China has seven statutory public holidays covering 13 days off, extended to longer blocks by a system that moves weekends around. The number of statutory days rose from 11 to 13 in a reform effective from 2025, the first increase since 2008. What makes the Chinese calendar unusual is not the length of the holidays but the mechanism used to create them: workers are frequently required to work on a Saturday or Sunday so that a weekday can be added to a holiday block, a practice called tiaoxiu.
The Seven Statutory Holidays
| Date | Holiday | Description |
|---|---|---|
| January 1 | New Year's Day (元旦) | One day off; relatively modest celebrations compared to Spring Festival |
| February 17–23 | Spring Festival/Chinese New Year (春节) | 7-day holiday; Year of the Horse; the world's largest annual migration (chunyun) |
| April 4–6 | Qingming Festival (清明节) | Tomb Sweeping Day; families visit ancestral graves and enjoy spring outings |
| May 1–5 | Labor Day (劳动节) | 5-day break (with weekend adjustments); travel and shopping peak |
| May 31 | Dragon Boat Festival (端午节) | Commemorates poet Qu Yuan; dragon boat races and zongzi (sticky rice dumplings) |
| September 21 | Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节) | Families gather to eat mooncakes and admire the full moon |
| October 1–7 | National Day Golden Week (国庆节) | Celebrates the founding of the PRC in 1949; massive travel and tourism period |
The Swap System
Tiaoxiu means adjusted rest, and it is the defining feature of Chinese holidays. The State Council publishes the following year's arrangement each autumn, specifying not only which days are holidays but which weekends will be worked to pay for them.
A typical arrangement turns three statutory days around the National Day into a seven- or eight-day block by adding the adjacent weekend and then requiring the preceding Sunday and the following Saturday to be normal working days. The total number of days off across the year does not increase; they are moved.
The system is widely disliked. Chinese social media reliably produces complaints when each year's calendar is published, usually pointing out that a seven-day break bought with two six-day working weeks is not obviously a gain. The 2025 reform reduced the amount of swapping required, partly in response.
Golden Weeks
Two holiday periods are long enough to be called Golden Weeks: Spring Festival in January or February, and National Day beginning 1 October. Both run to seven or eight consecutive days.
The Golden Week concept was introduced in 1999 explicitly as economic policy, to stimulate domestic consumption and tourism after the Asian financial crisis. A third Golden Week around Labour Day on 1 May was created at the same time and abolished in 2008, when Qingming, Dragon Boat and Mid-Autumn were added as statutory holidays instead.
The economic effect is enormous and measurable. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism publishes trip and spending figures for each Golden Week, and the numbers run to hundreds of millions of domestic trips and hundreds of billions of yuan.
The Spring Festival Rules of Observance
Spring Festival is the only Chinese holiday with a body of customary rules attached to specific days. The eve is for the reunion dinner and for staying up late; the first day is for visiting elders and for not sweeping the floor, on the grounds that it would sweep out the year's luck; the second is for visiting the wife's family; the fifth is for welcoming the god of wealth.
UNESCO inscribed Spring Festival on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in December 2024, describing it as the social practices marking the traditional new year.
Fireworks, once inseparable from the festival, have been restricted or banned in most large cities since the 1990s on air quality and safety grounds. Several cities relaxed the rules from 2023 after public pressure, and the argument recurs annually.
Chunyun, the Largest Human Migration
The forty-day travel period around Spring Festival, called chunyun, is routinely described as the largest annual human migration on earth. Total passenger trips across rail, road, air and water have been counted in the billions.
The driver is China's internal migrant workforce. Somewhere around 300 million people work in cities away from their registered home under the hukou household registration system, and Spring Festival is the one time of year most of them travel home.
Rail ticket sales open weeks in advance and sell out within minutes. The high-speed network, which has grown from nothing in 2008 to over 45,000 kilometres, has absorbed a large part of the load, and the road figures have risen sharply as car ownership has spread.
