Public Holidays and Make-Up Workdays: How HourStamp Counts the Day

The short answer

Working out what you earned is mostly arithmetic. Knowing which days count as work is not, and that is what the holiday calendar is for. HourStamp ships statutory holiday calendars for 44 regions across 2024–2027, including the official mainland China schedule and Taiwan's labour holidays with their make-up workdays. The day type is detected from that calendar rather than typed by you, and where the law distinguishes hours within a day the multiplier can be tiered by hour, as Taiwan's Labor Standards Act does.

Every amount is an estimate for personal record keeping, not a wage determination or legal advice. The download is HourStamp on the App Store; the rest of this page is about why the calendar decides whether your figures can be checked.

Why this is the question people actually have

Behind "does it know public holidays?" there is almost always one experience: the payslip says one thing, your arithmetic says another, and every plausible explanation points at a different day. The problem is not that you cannot multiply. It is that the multiplier is chosen for you by a calendar you never see, and a day that is nominally a holiday can be a working day you are owed more for. The failure has a specific shape: someone works a long weekend made of days announced as holidays, plus the weekdays designated as make-up days so the break nets out to the length the government intended. A tool that knows "this month has a holiday" and not "this specific Saturday was a working day" pays that Saturday at holiday rate and inflates the estimate — a few percent on one day, not dramatic enough to notice, which is why it survives.

The mirror image is a statutory-holiday shift recorded as an ordinary weekday because the entry was typed from memory. The first over-states, the second under-states, and both hide in the total.

What the calendar actually does

The mechanic is short. You log shifts and overtime against dates; each date is classified from the built-in calendar as a workday, a rest day, or a statutory holiday; the matching multiplier is applied; and the result is itemised rather than collapsed into one figure.

Day type	Overtime multiplier
Weekday	×1.5
Weekend	×2
Statutory holiday	×3

The design point is not the table, it is that the table is applied to you rather than chosen by you. Nothing asks you to remember which kind of day it was. That is the difference between a calculator that is right when you feed it right and one that is right when you are tired at 11pm on a Sunday, which is when most entries actually get made.

The visible part matters as much as the automatic part. The hourly basis, the cycle dates, and the multipliers stay visible on the estimate instead of only the total, so a figure you disagree with has a specific place to point rather than a general sense that something is off. The calculation walkthrough covers that chain in full. One property connects the two: stamping a record freezes its device time, the pay settings captured for it, and its day-level calculation, so a record made under one schedule cannot silently re-derive itself later under another.

Make-up workdays: the case that breaks a flat multiplier

Taiwan's labour calendar is the clearest case where one rate per day is not enough. Its holiday structure produces weekdays that are nominally holidays but designated as working days to make up a long weekend. A calendar that treats every announced holiday as a rest day understates the period; one that treats every holiday as a working day overstates it.

HourStamp models the make-up days as part of the calendar rather than as an exception you remember to apply. They are classified on the same pass as every other date, so they are stamped and revision-tracked like any other day — the classification that produced a figure is the one you can point at months later, not a correction someone made in their head afterwards. Mainland China has the same shape, where the official schedule pairs holiday days with the working weekends that compensate for them, so you are not reading a notice and re-deriving a year of dates by hand.

When a flat daily rate is wrong in a way you cannot see

A separate trap is where the law does not draw one line across a day. Applying a single multiplier to the whole day is then wrong in a hard-to-notice way: the first hour is over-paid and the last under-paid by the same amount, so the day total looks plausible and the shape is wrong.

HourStamp allows the multiplier to be tiered by hour where the law requires it — the case named in the App Store description is Taiwan's Labor Standards Act. The honest limit: tiers are only as good as the law they encode, and boundary hours are where an employer and an employee are most likely to have argued anyway. Having the tiers in the record does not settle that argument; it makes the disagreement visible instead of buried in a total. Where the law does not tier, a flat rate is correct and the app should not invent a structure the statute does not have.

The alternatives, and where a calendar runs out

Two limits are worth knowing before you build a habit on this. The stated coverage ends at 2027 — calendars are published year by year, so that is a real end date, and nothing in the app's description promises what happens after it. The 44 regions are counted, not named: the listing gives the number and the years without enumerating every region, so verify a few dates where your jurisdiction matters. A record you already stamped is unaffected either way, because the day-level calculation is frozen with it; a new entry in an uncovered year is not.

The obvious alternative is the spreadsheet or the generic timesheet where you pick the day type from a dropdown. It is fine for a salaried office worker with a stable Monday-to-Friday schedule. It fails in one place: the day type becomes an input, so its accuracy depends entirely on you, at the moment of entry, knowing something you almost never think about. Reading the government notice each year and setting the dates yourself is the same problem with annual maintenance; a pre-computed spreadsheet of holiday dates is the same thing with more copying. A built-in calendar moves that maintenance to the app, at the cost of being only as current as its last update.

The difference HourStamp makes is narrow: the classification is derived from the date rather than supplied alongside it, and it is captured in the stamped record rather than living only in what you typed.

What HourStamp does differently

The differentiator here is not a longer holiday list — a rival can print a longer one. It is that the calendar is an input to a calculation you can inspect, not a table that quietly produces a number: workdays, rest days, and statutory holidays stay distinct, with the hourly basis, the pay period, and the multiplier visible; the day type is detected rather than typed, with make-up workdays part of that detection; where the law tiers by hour, so does the multiplier; and every wage is broken out item by item, so a disagreement lands on a day and a line rather than on a total.

The honest limits, so this is not read as more than it is:

• The figures are estimates for personal record keeping, not a wage determination or legal advice, and not something an arbitrator or a court has concluded.
• The calendar is dated. 2024–2027 is the stated range; it does not extend itself.
• A stamp is not third-party trusted time — your device's record of a moment, not notarised.
• The first release centres on monthly-salary overtime; it is not a piece-rate calculator.
• No loans and no ads, ledgers on device with no account — but automatic iCloud sync is not promised as a first-release capability, so manual export is the real backup.

What to do with this

The decision is narrow. If every week you work looks like every other week, a timesheet that asks you to label each day is fine and no calendar will change your month. If your schedule is set by a posted roster, a rotating shift, or a statutory holiday calendar, then the calendar is not a detail of your pay — it is most of it, and the question worth asking of any app is whether the day type comes from a date or from you.

That test takes a minute. Log one shift on a date you already know was a public holiday and see whether the statutory rate is applied without being told to. Then log one on a make-up workday and see whether it is treated as a rest day. An app that cannot answer the second question is not modelling your calendar; it is asking you to.

The free tier includes logging, estimates, ledgers, and statistics, so you can run that test before paying anything. HourStamp Pro unlocks the shareable PDF personal record summary — $0.99 a month or ¥6, $3.99 a year or ¥28, and $9.99 once or ¥68, also available as a one-time lifetime purchase.

If that is what you want, HourStamp is on the App Store. Start by checking one past pay period against the dates in the app — if a make-up day is miscounted there, it will be miscounted everywhere.