Korean public holidays

Korean public holidays are set by decree, and some of them are fixed dates. Liberation Day is always 15 August. Christmas is always 25 December. So they drift through the week and some years they land on a Saturday.

A holiday on a Saturday costs you nothing and gains you nothing — you were not working anyway. That is why the count on a calendar and the count of days you actually rest are different numbers.

In 2026 there are 21 holidays on the calendar and 15 days you actually get off. The table above shows how that gap moves year to year.

This is the number worth checking before you plan a trip. A year with 21 holidays can be a worse year for travel than one with fewer, if more of them fall on weekends.

Korea gives some weekend holidays back. When one lands on a Saturday or Sunday, the next working day becomes a holiday instead — a substitute holiday (대체공휴일).

It does not apply to every holiday. The decree lists which ones qualify. Seollal and Chuseok have had it longest, and it was extended to Independence Movement Day, Liberation Day, National Foundation Day, Hangeul Day, Children’s Day and Buddha’s Birthday.

The rule is also stricter for Seollal and Chuseok than people assume: the substitute is given when one of the three days falls on Sunday, not Saturday. For the single-day holidays a Saturday clash does earn a substitute.

In 2026 there are 4 substitute holidays. The calculator above marks them in the list.

Seollal and Chuseok are each three days long — the day itself plus the day before and the day after. Almost nothing else in the Korean calendar works like that.

Both follow the lunar calendar, so they move through the solar year. Seollal falls in late January or February; Chuseok in September or October. That is also why their length changes from year to year depending on which weekday the middle day lands on.

The one worth marking now is Chuseok 2028. It runs Sep 30 to Oct 9 — 10 days without taking any leave, because National Foundation Day and Hangeul Day fall on either side of it.

These are the weeks when the whole country travels. Trains and flights sell out months ahead, and traffic out of Seoul stops moving. If you want to go anywhere, book early or stay put.

The rules come from the Regulations on Public Holidays for Government Offices. The name matters: it is written for public offices, and private employers follow it because labour law now requires them to.

Election days are public holidays too, but only the ones actually scheduled. National elections are known years ahead; by-elections are not. This calculator leaves them out rather than guess.

One-off holidays (임시공휴일) are also excluded. The government sometimes declares an extra day to bridge a gap — often announced only weeks beforehand. Nobody can put those in a table in advance.

So treat the figures here as the floor. You may end up with more days off than this, never fewer.

From 2026, Labour Day and Constitution Day are public holidays.

Labour Day (1 May) was already a paid day off for employees under a separate law, but it was not a public holiday — so public offices worked and schools opened. Constitution Day (17 July) had been a holiday until 2007 and has now come back.

Sundays are public holidays under the same decree. That sounds like trivia until you notice it is why the substitute rule needs to exist at all — a holiday falling on a Sunday is two holidays on one day, and the decree hands the second one back.

If you are working out how many days you are owed for a stretch of dates, our day-counting calculator counts Korean-style, where the first day is day one.