China’s Public Holidays: How to Plan Around Spring Festival and Golden Week

Published 2026-10-16 · 71Asia Tours

Two weeks that rearrange the country

If you have ever looked at hotel prices in Chengdu for the first week of February and assumed the website had a bug, it did not. China's public holidays are not scattered evenly through the year. They cluster, and when they cluster, the railways, airlines and motorways handle billions of passenger trips in the space of a few weeks.

Two of them matter for travellers. Spring Festival, better known outside China as Chinese New Year, follows the lunar calendar and lands somewhere between late January and mid-February. National Day is fixed at 1 October and nearly always drags the Mid-Autumn Festival along with it. The rest are long weekends, busy but manageable.

The 2026 calendar, and what it tells you

The State Council publishes the following year's dates each November, and they are worth reading because they include the make-up working days most guides leave out.

• New Year: 1 to 3 January, three days.
• Spring Festival: 15 to 23 February, nine days. Chinese New Year's Day falls on 17 February 2026.
• Qingming, the tomb-sweeping festival: 4 to 6 April.
• Labour Day: 1 to 5 May, five days.
• Dragon Boat Festival: 19 to 21 June.
• Mid-Autumn Festival: 25 to 27 September.
• National Day: 1 to 7 October, the week everyone calls Golden Week.

Two details matter more than the list. First, the Spring Festival holiday is only the visible part. The travel rush around it, chunyun, runs about forty days, from late January into early March. Trains are difficult for that entire window, not just for the nine official days.

Second, the lunar holidays move. Spring Festival falls on 6 February in 2027. Mid-Autumn drifts between mid-September and early October and occasionally overlaps National Day, which produces an eight-day block. Check the announcement for the year you are travelling before you build a trip around any of this.

What the make-up days mean for you

To create those long blocks, weekends get shuffled: in 2026, 14 and 28 February, 9 May, 20 September and 10 October are working Saturdays or Sundays. The crowds therefore do not stay neatly inside the holiday. They bleed into the weekends on either side, and the Sunday before a holiday week is often worse for long-distance travel than the holiday itself.

What actually happens when China travels

This is the part that catches people out.

• High-speed rail tickets on popular routes sell out within minutes, and they are released 15 days ahead, not 60.
• Domestic flights roughly double in price. The cheapest fares go first.
• Hotels in resort towns triple. Some switch to prepaid, non-refundable rates.
• Major attractions run daily caps. The Forbidden City, the Chengdu panda base and the Zhangjiajie cable cars all hit theirs.
• Tibet permit processing slows to a crawl, because every agency is filing at the same time.

The one time I tried to move from Xi'an to Chengdu on 2 October, the train I wanted had sold out eleven days earlier and the flight cost more than my hotel for the week.

City by city

Beijing. The Forbidden City and the Badaling and Mutianyu sections of the Great Wall fill fastest. Anything near Wangfujing becomes a slow-moving river by mid-morning.

Xi'an. The Terracotta Army needs a timed ticket and the Muslim Quarter is shoulder to shoulder after 6pm. The city wall still works if you go early.

Chengdu. Queues at the panda base start before opening. Take the earliest slot or skip it and head to the teahouses, which absorb crowds far better.

Chongqing. Hongya Cave and the Liziba monorail viewpoint get genuinely uncomfortable. The stairway neighbourhoods away from the river stay surprisingly calm.

Shanghai. The Bund and Yu Garden are the pressure points. The former French Concession is the escape hatch.

Tibet. Lhasa itself copes well, because visitor numbers are capped by permit. The permit is the bottleneck. Apply six to eight weeks out.

Zhangjiajie. The Bailong elevator and the Tianmen cable car can mean two-hour waits. Go up before 8am or use the walking routes instead.

Hong Kong, Macao and Taipei. They keep their own holiday calendars, though Lunar New Year falls on the same dates everywhere. Hong Kong is calm for three days, then the mainland visitors arrive. Macao's ferries and the HZMB bridge buses sell out, and Taipei's hotels fill and its night markets pack out.

The weeks I would pick instead

Mid-April to mid-May, after Qingming and before Labour Day, is the best value of the year across most of the country: near-perfect weather in Beijing and Xi'an, ordinary crowds, no price spikes.

September is underrated. The first two weeks are quiet, the heat in Chengdu and Chongqing has finally broken and Zhangjiajie's mist is at its most photogenic. Just be out of the mountains before Mid-Autumn.

The week right after Golden Week, roughly 8 to 15 October, is one of the calmest and cheapest stretches of the whole autumn. Everyone goes home and the weather stays.

Spring Festival is worth seeing once and painful to travel through: the lanterns, temple fairs and fireworks are real, and so are closed restaurants and sold-out everything. Stay in one city rather than touring.

If you cannot avoid a peak

• Book trains exactly 15 days out and be ready the moment sales open.
• Fly on the first or last day of a holiday only if you enjoy queues. The day before and the day after are usually cheaper and calmer.
• Take the earliest entry slot at any ticketed attraction. The first hour is a different experience.
• Choose a city with plenty of alternatives over a resort town with a single cable car.
• Keep a buffer day before any international flight.

The short version

Avoid late January through February, the first five days of May, the last week of September and the first week of October. Almost everything else works. Chinese holidays are predictable, published a year in advance and avoidable, which is why they are worth checking before you book.

Written by the team at 71Asia Tours, a China-based tour operator with licensed Spanish- and English-speaking guides. Browse all tours · About us · Our guides · Reviews · FAQ