Three Holidays Follow the Lunar Calendar
Spring Festival, Dragon Boat Festival and Mid-Autumn Festival all follow the traditional Chinese lunisolar calendar and move against the Gregorian year. Spring Festival falls between 21 January and 20 February; Dragon Boat is the fifth day of the fifth lunar month; Mid-Autumn is the fifteenth day of the eighth.
Qingming, the tomb-sweeping festival, is different again: it is a solar term, fixed by the sun's position, and falls on 4 or 5 April each year. It is the only Chinese holiday determined astronomically rather than by the moon.
New Year's Day on 1 January and Labour Day on 1 May are the only fixed Gregorian holidays besides National Day. The Chinese calendar therefore has to be recalculated annually, which is one reason the State Council announcement is an event.
What the 2025 Reform Changed
In November 2024 the State Council announced the first increase in statutory holidays since 2008, effective from 2025. Spring Festival gained a day, taking it to four statutory days, and Labour Day gained one, taking it to two.
The regulations also limited how much swapping can be required, generally to no more than one adjusted weekend either side of a holiday block, and specified that the first day of Spring Festival should be the eve rather than the first day of the lunar year, which matches how families actually observe it.
The change came alongside a wider policy push on consumption and on reducing working hours, and against a backdrop of public argument about the 996 working culture in the technology sector — nine to nine, six days a week — which China's Supreme People's Court declared illegal in 2021.
Holidays for Specific Groups
China also has a set of partial holidays that apply only to particular groups. Women get a half-day on International Women's Day on 8 March; young people over 14 get a half-day on Youth Day on 4 May; children under 14 get a day for Children's Day on 1 June; and serving military personnel get a half-day for Army Day on 1 August.
These are set out in the same State Council regulations as the main holidays and are legally binding, though compliance in the private sector is inconsistent.
Ethnic minority regions may also declare their own holidays. Xinjiang observes Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, Tibet observes Losar, and Inner Mongolia, Yunnan and Guangxi have regional festivals with local holiday status.
Hong Kong and Macau Are Different
Hong Kong has 17 statutory holidays and a separate list of 17 general holidays, which overlap but are not identical — a distinction that governs which workers are entitled to which days. Its calendar includes Good Friday, Easter Monday, Christmas and Boxing Day, none of which are holidays on the mainland.
Macau has around 20 public holidays and adds Portuguese-inherited observances including All Souls' Day and the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, alongside Macau SAR Establishment Day on 20 December.
Both regions observe Chinese New Year, Ching Ming, Tuen Ng and Mid-Autumn, so the traditional festivals are shared while the political and religious ones are not. Taiwan's calendar overlaps again but differs, with its own national days.
What Is Not a Holiday
Several dates that outsiders assume are Chinese holidays are not. Lantern Festival, fifteen days after the lunar new year, is widely celebrated and is a working day. The Double Ninth Festival in autumn is a working day, though it is designated as a day to honour the elderly.
Qixi, sometimes called Chinese Valentine's Day, is a working day. So is Singles' Day on 11 November, which despite generating more retail sales than any other day in the world is not a holiday and was invented by university students in the 1990s.
Christmas is not a holiday and has never been one, though it is widely marked commercially in large cities. Several local governments have discouraged public celebration of it since around 2017.
How Chinese Holidays Compare
Thirteen statutory days plus weekends is around the middle of the international range. Japan has 16 public holidays, India three national ones, the United States eleven federal ones, and most of Western Europe between ten and fourteen.
Where China differs is in paid annual leave, which is short by international standards: five days for one to ten years of service, ten days for ten to twenty, and fifteen after twenty. Most of Europe mandates twenty or more from the start.
That is why the Golden Weeks matter as much as they do. For most Chinese workers they represent the only extended break available in the year, which is exactly why several hundred million of them travel at the same moment. For related context, see religion in China and the count of countries in Asia.