Taiwan Holiday Calendar

Taiwan 2026 national holiday guide

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

Taiwan’s national holidays commonly include New Year’s Day, Lunar New Year, Peace Memorial Day, Children’s Day combined with Tomb-Sweeping Day, Dragon Boat Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, and National Day (Double Tenth). Make-up workdays may be scheduled to create long weekends.

Lunar New Year is usually the longest family break. Ching Ming and Double Tenth are also busy for travel. For Taipei or Kaohsiung trips, avoid the most congested days at the start and end of long weekends.

Confirm final dates with the official annual announcement from the competent authority.

Planning tips

• Lunar New Year: major homecoming period.
• Ching Ming: tomb-sweeping plus spring outings.
• Double Tenth: autumn travel surge.
• Dragon Boat / Mid-Autumn: good for short island trips.

Taiwan 2026 public holiday table

This 2026 view lists 34 public holiday dates for Taiwan. The earliest entry is 2026-01-01 (New Year's Day, Thu) and the latest is 2026-12-27 (Constitution Day holiday). The longest consecutive block in the dataset is about 9 days (2026-02-14–2026-02-22). The table below is fully readable without JavaScript.

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

Two systems decide whether your counterpart is at work

Taiwan does not have a single authority that declares public holidays for everyone. The document most people quote is the annual government office calendar published by the Directorate-General of Personnel Administration (DGPA) under the Executive Yuan. It is released well over a year in advance, marks every day of the year as a working day, a holiday or an adjusted holiday, and is what newspapers mean when they announce how many long weekends the coming year will contain. Its scope, however, is government agencies.

Private-sector employees fall under the Labor Standards Act, which defines rest days, regular days off and statutory holidays separately, and requires premium pay for work performed on a statutory holiday. In most of the year the two lists coincide, which is exactly why people stop distinguishing them, and exactly why 1 May causes an argument in some office every single year.

A third piece arrived recently. Legislation passed at the end of 2024 lifted the legal basis for national commemorative days and festivals from administrative order to statute, and added days such as Lunar New Year Eve and Teachers Day to the list of days off. 2026 is the first full year in which the expanded list operates normally. If your internal HR calendar was built from pre-2024 experience, rebuild it rather than patch it.

How Saturday holidays get paid back

The substitution rule is mercifully simple. A commemorative day or festival that lands on a Saturday is compensated on the preceding working day; one that lands on a Sunday is compensated on the following working day. This single rule explains most of the odd-looking entries on the 2026 grid.

The clearest case is late February. 228 Peace Memorial Day is fixed to 28 February, which in 2026 is a Saturday, so Friday 27 February becomes a day off and the month ends with three consecutive days away from the office. Two other 2026 dates sit on Saturdays and deserve a direct check against the official calendar rather than mental arithmetic: the Childrens Day and tomb-sweeping cluster in early April, and National Day on 10 October. When commemorative days sit next to each other, the compensated day shifts outward and is not always the day you would guess.

Taiwan does occasionally create a long weekend by converting a Saturday into a working day, a practice known locally as make-up work. It has never become the annual routine it is in some neighbouring jurisdictions, and recent policy direction has been to minimise it. Still, the safe habit is to treat the festival name and the actual block of days off as two separate pieces of information.

Lunar New Year, 17 to 19 February, and the emptying of Taipei

Lunar New Year Day falls on Tuesday 17 February 2026, followed by the second and third days of the new year on 18 and 19 February. New Year Eve on Monday 16 February is now a statutory day off, and with the preceding weekend attached the result is close to a full week. Whether Friday 20 February is also released depends on how the DGPA arranges that year, so confirm it before booking anything.

This is the only stretch of the Taiwanese year when the whole society genuinely stops. Everything else is a partial slowdown. The internal structure of the holiday matters if you are working around it: families gather for the reunion dinner on New Year Eve, visit temples on the first day, and travel to the wife’s family home on the second day, which produces a distinct reverse traffic wave on the freeways. Businesses reopen ceremonially on the fifth day with firecrackers and offerings to the god of wealth.

For a foreign resident in Taipei or New Taipei, the surprise is how empty the city becomes. Street parking appears, commuter roads clear, and the metro runs extra late-night services for people heading to Longshan Temple or Xingtian Temple to compete for the first incense of the year. Meanwhile your neighbourhood breakfast shop, wet market stall and pharmacy are all shut from the first to the third day, and restaurants that do open frequently add a holiday service charge. Stock your medication and check opening notices in advance.

228 is not a spring long weekend

228 Peace Memorial Day marks the violent suppression that began on 28 February 1947 and shaped Taiwanese politics for decades afterwards. It became a national holiday in 1997. Flags fly at half-mast on government buildings, memorial services are held around the island, and the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum and the National 228 Memorial Museum run commemorative programmes, often with free admission that day.

Because 28 February 2026 is a Saturday, Friday 27 February is granted as the compensated day and the date becomes a three-day break that the travel industry treats as an off-peak opportunity. Both things are true at once. If you are in Taiwan that weekend, the memorial museums are among the fastest ways to understand contemporary Taiwanese political vocabulary. Many local people hold specific and personal views about this date, which is worth knowing before you raise it casually at a work dinner.

