Taiwan Public Holidays 2027: Every Date, Every Long Weekend, and How Make-Up Days Work

Here is the thing nobody tells you about Taiwan public holidays: the dates on the calendar are only half the story. The other half is a rule called 補假 (bǔjià), the make-up day, and it is the single mechanism that turns Taiwan’s scattered holidays into the nine long weekends that empty Taipei and fill every train heading south. Learn that one rule and the whole year suddenly makes sense.

The official 2027 calendar has been public since May 2026, and it is a good one — 121 days off, nine blocks of three days or more, and a Lunar New Year break that runs a full seven days. Yet most English-language guides to Taiwan public holidays still stop at 2026, and almost none of them explain why a holiday that falls on a Saturday still gets you a day off work.

This guide fixes both. Every 2027 date, verified against the primary source. The make-up rule explained in plain English. Which long weekends are genuinely worth travelling on and which ones you should plan around. And what is actually open when the whole island takes the same Tuesday off.

Taiwan Public Holidays 2027: The Complete Official Calendar

Taiwan’s official holiday calendar is set by the Directorate-General of Personnel Administration (人事行政總處), the Executive Yuan body that publishes the government work calendar each year. The 2027 calendar — 民國116年 in the Republic of China year system you will see on Taiwanese documents — was approved and released on 21 May 2026. Every date below comes from that release and its appendix tables, and every weekday has been independently re-derived rather than copied.

The headline figures: 121 total days off, and nine continuous breaks of three days or longer. Here is the full set of extended blocks.

• New Year’s Day (開國紀念日) — Friday 1 January to Sunday 3 January. Three days.
• Lunar New Year (除夕及春節) — Thursday 4 February to Wednesday 10 February. Seven days.
• Peace Memorial Day (和平紀念日) — Saturday 27 February to Monday 1 March. Three days.
• Children’s Day and Tomb Sweeping Day (兒童節及清明節) — Saturday 3 April to Tuesday 6 April. Four days.
• Labour Day (勞動節) — Friday 30 April to Sunday 2 May. Three days.
• National Day (國慶日) — Saturday 9 October to Monday 11 October. Three days.
• Retrocession Day (臺灣光復暨金門古寧頭大捷紀念日) — Saturday 23 October to Monday 25 October. Three days.
• Constitution Day (行憲紀念日) — Friday 24 December to Sunday 26 December. Three days.
• New Year’s Day 2028, pulled forward — Friday 31 December 2027 to Sunday 2 January 2028. Three days.

Two major festivals do not generate a long weekend in 2027, and this is worth knowing before you book anything. Dragon Boat Festival falls on Tuesday 8 June and Mid-Autumn Festival on Wednesday 15 September — both land mid-week, so both are single days off rather than the four-day blocks they produced in other years. Teachers’ Day, Confucius’ Birthday, lands on Tuesday 28 September, also alone. If you have been planning a trip around the Dragon Boat Festival or the Mid-Autumn barbecue season, 2027 is a year where the festivals happen but the country does not stop moving for them.

How 補假 (Make-Up Holidays) Works — The Rule Behind Every Long Weekend

This is the part page one of Google skips entirely, and it is the most useful thing on this page.

Taiwan abolished make-up workdays — the deeply unloved practice of clawing back a long weekend by making everyone work a Saturday — but it kept make-up days off. The governing regulation puts it about as plainly as a regulation can:

A holiday falling on a Saturday is made up on the preceding working day. A holiday falling on a Sunday is made up on the following working day.

That is the entire mechanic. A holiday never simply vanishes into a weekend the way it does in much of the world. It always converts into a weekday off, and that weekday is always adjacent to the weekend — which is precisely why it produces a three-day block rather than a stranded Wednesday.

Watch it work across three 2027 examples:

• Labour Day, 1 May 2027, is a Saturday. Saturday means the make-up goes backwards, to Friday 30 April. Result: Friday, Saturday, Sunday off.
• National Day, 10 October 2027, is a Sunday. Sunday means the make-up goes forwards, to Monday 11 October. Result: Saturday, Sunday, Monday off.
• Retrocession Day, 25 October 2027, is a Monday. It already sits against the weekend, so no make-up is needed. Result: Saturday, Sunday, Monday off anyway.

There is exactly one exception, and it exists because Lunar New Year is too important to be governed by a tidy rule: for 除夕 (New Year’s Eve) and the 春節 days, the make-up may be taken on either the preceding or the following working day, whichever produces the better break. That flexibility is what makes the 2027 Lunar New Year seven days long instead of five.

One more consequence worth internalising. Because make-up days are always weekdays, the last day of a Taiwanese long weekend is usually a Monday or Tuesday, not a Sunday. The return crush therefore happens a day later than a foreign visitor’s instincts expect — which matters enormously if you are booking a train back to Taipei.

Lunar New Year 2027: A Seven-Day Block, 4–10 February

If you only remember one date from this entire guide, remember this one. Lunar New Year 2027 runs Thursday 4 February through Wednesday 10 February — seven consecutive days, and comfortably the largest single disruption in the Taiwanese year.

