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

FCPS 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, Fairfax 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, the smaller FCPS breaks earn you shorter lines for the same days off.

The first day of school for Fairfax County Public Schools is Monday, August 24, 2026 for the 2026–27 school year and Monday, August 23, 2027 for 2027–28. The last days of school are June 16, 2027 and June 14, 2028. For vacation planners, those bookend dates matter twice: late August before school starts is hot but progressively less crowded in Orlando as other districts go back, and the first weeks after the last day of school are the calm before the July peak. My grandkids and I call the summer stretch the yellow zone: doable, but the green blocks during the school year beat it every time.

FCPS winter break runs December 21, 2026 through January 3, 2027, with students returning Monday, January 4. For 2027–28 it runs December 20, 2027 through January 2, 2028. 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 FCPS families is the semester break, January 29 through February 1, 2027: four 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. The April days off, April 17–20, 2027, are a close second at levels 4 to 6. Most families never notice these windows because they are built from teacher workdays rather than named holidays. That is exactly why the parks stay quiet: the whole country is not off, but your kids are. Those two windows are the closest thing to a cheat code the FCPS calendar offers.

Yes. Beyond Thanksgiving, winter break, and spring break, FCPS students get more than ten additional days off each year: single-day holidays such as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Election Day, MLK Jr. Day, Presidents’ Day, Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, and Memorial Day, plus teacher workdays after each grading quarter. Several of them land next to weekends and quietly become three- and four-day travel windows, like October 9–12, 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 FCPS families do not need to: the calendar already builds in five multi-day travel windows per school year, plus long weekends, without a single missed class. A September or early-November 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.