Are shops open in Croatia on Sundays and holidays?

Restaurants, cafés and bars are not covered by these rules and keep their own hours.

Bakeries come under the same rule as shops. Some are also registered as catering outlets and open anyway, selling food to eat straight away but not whole loaves of bread. Petrol stations are exempt outright, and some of them sell fresh baked goods and basic groceries. If a public holiday falls on a Sunday, shops stay closed, and that Sunday cannot be chosen as one of a retailer's 16 working Sundays.

The Sunday rule and the 16 working Sundays

Since 1 July 2023 the Croatian Trade Act has kept shops closed on Sundays, and the rule applies to supermarkets and shopping centres alike. A retailer may pick 16 Sundays a year on which to open. The choice is made shop by shop, so on the same Sunday one branch of a chain can be open and the next one shut.

On the coast much of that allowance is used up in summer. Sixteen Sundays in a row are enough to cover a season from mid-June to late September, and a shop that spends them that way has none left for the rest of the year. Studenac, a chain with more than 1,400 shops, shows the pattern in its store finder. Most branches in seaside towns are marked as open on a Sunday in early August, compared with only a small share in December or February.

Public holidays

On the 14 public holidays shops are closed whatever the day of the week, Saturdays included. The allowance of 16 Sundays does not extend to holidays, so an ordinary shop cannot choose to open on one. Easter Sunday is followed by Easter Monday and Christmas Day by St. Stephen's Day, so at least twice a year supermarkets are shut for two days or more in a row. The next closures are listed further up this page.

Food and medicine on a closed day

Most of the exemptions depend on where a shop is. One that is part of a petrol station, a campsite, a marina or a hotel may open every day of the year. So may shops on family farms and inside national parks and other protected areas. At markets, growers selling their own produce may trade on Sundays and holidays as well.

Pharmacies are part of the health service and do not count as ordinary shops. Outside normal hours, look for the duty pharmacy, dežurna ljekarna in Croatian. In Zagreb the pharmacy at Trg bana Jelačića 3, on the main square, is open day and night, and so is the one at Pupačićeva 4 in Split, Sundays and holidays included.

Opening hours from Monday to Saturday

From Monday to Saturday a shop may open for up to 90 hours a week, or 15 hours a day on average. A working Sunday adds another 15 hours to the week. Supermarkets use most of those hours. They generally open at 7:00 or 8:00 and close at 21:00 or 22:00, on Saturdays as on weekdays. Smaller shops sometimes open at 6:00 or 6:30 and close earlier in the evening. Since June 2026 the Act has also allowed a town or municipality to restrict the sale of alcohol in shops between 21:00 and 6:00.

How to check a particular shop

Croatia has no public register of working Sundays. The law only requires a retailer to keep its own record of them and to display its opening hours clearly at the shop. That makes the notice on the door and the chain's own website the sources to trust. Konzum, Lidl, Kaufland, Spar, Plodine, Tommy, Studenac, Eurospin and dm all publish the hours of each shop, and some of their store finders can be filtered for shops open on the coming Sunday. The finders are in Croatian, where radno vrijeme means opening hours, nedjelja is Sunday, otvoreno is open and zatvoreno is closed.