LCPS Calendar 26–27 & 27–28
Days Off, Made for Family Travel

LCPS spring break runs March 22–26, 2027 for the 2026–27 school year and April 10–14, 2028 for 2027–28. Counting the weekends on both ends, Loudoun County families get nine straight days off: March 20–28, 2027 and April 8–16, 2028. One honest note from Grampy: spring break is the busiest family travel window of the year, with Disney World crowd levels running 8 to 10 out of 10. If spring break is your only option, book six or more months ahead and go in with a day-by-day plan. If your dates are flexible, Loudoun’s Fall Getaway and Lunar New Year breaks earn you far shorter lines for the same number of days off.

The first day of school for Loudoun County Public Schools is Monday, August 17, 2026 for the 2026–27 school year and Thursday, August 19, 2027 for 2027–28. The last days of school are June 11, 2027 and June 14, 2028. Loudoun starts about a week earlier than neighboring Fairfax County, which matters if you are trying to squeeze in a late-summer trip. Mid-August in Orlando is hot, but it thins out fast as districts across the country go back. My grandkids and I call the summer stretch the yellow zone: doable, but the green blocks during the school year beat it every time.

LCPS winter break runs December 21, 2026 through January 1, 2027, with students returning Monday, January 4. For 2027–28 it runs December 20 through December 31, 2027, returning Monday, January 3. With weekends included, families get 16 consecutive days off both years. The catch is that Christmas through New Year’s is the single busiest theme park week of the year, a 10 out of 10 on the Favorite Grampy Travels crowd calendars. The first weekend of the break and the days right before Christmas are noticeably calmer than the week between the holidays, so aim early in the break if the parks are the goal.

The best no-school-missed travel window for LCPS families is the Lunar New Year break, January 22 through January 26, 2028: five days off while Disney World and Universal Orlando crowd levels run just 3 to 5 out of 10, the calmest stretch of the entire school year. Fairfax County families do not get this break at all, which is exactly why it stays quiet. The February 5–7, 2027 student holiday weekend is a close second at the same crowd levels. Both are built from student holidays rather than national holidays, so the whole country is not off, but your kids are. Those are the closest thing to a cheat code the LCPS calendar offers.

Three differences matter for travel. First, Loudoun starts school about a week earlier (August 17, 2026 versus August 24 for FCPS). Second, LCPS gives a six-day Fall Getaway in late October and early November, one day longer than the Fairfax fall break. Third, and biggest, LCPS observes Lunar New Year with days off in 2027–28 that FCPS does not, creating a five-day January window when Orlando is at its quietest. Spring break and winter break land on the same weeks in both counties. If your family straddles both districts, our Fairfax County calendar page has the same traffic-light view for FCPS.

Yes. Beyond Thanksgiving, winter break, and spring break, LCPS students get more than ten additional days off each year: single-day holidays such as Yom Kippur, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Diwali, MLK Jr. Day, Presidents’ Day, Eid al-Fitr, and Memorial Day, plus student holidays after each grading quarter. Several of them land next to weekends and quietly become three- and four-day travel windows, like February 5–7, 2027 and March 4–7, 2028. Grampy’s rule of thumb: a long weekend when school is in session elsewhere often beats a full week when the whole country is off.

Most LCPS families do not need to: the calendar already builds in six multi-day travel windows per school year, plus long weekends, without a single missed class. A September or early-December trip does mean missed school days in exchange for walk-on ride waits, and some families decide that trade is worth it once in a childhood. If you are considering it, talk to your school’s attendance office first, since family-trip absences are handled differently school to school. My advisors at Favorite Grampy Travels plan both kinds of trips every week, and the green-block windows on this page are where we start.