Korean Holidays
Seollal, Chuseok and every day off, year by year.
Korea's big holidays follow the moon, so Seollal and Chuseok move every year. Each year here lists every public holiday with its date and weekday, worked out from a Korean lunar calendar table.
The two big ones
Seollal is the Lunar New Year: three days off (the day before, the day, the day after). Families gather, bow to elders (sebae), get pocket money and eat tteokguk, rice-cake soup — one bowl, one year older.
Chuseok, on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month, is the harvest festival under the full moon. Another three-day break: hometown trips, ancestral rites and songpyeon, half-moon rice cakes made together.
How are the Korean holiday dates worked out?
Most holidays sit on the same solar date every year: New Year's Day, Independence Movement Day (March 1), Children's Day (May 5), Memorial Day (June 6), Liberation Day (August 15), National Foundation Day (October 3), Hangeul Day (October 9) and Christmas. From 2026 the list adds Labor Day (May 1) and Constitution Day (July 17).
Three holidays follow the moon. Each is set on the Korean lunar calendar and converted to a solar date: Seollal is the 1st day of the 1st lunar month, Buddha's Birthday the 8th day of the 4th, and Chuseok the 15th day of the 8th. Seollal and Chuseok also take the day before and the day after, giving three days in a row. The yearly total counts each date once, so if Chuseok overlaps another holiday that date isn't counted twice; dates that fall on a weekend still count.
The lunar conversion uses a table of Korean lunar months generated from the Unicode ICU Korean (dangi) calendar in Korean time, and this page covers 2020 to 2040. Substitute holidays, one-off temporary holidays and election days are announced separately and aren't in the list, so the real number of days off can be higher. Future years can also change if the law changes; check the official announcement before booking travel.