diff --git a/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.20.3.txt b/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.20.3.txt
index 49546c9e9faca..4b592f56c397d 100644
--- a/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.20.3.txt
+++ b/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.20.3.txt
@@ -44,6 +44,7 @@ Bug Fixes
 - Bug in a DataFrame/Series with a ``TimedeltaIndex`` when slice indexing (:issue:`16637`)
 - Bug in reindexing on an empty ``CategoricalIndex`` (:issue:`16770`)
 - Fixed a pytest marker failing downstream packages' tests suites (:issue:`16680`)
+- Fixed compat with loading a ``DataFrame`` with a ``PeriodIndex``, from a ``format='fixed'`` HDFStore, in Python 3, that was written in Python 2 (:issue:`16781`)
 
 Conversion
 ^^^^^^^^^^