China Holiday Calendar

China 2026 public holiday guide

Last reviewed 2026-09-23 · Maintained by the site operator

Mainland China’s public holidays are set each year in a notice from the General Office of the State Council. Besides fixed festival dates, “tiaoxiu” (weekend-workday swaps) often creates longer breaks. In 2026, major holidays typically include New Year’s Day, Spring Festival, Qingming, Labour Day, Dragon Boat Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, and National Day.

Treat the festival date and the actual leave window as separate things. This calendar marks days off for planning trips and coverage; for payroll or attendance, follow the official notice and your employer’s rules.

Spring Festival and National Day are peak travel periods. Cross-border teams should mark these gaps early and compare them with holidays in nearby markets such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and Singapore.

Planning tips for 2026

• New Year’s Day: a short break useful for wrap-up or a quick trip.
• Spring Festival: the main family-reunion holiday; book travel early.
• Qingming, Dragon Boat, Mid-Autumn: usually shorter long weekends.
• Labour Day and National Day: busy tourism seasons with higher prices.

China 2026 public holiday table

This 2026 view lists 33 public holiday dates for China. The earliest entry is 2026-01-01 (New Year's Day, Thu) and the latest is 2026-10-07 (National Day). The longest consecutive block in the dataset is about 9 days (2026-02-15–2026-02-23). The table below is fully readable without JavaScript.

Note: Compiled from public notices for planning. Confirm critical dates with official sources.

Where the dates come from, and when they become reliable

Two documents govern public holidays in mainland China. The first is an administrative regulation issued by the State Council, the Measures on Public Holidays for National Annual Festivals and Memorial Days, which fixes how many statutory days each festival gets and which commemorative days apply only to part of the population. It was amended at the end of 2024: New Year Eve returned to the Spring Festival block, Labour Day went from one statutory day to two, and the nationwide total rose from eleven to thirteen days.

The second document is the annual arrangement circular published by the General Office of the State Council, usually in the autumn or early winter of the preceding year. That circular is what turns thirteen statutory days into the actual blocks people take off, and it specifies which weekends must be worked in exchange. Until it appears, any calendar claiming to show next year holiday arrangements is an educated guess, and those guesses are routinely wrong by a day on the make-up workdays.

A practical consequence for anyone planning from abroad: treat the festival name and the leave block as separate pieces of information. Knowing that National Day is 1 October tells you almost nothing about when your counterpart will actually be reachable.

Tiaoxiu, the weekend swap that catches out every newcomer

The mechanism the Chinese call tiaoxiu converts a nearby Saturday or Sunday into a working day so that the freed rest day can be attached to the holiday, producing one continuous block instead of scattered days off. Nothing is created; the time is borrowed from a weekend and repaid, or repaid first and borrowed later.

The 2026 calendar shows the arithmetic plainly. New Year Day carries one statutory day, yet the break runs Thursday 1 January to Saturday 3 January. Labour Day carries two statutory days and the break runs Friday 1 May to Tuesday 5 May. National Day carries three, and the break runs Thursday 1 October to Wednesday 7 October. The difference is made up partly by weekends that already fall inside the block and partly by swaps with weekends outside it.

For foreign managers the failure mode is predictable. Most countries shift a holiday forward if it lands on a weekend, and no country in your team calendar asks staff to come in on a Saturday to pay for a Monday. If you subscribe to a generic China holiday feed you will usually import the festival days and miss the make-up workdays entirely, which is how you end up scheduling a review call on a day the Shanghai office is quietly at full strength, or the reverse.

The distinction also has a payroll dimension. Work performed on a genuine statutory holiday attracts triple pay that cannot be substituted with time off in lieu, while work on a rest day, including a rest day moved by tiaoxiu, can be compensated with compensatory leave first. If you run a joint venture or a wholly foreign-owned entity, your HR team will care a great deal about which category a given date falls into.

