Term dates, holidays and cancelled sessions

Most billing disputes are calendar disputes. Publish the year, decide how holidays meet your prices, and settle cancellations and snow days before they happen.

Jul 21, 2026 · 5 min read

The email arrives in the second week of December: "We paid the same for December as for October, and there are only two classes." It reads like a complaint about money. It isn't. It's a question about whether classes were supposed to happen, and nobody answered it in advance.

A surprising share of the awkward money conversations a class business has are calendar conversations underneath. Fix the calendar and most of them stop. July, before fall registration opens, is the time to do it.

Publish the whole year before it starts

Every term date and every closure, for the full year, before anyone registers. One page, linked from everywhere, updated in place rather than re-sent.

What goes on it:

• The first and last day of each term
• Every day off, with its name ("Thanksgiving Monday, no classes")
• The weeks you're closed: winter break, March break or spring break
• Show dates, picture day, watch week, and anything else that changes the normal week
• What happens when you cancel a class, and when a family misses one (below)

This feels like a lot of work in July and saves you every week after. It also answers, without a conversation, the question that fills your inbox: "Is there class this week?"

Canada and the US don't share a holiday calendar

If you've moved across the border, or copied a template from a business on the other side, check every date. The ones that catch people:

• Thanksgiving is the second Monday of October in Canada and the fourth Thursday of November in the US.
• Victoria Day (Canada) is the Monday before May 25, and Memorial Day (US) is the last Monday of May, a week later.
• Remembrance Day and Veterans Day both fall on November 11, and whether schools and offices close depends on the province or state.
• Family Day in most provinces and Presidents' Day in the US usually share a February Monday, but not every province has Family Day.
• March break in Canada and spring break in the US are set by provinces, states or school boards, run one week or two, and can differ between two schools in the same town.

Two more things to decide for each one. First, a holiday for government isn't always a day off for your families: if schools are open on Remembrance Day where you are, your 4:30 class might be full. Second, the opposite: school professional development days are a regular day for you and a free day for every child, which is a camp opportunity, not a closure.

If you run on a statutory holiday, your staff may be owed holiday pay. The rules differ by province and state, so check your own before you build the schedule.

Decide how holidays meet your prices

This is the real source of the December email, and there are three coherent answers.

Charge per term, for the sessions in it. The most transparent. "Fall: 12 classes, $180" is $15 a class, and a winter term of 10 classes is $150. Bills differ term to term, which some families find fiddly, but nobody can say they paid for a class that didn't happen.

Charge the same every month. A $780 year over ten months is $78 a month. Predictable for everyone, and the one most families prefer. The catch is that December, with two classes, costs the same as October, with five. You have to say so, plainly and more than once.

Charge monthly for the sessions in that month. It looks fair and it's the worst of both: bills that change every month, income that changes every month, and a question every time the number moves.

Pick one, write the sentence that explains it, and put that sentence on your prices page and your registration confirmation. Flat monthly lives or dies on one line: "Tuition is a yearly total divided into ten equal payments, so it's the same whether a month has two classes or five."

When you cancel a class

A burst pipe, an ice storm, a teacher with the flu and no cover. Whatever the reason, the family didn't choose it.

Tell them as soon as you know, by the channel they actually read. If they read texts and ignore email, text.

Say what happens to the class in the same message. Not "more details to follow". A credit, a make-up, or a class added to the end of the term, decided before you hit send. For example:

Tonight's Ballet 2 is cancelled: our teacher is ill and we couldn't find a cover. We've added a class at the end of term, the Tuesday after the last one, same time. Nothing for you to do.

Default to generous. Making up one class costs you an hour. A family feeling they paid for nothing costs you far more.

Know your number. One cancelled class a year is noise. Four is a pattern, and families start to price it in, or leave.

When a family misses a class

A different thing entirely, covered by your make-up or notice policy. What matters is that the two are never confused. A class you cancelled and a class they missed aren't the same, and treating them the same in either direction starts an argument: refusing to make up your own cancellation feels like theft, and refunding every absence makes your policy meaningless.

Snow days and the studio that can't open

Write the rule before the weather arrives. Who decides, by when, and how families hear about it.

"We decide by 2 PM and text everyone" is a policy. Deciding at 4:40, while families are already in the car, isn't. Some businesses follow the local school board ("if schools close for weather, so do we"), which is simple, but schools close in the morning and your classes are in the evening, when the roads may be clear. Whichever you choose, say it on the page, and say what happens to the class: it's the same as any other class you cancel.

The page that prevents most of it

One page: term dates, days off, what happens when you cancel, what happens when they miss, how the bill relates to the calendar, and the weather rule.

Link it from the registration page, the welcome email and the holiday schedule email. When a question comes in, reply with the link rather than retyping the answer. Not to be curt: the fourth time you type it by hand, you'll get a detail slightly wrong, and that inconsistency is what turns a calendar question into a billing dispute.

In Caletan, a season holds its own days off: name the day, such as Thanksgiving, and that day's classes are cancelled and their rooms freed for other bookings. A closure does the same for a whole location or one room, and a single class can be cancelled from the schedule, telling its families as you do. More in closures and holidays.