China working days calculator

How to use it

1. Choose the calculation. "Between two dates" counts working days from the start date to the end date, both included. "N working days ahead" starts counting from the day after the start date and stops at the Nth working day; a negative number counts backwards.
2. Enter the dates. The result also shows how many make-up workdays and statutory holidays the range includes, and which holiday periods it crosses.
3. The calendar below jumps to the relevant month. Days marked "Off" are holidays, days marked "Work" are weekend days that are working days, and a red dot marks a statutory holiday. The range is outlined.

Holidays, make-up days and statutory holidays

Where the schedule comes from

Each year the General Office of the State Council publishes the dates of the public holidays and the weekend days swapped to make them longer. The calculator includes the notices for 2025 and 2026: days the notice gives off are rest days, weekend days it lists as working days are working days, and all other days follow the normal Monday-to-Friday week. On that basis both 2025 and 2026 have 248 working days; October 2026 has 18 and February 2026 only 16.

Only 13 days are statutory holidays

Not every day of a long holiday is a statutory holiday. Article 2 of the national holiday regulations, as revised in 2024 and in force from 1 January 2025, lists 13 days: New Year's Day (1), Spring Festival (4: New Year's Eve and the first three days of the lunar year), Qingming (1), Labour Day (2: 1 and 2 May), Dragon Boat Festival (1), Mid-Autumn Festival (1) and National Day (3: 1 to 3 October). The rest of each long holiday is made of moved weekend days. The difference matters for pay: under article 44 of the Labour Law, work on a statutory holiday is paid at no less than 300% of wages, and work on a rest day without time off in lieu at no less than 200%.

New Year's Eve, Qingming, the Dragon Boat and Mid-Autumn festivals follow the lunar calendar or the solar terms, and the dates here were checked against the Hong Kong Observatory's Gregorian–lunar calendar tables. In 2026 the lunar New Year's Eve is 16 February, so 15 February is a day off but not a statutory holiday. In 2025 the Mid-Autumn Festival fell on 6 October, inside the National Day break, which is why that break lasted 8 days.

How the swaps are arranged

Article 7 of the regulations allows holidays to be combined with swapped weekend days, and says that apart from special cases no one should normally work more than six days in a row before or after a holiday. The 2025 notice set out the pattern: 8 days for the Spring Festival from New Year's Eve, 7 for National Day, 5 for Labour Day, and 3 each for New Year's Day, Qingming, Dragon Boat and Mid-Autumn (only the day itself if it falls on a Wednesday), with 8 days when National Day and Mid-Autumn coincide.

Examples

Limits

• Only published years are included. Outside them you get a warning, and those days are counted Monday to Friday.
• Half-day holidays for some groups, such as Women's Day and Youth Day, and regional holidays in ethnic autonomous areas are not included.
• Working days follow the national schedule. Shift work, flexible working-hour arrangements and contracts with their own definitions may differ.
• Legal deadlines have their own rules for when counting starts and what happens when the last day is a holiday. The calculator only counts calendar days.
• Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan have different public holidays.

Sources and further reading

• State Council General Office: 2026 public holiday schedule (in Chinese)
• State Council General Office: 2025 public holiday schedule (in Chinese)
• State Council: revision of the national holiday regulations, with full text (in Chinese)
• Labour Law of the PRC (SAMR website, in Chinese)
• Hong Kong Observatory: 2026 Gregorian–lunar calendar