Midwinter: a quiet three days, then the largest movement of people anywhere

The 2026 New Year break covers Thursday 1 January to Saturday 3 January. Gregorian New Year is a modest affair in China. Companies hold annual meetings and hand out bonuses around this period, shopping centres run countdown promotions, and cinemas release a dedicated New Year slate, but there is no travel surge worth planning around.

Spring Festival is the opposite. In 2026 the block runs Sunday 15 February to Monday 23 February, with New Year Eve on Monday 16 February and the first day of the lunar year on Tuesday 17 February, opening the Year of the Horse. For a visitor the important thing is not the eight days on paper but the shape of the weeks around them. Factories begin winding down well before the official start, migrant workers head home, and restaurants, barbers, laundries, courier depots and small shops in big cities close for stretches that can extend past the Lantern Festival on 3 March, which is not itself a holiday.

If you are in China over this period, expect an unusual city. Beijing and Shanghai empty out and become pleasant; the small cities and county towns fill up. Museums and major attractions stay open and get busy, family-run noodle shops do not. Fireworks rules vary by municipality, with central urban districts generally restricting time and location while outlying districts are looser, so check the local public security notice rather than assuming.

Spring and early summer: three short breaks with very different weight

Qingming in 2026 runs Saturday 4 April through Monday 6 April — a three-day block under the published State Council notice. It is still a tomb-sweeping period: cemeteries operate timed entry, many now offer proxy or online memorial services, and open flame burning of paper offerings is restricted in most urban areas.

Labour Day, Friday 1 May to Tuesday 5 May, is the one substantial spring block. Domestic tourism peaks, popular scenic areas require advance reservation with real-name registration and timed entry, and museum slots in first-tier cities are often gone a week ahead. Hotel rates in destination cities rise sharply and then collapse in the week after.

Dragon Boat Festival runs Friday 19 June through Sunday 21 June. Regional races are worth seeing if your travel dates coincide: the Pearl River Delta, Miluo in Hunan, and the canal towns of Jiangsu and Zhejiang all run competitive events. Zongzi, the glutinous rice parcels eaten at this time, split along a savoury south and sweet north line that locals will happily argue about.

The autumn cluster and why late September is a bad deadline

Mid-Autumn Festival in 2026 gives Friday 25 September through Sunday 27 September. Mooncake exchange is a business ritual as much as a family one; companies distribute boxes to staff and send them to clients, which is worth knowing if your firm has gift-value compliance rules, because an unopened corporate mooncake box arriving at a foreign head office has caused awkward conversations before.

National Day follows almost immediately, Thursday 1 October to Wednesday 7 October, seven days commonly called the October Golden Week. The flag-raising ceremony at Tiananmen Square takes place at dawn and draws queues that form hours earlier. Nationally this is the annual high point for long-distance travel, weddings and big-ticket purchases, and the marquee sites are at their worst between 2 and 4 October.

The gap between the two blocks is only about a week. Anyone who needs a Chinese counterparty to sign, stamp, inspect goods or clear an approval should treat the stretch from late September to the second week of October as low throughput, and either pull the milestone before 24 September or push it past 8 October.

What actually shuts

Government offices close completely, and that includes the exit and entry administration bureaus that handle residence permits and visa extensions. If your permit expires in early October, deal with it in September; the queues in the days after a Golden Week are noticeably worse than usual. Property registration, social insurance and housing fund counters are in the same category.

Financial infrastructure is the part foreign firms underestimate. The Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges close, Stock Connect northbound trading halts, the interbank and foreign exchange markets stop, and large-value interbank settlement pauses. Corporate payments, currency conversion and cross-border remittances therefore do not merely slow down, they stop until the first working day after the block. Retail banking continues in reduced form, with some branches on rotation and shorter counter hours, while mobile banking, ATMs, Alipay and WeChat Pay work normally throughout.

Consumer services run in the opposite direction. Malls, restaurants, cinemas and attractions extend hours and staff up. Hospitals keep emergency departments running around the clock but thin out outpatient clinics and specialist appointments. Courier networks publish suspension notices for parts of the Spring Festival period. Customs and border posts keep duty staff on, but expect declarations and inspections to move slowly.

