitat publishes term dates months ahead, every school repeats them, and any parent can find them in a minute.

The half that catches people out is everything attached to it. The book scheme is a lending bank rather than a grant, and it has its own deadline running into November. Your school's calendar is not quite the regional calendar, because two separate mechanisms let it move days around. And enrolment, the thing most new arrivals are actually worried about, does not happen in September at all.

This page covers the confirmed 2026-2027 dates and then the parts around them, with every figure sourced from the Generalitat's own publications. If you are still choosing a school, our guide to international schools in Valencia is the better place to start.

The confirmed 2026-2027 dates

The Generalitat confirmed the calendar for the coming year in July 2026. One start date covers Infantil, Primaria, ESO, Bachillerato and Formacion Profesional, so siblings at different stages all go back on the same morning.

Universities are not covered by this calendar and run their own, which typically starts later in September. If you have a school-age child and a student in the same house, expect two different rhythms.

Holidays and the days school is closed

There are two long breaks and a short list of public holidays that fall on a teaching day. Both breaks are given inclusive of the dates shown, so the Christmas one is a full sixteen days rather than the fortnight people tend to assume.

Worth planning around if you are booking flights home: the Christmas break ends on 6 January, which is Reyes and the single biggest family day of the Spanish winter. Children go back the following morning.

The three free days, and the new swap rule

This is the part that makes the regional calendar an approximation rather than a schedule. Municipal school councils, the Consejos Escolares Municipales, can still fix three non-teaching days of their own choosing across the year. These are set locally, so two schools ten minutes apart can close on different days.

New for 2026-2027, those councils can also modify the calendar by exchanging between one and four teaching days for consecutive non-teaching days. The total number of teaching days and the overall length of the year both have to be respected, so nothing is lost, but the shape of your autumn can shift.

In practice this is used to bridge awkward midweek holidays into long weekends. If 9 October or 8 December falls on a Tuesday or Thursday, expect the surrounding Monday or Friday to be a candidate.

Banc de Llibres: it is a lending bank, not a grant

The single most common misunderstanding among newly arrived families is that the Banc de Llibres is money towards books. It is not. It is a lending scheme: you hand back last year's set in usable condition at the end of the year, and you receive the next year's set in September.

That means the obligation runs in both directions. A family that joins mid-year and has no set to return can normally still participate, but a family that fails to return a set, or returns it damaged, can be excluded from the following year.

The Generalitat has budgeted around EUR 70.7 million for replacing and renewing textbooks and curricular material across the region in 2026-2027. All public centres take part automatically. Concertados and centres run by local authorities have to apply themselves, through OVICE, within ten working days of the convocatoria being published.

Where the money side actually sits

Because the book scheme is a loan rather than a payment, the costs a family still faces are the ones around it: stationery, the school's own material fees, the comedor if your child eats at school, and transport where the centre provides it. Those are separate schemes with their own calls and their own deadlines, and they vary by centre and by municipality.

We are deliberately not publishing figures for them here. They change annually, they differ between public, concertado and private centres, and a stale number is worse than none. Ask the centre directly, and ask in the same conversation which of them are means-tested.

If you are comparing the total cost of private and international schooling rather than the state system, our school fees calculator models the fee side properly.

What to have ready before September

Enrolment and the start of term are two different things, and this is the distinction that causes the most trouble. Admission to a state school runs through a formal process in the spring, months before the September your child would start.

If you are arriving mid-year or after the admission window has closed, you are in the out-of-period route instead, which is handled case by case and depends on which centres in your area have places. That is a very different conversation from the ordinary one, and worth starting early.

• Empadronamiento at your municipality. The certificate is what proves which catchment area you are in, and it is required almost everywhere.
• NIE or TIE for the parents, and documentation for the child.
• The child's vaccination record, translated if it is not in Spanish or Valencian.
• Previous school reports, with an apostille and a sworn translation if you are coming from outside the EU.
• A decision on the language question, since Valencian is a subject and, in many centres, a language of instruction rather than an optional extra.

None of this is difficult once you know the shape of it. Term runs 9 September to 18 June. The two long breaks are fixed. The three floating days and any day-swap are decided by your municipality and your centre, so get their calendar rather than relying on the regional one.

And the deadline actually worth writing down is 10 November 2026, for the Banc de Llibres. It is the one that is easy to miss, because it falls two months after term has already started and everything feels settled.

If the admission process itself is what you are facing, our school enrolment support deals with applications, document apostilles and waiting lists.

Sources

Term dates, holiday periods and the Banc de Llibres figures on this page come from the Generalitat Valenciana's own announcements, consulted in August 2026. Where a scheme is administered by individual centres, we have said so rather than generalising.

• Generalitat Valenciana, school calendar for 2026-2027 (comunica.gva.es)
• Generalitat Valenciana, Banco de Libros call for 2026-2027 (comunica.gva.es)
• Sede electronica GVA, family participation in the Banco de Libros programme, 2026-2027 (procedure G112587)