The structure is worth unpacking, because it is a perfect demonstration of the make-up rule at full stretch. 初一 — the first day of the lunar year — falls on Saturday 6 February 2027, and 初二, the second day, on Sunday 7 February. Both land on the weekend. Under the ordinary rule that would be a significant loss, so the Lunar New Year exception kicks in and both are made up forwards: Tuesday 9 and Wednesday 10 February. Add 除夕 and the days leading into it, and you get an unbroken Thursday-to-Wednesday block.

A correction worth making explicitly: you will find sources giving these dates as 5–10 February. That is six days, and it is wrong — the official release specifies seven, ending on Wednesday 10 February. If you are booking flights around Lunar New Year 2027, that discrepancy is a whole day of your trip.

What this actually means on the ground: Lunar New Year is the one holiday where Taiwan genuinely closes. It is a family holiday first and a public one second. The reunion dinner on 除夕 is the emotional centre of the entire calendar, red envelopes change hands, and enormous numbers of people travel back to home towns in the west and south. Taipei becomes noticeably quiet. Independent restaurants shutter for anywhere from three days to a fortnight. Temples, by contrast, are packed — the first-day temple visit is a tradition in its own right.

Book domestic transport for this window the moment reservations open, and expect international airfares into Taoyuan to climb steeply for the fortnight either side. The Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival, which closes out the Lunar New Year period on the fifteenth day, is a separate and equally busy planning problem.

The Nine Long Weekends of 2027, Ranked by How Busy They Get

Not all Taiwan public holidays are equal. Some empty the cities, some fill them, and a couple barely register. Ranked from most disruptive to least:

1. Lunar New Year, 4–10 February. In a category of its own. Everything above applies.
2. Children’s Day and Tomb Sweeping, 3–6 April. Four days, and the second-heaviest travel event of the year. The flow here is outward — families leave the cities for ancestral graves — so freeways and long-distance trains jam while Taipei itself thins out. Staying in the capital over 清明 is genuinely the smart play, not a consolation prize.
3. National Day, 9–11 October. Double Ten brings fireworks, a military parade and a heavy concentration of domestic tourism. Our full Double Ten guide covers what actually happens on the day.
4. New Year’s Day, 1–3 January. Taipei 101’s fireworks pull an enormous crowd into Xinyi, and the city’s hotels price accordingly.
5. Retrocession Day, 23–25 October. Two long weekends in October, a fortnight apart, in what is arguably Taiwan’s best weather month. Domestic tourism is heavy for both.
6. Constitution Day, 24–26 December. Still a relatively new fixture and still finding its rhythm, but December travel is warming up fast.
7. Peace Memorial Day, 27 February – 1 March. A solemn commemoration of the 228 Incident. Museums and memorial sites see visitors; general travel is moderate.
8. Labour Day, 30 April – 2 May. Moderate. Note that Labour Day coverage is now universal, so this one moves more people than it used to.
9. New Year’s Eve into 2028, 31 December – 2 January. Effectively a second New Year block, immediately following the Constitution Day weekend five days earlier.

Notice the December clustering: Constitution Day on 24–26 December and then the year-end block on 31 December, with only four working days between them. Anyone travelling in late December 2027 is threading between two domestic surges.

If you are going to spend a long weekend on the MRT and the high-speed rail like everyone else, you may as well look the part — our Taipei Metro Shiba Inu Civic Pride Roundel T-Shirt is an affectionate tribute to the transit system that somehow keeps running on time while the entire island tries to use it at once.

What Changed in 2025: The Four Restored Holidays

If the list of Taiwan public holidays looks unfamiliar compared to older guides, that is because it genuinely changed. In May 2025 the Legislative Yuan passed the Memorial Days and Holidays Implementation Act on its third reading, upgrading what had been administrative regulation into actual statute — and restoring four dates that had been struck from the list of days off back in 2000, when Taiwan adopted the two-day weekend and paid for it by deleting holidays.

The four that came back:

• 除夕, Lunar New Year’s Eve — previously granted by administrative practice, now guaranteed by law.
• Confucius’ Birthday and Teachers’ Day, 28 September — a national holiday from 1963 until it was demoted to a commemorative day in 2000.
• Retrocession Day, 25 October — marking the end of Japanese administration in 1945.
• Constitution Day, 25 December — which is why Taiwan now has a late-December day off that has nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas, however convenient the overlap.

The same act made Labour Day a universal holiday rather than one restricted to workers covered by the Labour Standards Act, and — the provision that matters most for planning — it guarantees the Lunar New Year break will span at least seven days, and permits up to ten. The seven-day 2027 block is that floor, not a windfall.

The practical takeaway: any guide to Taiwan public holidays written before mid-2025 is describing a calendar that no longer exists. If a source lists 28 September or 25 October as ordinary working days, it is out of date, and the dates it gives you for everything else deserve checking too.

The Rest of 2026, Including the 25–27 December Weekend

2027 planning is useful, but there is still a quarter of 2026 to get through, and it contains three blocks worth knowing about.