Getting around during a peak

Rail is the default for domestic travel and the booking window matters. Tickets are released on the 12306 platform a set number of days ahead, currently fifteen, though the window has changed before and the platform announcement is the authority. Popular routes can sell out within minutes of release; the waitlist function generally performs better than refreshing manually. Tickets are tied to identity documents, and foreign passport holders may still be directed to staffed gates or a counter at some stations.

Driving has one rule worth memorising: expressway tolls are waived for small passenger vehicles during Spring Festival, Qingming, Labour Day and National Day only. New Year Day, Dragon Boat and Mid-Autumn are not included. Eligibility is judged by the moment you exit the toll gate rather than when you entered, which produces two predictable jams, one at entrances just before midnight on the eve of a qualifying break and one on the final afternoon as everyone returns at once.

Air travel prices peak with Spring Festival and National Day and stay high across the whole block rather than just the first and last days. Booking a flight that departs on the final day of a Golden Week is usually both expensive and vulnerable to knock-on delays.

Working with mainland counterparts across the calendar

Manufacturing is where the Spring Festival block turns into something much longer than eight days. Lines begin stopping before the official start, workers travel home, and return is staggered; the period doubles as the main annual job-changing season, so a supplier may come back with a partly new workforce. Sourcing teams generally treat the last pre-holiday vessel departure as a hard constraint, build buffer stock, and write post-holiday delivery slack into contracts.

The October block behaves differently. Factory downtime is shorter, but approvals, customs clearance, inspections and bank settlement all stack up, and the backlog takes several days beyond 8 October to clear. Anything requiring a company chop, a fapiao or a government permit should be assumed to land in that queue.

Finally, do not treat Greater China as a single calendar. In 2026 the mainland lunar new year block runs to 23 February, while Hong Kong and Macau observe only 17 to 19 February. Qingming, Labour Day and National Day differ as well, and Hong Kong and Macau keep Good Friday, Easter Monday and Christmas, which the mainland does not. Teams spread across the Greater Bay Area need a side-by-side roster, not an assumption that one office covers another.

Assumptions that cause trouble

Christmas is not a public holiday on the mainland. Shops decorate and young people go out, but offices, banks, schools and factories operate normally on 25 December. The same applies to Valentine Day and Halloween, which exist commercially and not on the calendar.

Several well-known traditional festivals carry no day off at all: Lantern Festival, Qixi, the Double Ninth, and Laba. Separately, a handful of dates give partial leave to specific groups under the regulation rather than to everyone, such as a half day for women on International Women Day and a day for children under fourteen on 1 June, which is why a colleague may be out while the office stays open.

Lunar and solar-term festivals move against the Gregorian calendar each year, so last year pattern is not a template. The 2026 calendar is a good illustration, and the published circular giving Qingming and Dragon Boat three-day windows rather than weekend-only leftovers. Arrangement circulars can also be adjusted for major national events or emergencies. Use the dates here as a planning baseline, then confirm against the State Council General Office circular for the year and against whatever your own employer or counterparty actually practises.

• Separate the statutory day from the actual leave block before you plan anything
• Colour make-up workdays differently in shared calendars so overseas teams do not misread them
• Toll-free expressway travel covers Spring Festival, Qingming, Labour Day and National Day only
• Large-value payments and FX stop for the whole block, not just the first day
• Mainland, Hong Kong and Macau calendars diverge; keep all three if you operate in the Bay Area

Cross-border planning notes

Nearby contrast: Hong Kong and Taiwan observe Lunar New Year with different leave lengths and no Mainland-style tiaoxiu. Japan’s Golden Week (late April–early May) can overlap China’s Labour Day window. Mark Spring Festival and National Day as hard coverage gaps.

Where these dates come from

Mainland dates follow the State Council holiday regulation and the General Office circular for the year. Makeup workdays come from that circular, not from unofficial preview calendars.

Primary references for verification

• General Office of the State Council: 2026 holiday notice

China holiday FAQ

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