China's 2027 public holidays: 29 days off, five worked back

On 5 November 2026 the State Council’s general office published the 2027 holiday calendar: seven holidays, 29 calendar days off, and five weekend days that become working days (国办发明电〔2026〕10号, 5 November 2026).

The number readers usually miss is the third one. A nine-day Spring Festival is not nine days granted: four are statutory, three are ordinary weekend days, and two are borrowed from Sundays on either side of the block and paid back later. The notice prints the totals and the make-up dates, and leaves the split to the reader.

The seven holidays, as the notice prints them

The document is one page of prose, addressed to provincial governments and central ministries, with a numbered paragraph per holiday. Each paragraph carries the same four facts — first day, last day, the weekday of each end, and the number of days — plus any working days attached to the block. Those four facts are the whole calendar; the closing sentence only encourages employers to combine the blocks with paid annual leave and stagger travel.

Thirteen of the 29 days are the statutory ones

Chinese law fixes 13 public holidays a year, listed in the national holiday measures revised in November 2024 (State Council order 795, in force from 1 January 2025).

The 2024 revision changed two lines. Spring Festival went from three days to four, adding the lunar New Year’s Eve, and Labour Day from one day to two; the annual total moved from 11 to 13. Every other holiday was left as it stood.

Where the other sixteen days come from

Eleven of the 29 days are ordinary weekend days that happen to fall inside a block, and five are borrowed from weekends outside it.

The column that needs care is the second-to-last. A statutory holiday landing on a Saturday or Sunday is made up on a working day: 全体公民放假的假日，如果适逢周六、周日，应当在工作日补假 (第六条 of the measures, in force 1 January 2025). Labour Day in 2027 is the clean example — its two statutory days fall on Saturday 1 May and Sunday 2 May and reappear as the Monday and Tuesday off.

Spring Festival reads differently. Four statutory days sit inside a nine-day block that also contains three weekend days, so only two days have to be borrowed, and those two are the Sundays of 31 January and 14 February.

Two festivals get a single day

Mid-Autumn falls on Wednesday 15 September 2027 and Dragon Boat on Wednesday 9 June, so each is one day off with no borrowed weekend attached (notice, 5 November 2026).

In 2026 both were three-day blocks, 19–21 June and 25–27 September (2026 calendar, 4 November 2025). The two midweek festivals, plus one fewer make-up day, produce the year-on-year gap: 29 days off in 2027 against 33 in 2026, and five worked weekends against six.

Block lengths also move the numbers that measure travel, because those are compiled over windows that differ by publisher (how China counts holiday travel).

A Wednesday festival is still extensible with annual leave. Two days of leave on 10–11 June turn the single Wednesday into five consecutive days off, and two days on 16–17 September do the same in the autumn. Paid annual leave is a separate entitlement under Labour Law §45, not part of the holiday calendar.

Five weekend days you work, and the six-day cap

The measures also cap the cost of borrowing: 除个别特殊情形外，法定节假日假期前后连续工作一般不超过6天 (第七条).

Checked day by day against 2027, the longest continuous run of working days is six — Sunday 14 February through Friday 19 February. The next longest is five, Sunday 26 September through Thursday 30 September. New Year’s Day needs nothing borrowed at all in 2027, because 1 January falls on a Friday and the block closes on Sunday; in 2026 the same holiday cost a Sunday, 4 January.

Four holidays are toll-free, and the clock ends at the exit barrier

Toll-free travel covers Spring Festival, Qingming, Labour Day and National Day, together with the connected rest days the annual notice sets for them (国发〔2012〕37号, 24 July 2012). That is 24 of the 29 days off in 2027; New Year’s Day, Dragon Boat and Mid-Autumn are outside the scheme.

Two conditions narrow it further. The vehicle has to be a passenger car of seven seats or fewer, on a toll road, bridge or tunnel that was legally approved as a toll facility; whether an airport expressway takes part is decided by each province. The window runs from 00:00 on the first day of the block to 24:00 on the last, and on expressways the clock that matters is the one at the exit barrier: 高速公路以车辆驶离出口收费车道的时间为准. On ordinary toll roads it is the moment the car passes the toll lane.

That exit rule has a practical edge. A car that enters the expressway on the evening of 4 February and leaves at 00:10 on 5 February travels free, because 5 February is inside the window. A car that enters on 13 February and leaves at 00:10 on 14 February pays for the whole run, even though most of it was inside the window.

The half-days the annual notice never lists

Four holidays in the measures apply to part of the population, and none of them appears in the annual calendar. The list is half a day on 8 March for women, half a day on 4 May for people aged 14 and over, one day on 1 June for children under 14, and half a day on 1 August for active servicemen and women (第三条).

The same article’s second sentence explains their absence from the make-up arithmetic: 部分公民放假的假日，如果适逢周六、周日，则不补假. A part-population holiday that lands on a weekend is simply lost, so no working day is ever attached to it.

What the wage rules say about a day inside a block

Labour Law §44 sets three rates for work outside the normal schedule (Labour Law §44, 2018 amendment). They are 150% of the wage for extended hours, 200% for work on a rest day that cannot be replaced with time off, and 300% for work on a statutory holiday.

Mapped onto 2027, that puts 13 dates in the 300% tier and 11 weekend days inside the blocks in the 200% tier. The five make-up dates are designated 上班 days by the notice, so the measure’s own wording does not classify them as rest days. Whether an employer owes anything extra for them is a contract and local-practice question, and I did not verify it.

How I checked

The calendar was typed into a script straight from the notice, then checked four ways, each of which fails loudly rather than printing a wrong table.

• Length. For every holiday, the end date minus the start date plus one has to equal the 共N天 the notice states.
• Weekdays. The notice prints 周五, 周六 and so on for each end date; each was compared against the computed weekday.
• Split. Statutory days come from 第二条 of the measures; weekend days inside a block were counted by weekday; the remainder must equal the number of make-up dates the same paragraph lists. All seven rows balance, and the columns sum to 29, 13, 11 and 5.
• Year-on-year. The 2026 notice was put through the same script, giving 33 days off and six make-up days.
• Toll. Free days are the lengths of the four named blocks only, which sum to 24.
• Cap. Every day of 2027 was walked to find the longest run of consecutive working days around the make-up dates; the answer is six, ending 19 February.

What I could not check

• Whether the five make-up days carry any premium in practice. The labour law’s tiers turn on the day being a 休息日 or a 法定休假日, and the notice calls these dates 上班 days.
• Local holidays under 第四条, where provincial governments set days for ethnic-minority festivals. They are not in the national notice and are not counted in the 29 days.
• Branch-level arrangements: bank counters, hospitals, government service halls and courier networks publish their own opening hours for each block, and I did not read them.
• Whether schools and universities follow the same calendar. Education departments sometimes issue their own schedule for the winter break.
• The 2028 dates. The notice for the following year usually appears in early November, and nothing is published before that.
• The Spring Festival travel period (春运), which the transport ministry announces separately and which starts before the holiday block does.
• The 2026 comparison uses the totals only; I did not check whether individual blocks in 2026 had the same statutory split, because two of them fell on midweek dates and were bridged differently.