• National Day: Friday 9 October – Sunday 11 October 2026. Double Ten itself falls on Saturday 10 October, so the make-up runs backwards to Friday 9 October.
• Retrocession Day: Saturday 24 October – Monday 26 October 2026. The holiday is Sunday 25 October, so the make-up goes forwards to Monday 26 October.
• Constitution Day: Friday 25 December – Sunday 27 December 2026. No make-up needed — 25 December simply is a Friday this year, which makes it the first restored Constitution Day to deliver a clean three-day weekend on its own.

That last one is the most interesting date remaining in 2026. Constitution Day returned to the calendar in 2025, so this is year two — but 2025’s fell on a Thursday, and a Thursday is not a long weekend. December 2026 is the first time the restored holiday has produced a genuine Friday-to-Sunday break, and it lands at the front of Taiwan’s busiest tourism fortnight. With New Year’s Day 2027 also falling on a Friday, the stretch from 22 December to 3 January is bracketed by two separate domestic travel surges with a quiet middle.

That quiet middle is the opportunity. If you want the mild weather without the crowds, roughly 8–18 December contains no public holiday at all — the cheapest, calmest window of the whole month. Our guides to Taiwan in December and December weather go much deeper on how to use it.

What’s Actually Open During Taiwan Public Holidays

Here is where visitors’ instincts tend to mislead them, because Taiwan’s holiday closures work almost backwards from what North American and European travellers expect.

Reliably closed: government offices, public-service counters, banks, post offices, and schools. If you need to renew something, stamp something or move money at a branch, a public holiday is a wasted day.

Reliably open, and often busier than usual: night markets, convenience stores, department stores, shopping malls, cinemas, tea shops and the overwhelming majority of restaurants. A public holiday in Taiwan is a shopping and eating day. The MRT and the high-speed rail run to holiday timetables, which usually means more services rather than fewer, and city buses shift to weekend frequencies.

Busier than any other day of the year: temples. Major temple visits cluster hard around New Year, Lunar New Year and deity birthdays, and a temple that is pleasantly atmospheric on a Tuesday afternoon can be genuinely shoulder-to-shoulder on a holiday morning.

The one genuine exception to all of this is Lunar New Year, which behaves differently from every other holiday on the list. Independent and family-run restaurants close, sometimes for a week or more. Small neighbourhood shops pull their shutters down. The businesses that stay open through 春節 are the chains, the department stores and the convenience stores — so the practical advice inverts: during Lunar New Year you eat at the places you would normally skip, and during every other holiday you eat wherever you like.

Museums and paid attractions set their own schedules and frequently publish special Lunar New Year closures weeks in advance. Never assume; check the specific venue for the specific date.

Planning Around Taiwan Public Holidays: When Not to Book Domestic Travel

Everything above converges on a handful of concrete booking rules.

Book transport the day reservations open, or do not travel at all. High-speed rail seats for Lunar New Year and the Tomb Sweeping block disappear within hours of release. Taiwan Railway’s reservation window and the HSR’s both open a fixed number of days ahead — set a reminder.

Understand the direction of travel. This is the detail that separates a good plan from a bad one. Over Tomb Sweeping, the flow is out of the cities toward ancestral graves, so the freeways and long-distance trains are the problem and Taipei is the refuge. Over Mid-Autumn and National Day, the flow is toward destinations — Sun Moon Lake, Alishan, Jiufen, Kenting — so the cities are fine and the scenic areas are not. Work out which way the country is moving before deciding where to be.

The surge starts on the eve, not on the first official day. Taiwan’s transport agencies routinely begin their enhanced-service plans and discounted intercity fares the day before a holiday block opens, because that is when movement actually starts. If a block begins on a Saturday, Friday evening is already heavy.

The return day is the worst day. Because make-up days push the end of a block onto a Monday or Tuesday, the return crush lands on a weekday. The final afternoon and evening of any long weekend is the single worst time to be on a freeway or a southbound-to-northbound train.

And the genuinely good news: the weeks immediately after a major block are among the best times to travel in Taiwan. Domestic tourists have used their days off, accommodation prices fall back, and the scenic areas that were impassable ten days earlier are close to empty. Mid-March, late April and early November are consistently excellent for exactly this reason.

Final Thoughts: The Calendar Is the Itinerary

Taiwan public holidays are not background information. They are the single highest-leverage fact in planning a trip here — more decisive than weather, more decisive than booking windows, and completely invisible to anyone reading a normal calendar. A week that looks identical to the week before it can differ by a factor of ten in crowds and by half again in price, and nothing on the surface tells you which is which.

So use the list. Nine long weekends in 2027, with Lunar New Year running a full seven days from Thursday 4 February to Wednesday 10 February. Two major festivals — Dragon Boat and Mid-Autumn — landing mid-week and passing without a block. A December bracketed by two surges with a calm stretch in between. And underneath all of it, one small regulation about make-up days that quietly generates the entire rhythm of the Taiwanese year.

Whether you are booking a trip, planning a visit home, or simply trying to work out why your Taipei office is suddenly empty on a Tuesday, the answer is almost always on the calendar. You just have to know that 補假 exists to read it properly.