If a French colleague, friend, or your host family mentions they're "faisant le pont" this month, they're not talking about literal bridges, but they might as well be, they're about to disappear for a four-day weekend, and so is roughly a fifth of the country.
What does "faire le pont" actually mean?
Faire le pont literally translates to "to make the bridge." It describes the very French habit of taking a single extra day off work to connect a public holiday to the weekend, turning what would be a normal Thursday or Tuesday holiday into a four-day break. Picture the days of the week as two riverbanks: the holiday on one side, the weekend on the other. The one workday sitting in between is the gap, and the extra day off you take is the bridge that connects them.
On fait le pont ce week-end, le bureau est fermé jusqu'à lundi. → We're bridging this weekend, the office is closed until Monday.
Where the expression comes from
The phrase dates back to the French Second Empire (1852 to 1870) and has kept essentially the same meaning ever since: crossing over the single working day standing between a holiday and the weekend, rather than going in to work for just that one day.
How it works in practice
France has 11 official public holidays (jours fériés) each year. When one lands on a Tuesday, people often take the Monday off to create a four-day weekend. When one lands on a Thursday, the Friday becomes the bridge instead. A holiday that falls on a Wednesday can sometimes stretch into an even longer break, with people taking both the Thursday and Friday off.
Take Ascension Day in 2026: it fell on Thursday, 14 May. Employees who took the Friday off turned a single public holiday into four consecutive days away from work, without touching much of their annual leave. It's one of the most reliably bridged holidays every year, precisely because Ascension always falls on a Thursday.
A look at France's 2026 holidays
| Holiday (2026) | Day it falls on | Pont potential |
|---|---|---|
| Fête du Travail, 1 May | Friday | Already a long weekend |
| Ascension, 14 May | Thursday | Classic pont: take the Friday |
| Fête nationale, 14 July | Tuesday | Classic pont: take the Monday |
| Armistice, 11 November | Wednesday | Grand pont: take Thursday and Friday for a 5-day break |
| Noël, 25 December | Friday | Already a long weekend |
If you're reading this in the summer of 2026, the Armistice holiday on Wednesday, 11 November is your next real opportunity to plan around: bridging the Thursday and Friday turns it into a five-day break running from Wednesday straight through to Sunday.
Is faire le pont automatic, or do you have to ask?
It depends entirely on the company. Some employers, particularly smaller businesses and parts of the public sector, close automatically on bridge days. In most companies, though, the bridge day comes out of your own paid leave or RTT allowance (the extra days off that come with working more than the legal 35-hour week, explained in more detail in my guide to French work culture), and needs to be requested like any other day off, ideally weeks in advance since everyone tends to want the same days.
How popular is faire le pont, really?
Extremely. Around 12 million people in France, close to a fifth of the population, bridged the Ascension holiday in a single recent year, according to tourism advisory body Protourisme. Roads, trains and short-haul flights around these long weekends fill up well in advance, which is worth knowing if you're ever travelling in France around a jour férié: book ahead, or expect a very crowded TGV.
Is there an English equivalent?
Not really a perfect one. English speakers might say "taking a long weekend" or, in the UK, occasionally "bridging" a bank holiday, but neither phrase carries the same near-institutional weight that faire le pont has in France, where it's assumed enough that some companies build it directly into the office calendar. It's a small expression, but understanding it tells you a lot about how the French relationship with time off actually works: structured, protected, and taken seriously, not squeezed in around work.