The first of May, when half the country works

Labour Day 2026 falls on Friday 1 May. Under the Labor Standards Act it is a paid day off for employees covered by that Act, so most private companies close, bank branches shut their counters and the securities market does not trade. Civil servants and public school staff are not covered, so household registration offices, motor vehicle offices, district offices and public schools all operate normally. Parents are off work and their children still have class.

The practical consequence for a company operating in Taiwan is that the HR calendar cannot be maintained as a single list. Locally hired staff follow the Labor Standards Act; expatriates on a headquarters contract may be governed by an entirely different set of leave rules, and the attendance system needs to reflect both. For cross-border scheduling, assume your commercial, marketing and engineering contacts in Taiwan are unavailable on 1 May, while government service counters are open. It is a poor day for meetings and a surprisingly good day for paperwork.

Autumn: charcoal smoke, Confucian rites and fireworks

Mid-Autumn Festival lands on Friday 25 September 2026 and joins the weekend. Taiwan observes it in a way that reliably startles visitors from elsewhere in the Chinese-speaking world: everyone barbecues. The custom is not ancient, it grew out of a barbecue sauce advertising campaign in the 1980s, and it is now so entrenched that supermarkets stack charcoal in pyramids the week before and the smell of grilling drifts from riversides, parks, alleys and the covered walkways in front of shops. Pomelos and mooncakes remain standard, and almost every Taiwanese adult has a childhood photograph wearing a pomelo rind as a hat.

Monday 28 September is Teachers Day, observed on the traditional birthday of Confucius, and it is now a day off, creating a second three-day weekend only days after the first. At dawn that morning the Confucius temples in Taipei and Tainan hold the sacrificial rites, with ceremonial dance and offerings performed in archaic form. Tainan hosts the oldest Confucian temple in Taiwan and its ceremony feels noticeably different from the Taipei one. Arrive before sunrise if you want to see anything.

National Day on 10 October commemorates the 1911 Wuchang Uprising. The morning ceremony takes place on the plaza in front of the Presidential Office with honour guards and a flypast, while the national fireworks display rotates between host cities each year and saturates that city’s hotels and transport for the evening. In 2026 the date is a Saturday, so check the official calendar for the compensated day.

What shuts, what never shuts

Taiwan has one of the densest convenience store networks anywhere, and 7-Eleven and FamilyMart never close. They are also functional infrastructure rather than just shops: you can pay utility bills, collect parcels, print documents and buy high speed rail tickets at the counter, which makes them the fallback for almost any holiday-period problem. Department stores, cinemas and night markets treat long weekends as peak trading and often extend hours.

The closures are administrative and medical. Household registration, land administration, motor vehicle and tax offices are shut. Bank branches close although ATMs and online banking run normally. Post offices close and parcel delivery pauses. Hospitals keep emergency departments and a rotating skeleton of clinics, and most neighbourhood pharmacies are shut, so prescriptions need to be filled before the break. Household waste collection is also suspended on published dates around Lunar New Year, announced by each city’s environmental protection bureau. New foreign residents get caught by that one almost without exception, because there are no municipal bins to fall back on.

Getting around, and getting goods out

Taiwan High Speed Rail and Taiwan Railway publish separate transport plans before Lunar New Year and Mid-Autumn, including extra services and a specific ticket release date. Popular southbound departures frequently sell out within the day that booking opens, so treat the release date as the deadline rather than the trip date. On the freeways, the National Freeway Bureau typically suspends tolls during overnight windows on major holidays and applies ramp closures and high-occupancy-vehicle restrictions on the busiest corridors. Checking the published restrictions once before departure genuinely saves hours.

The cross-border risk sits in logistics and administration rather than production. Customs brokers, freight forwarders and customs counters stop during the Lunar New Year break, which is why shipping everything out before the holiday is an annual ritual in Taiwanese supply chains. Semiconductor fabs and some manufacturing lines run shifts through the holiday, so the machines keep going while procurement, finance and sales have nobody at the desk. Two social fixtures also shape the calendar: the year-end company banquet before the holiday, which is the largest corporate gathering of the year, and the reopening day afterwards, which begins with offerings and red envelopes and realistically delivers half a day of output. If your other counterpart is in mainland China, do not assume the two holiday blocks align, because they do not.

Closures that never appear on an annual calendar

Two categories of day off cannot be planned from a calendar. The first is the typhoon day. When a storm approaches, each city and county mayor decides independently whether to suspend work and classes, using wind and rainfall thresholds, and the announcement typically comes the evening before or at dawn. The same typhoon can close the south while the north works normally. Between roughly July and October, build slack into travel itineraries and choose changeable tickets and cancellable accommodation. When work is suspended the metro usually keeps running, but buses, ferries and mountain roads are heavily curtailed.

The second is the election cycle. Taiwan holds its combined local elections in 2026, and polling day traditionally falls on a Saturday. Campaign activity in the preceding weeks is loud and visible, government announcements slow down, and hotels in some constituencies fill with campaign staff. Neither of these belongs on the annual grid, which is precisely why they catch people out.

Cross-border planning notes

Taiwan’s Lunar New Year leave is often long; Ching Ming and Double Tenth are travel peaks. Unlike Hong Kong there is no Easter long weekend; unlike Mainland China, makeup-workday rules differ.

Where these dates come from

Taiwan dates follow the Directorate-General of Personnel Administration calendar. Makeup rules are not mainland tiaoxiu.

Primary references for verification

• Taiwan DGPA: 2026 work calendar
• Taiwan DGPA: 2027 work calendar

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