Vietnam public holidays, and the ones that fill the trains

Vietnam keeps a short official calendar and a long practical one. Vietnam public holidays take eleven days of the year by law. Two blocks of them rearrange every flight, train and beach hotel in the country for a week.

Which days are public holidays in Vietnam?

Vietnam has eleven statutory public holiday days, set by the Labour Code and spread across six occasions. One of them takes five days on its own, and one takes two.

Foreign employees working in Vietnam get two extra days on top: their own country's national day and its traditional new year. That is a rule about employment rather than about travel. It does explain why an office can be half empty on a date the calendar says nothing about.

Which of them actually changes a trip?

Tet changes everything, and the 30 April block changes the coast. Those two are the ones to plan around; the others pass with the banks shut and the streets normal.

Tet closes street kitchens, shops and family businesses for three days at minimum, and often for a week. Fares triple in the fortnight around it. The Tet guide covers what that week is like and how to travel through it rather than into it.

Reunification Day and Labour Day sit next to each other. With a weekend and a swapped working day they usually become a four or five-day break. Every domestic airline, every sleeper train and every beach hotel from Da Nang to Vung Tau sells out for it.

National Day at the start of September does a smaller version of the same thing, concentrated on Hanoi and the northern coast.

What happens when a holiday lands on a weekend?

Employees take the next working day off instead, which the Labour Code states rather than leaving to employers. That single rule is why a one-day holiday regularly turns into a three-day one.

The government goes further each year with an official notice that swaps working days. A Friday caught between a Thursday holiday and the weekend becomes a day off, and everyone works the Saturday after it instead. Those swaps appear months ahead. They are the reason a holiday block runs four or five days without any new holiday being created.

For a visitor the swapped days matter more than the holiday itself, because they are what fill the trains. The notice is worth checking once you have dates, particularly for late April.

What closes, and what does not?

Banks, post offices, embassies and government offices close on all eleven days. Everything a traveller relies on stays open on every holiday except Tet: markets, street kitchens, convenience stores, coffee shops, museums, tour operators.

So the practical effect of a September or May holiday is not closure. The roads out of the cities fill on the first morning, the beaches fill for three days, and hotel rates on the coast hit their annual peak.

ATMs run out of cash faster over a long weekend, which is the one small thing worth pre-empting. The money guide covers which machines are reliable and what the withdrawal limits are.

Which dates move each year?

Two of the Vietnam public holidays move, because they follow the lunar calendar. Tet falls on the first day of the lunar new year, somewhere between late January and the middle of February. In 2027 that is Saturday 6 February, with the official holiday running roughly 3 to 11 February.

The Hung Kings commemoration falls on the tenth day of the third lunar month, which puts it in April most years. It takes one day, it closes offices, and it fills the temple complex at Phu Tho with a real pilgrimage rather than a parade.

The other four are fixed to the solar calendar: 1 January, 30 April, 1 May and 2 September. In 2027, 30 April is a Friday and 2 September is a Thursday, so both sit against a weekend and both will be extended.

What do the anniversary years add?

Round-number anniversaries bring military parades, and parades bring closed streets. The fiftieth anniversary of reunification in April 2025 and the eightieth National Day that September both shut central roads in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. The rehearsals in the days before closed them too.

Rehearsals are the part that catches people out. A central district can shut to traffic late at night a week ahead, with no notice a visitor is likely to see. Hotels near the route know, and asking at reception is quicker than looking for an announcement in English.

In ordinary years none of this happens, and 2 September is flags, a day off and a crowded coast. The festivals guide covers the events worth arranging a trip around, which are mostly not the public holidays.

Is Ho Chi Minh's birthday a holiday, and what else is not?

Ho Chi Minh's birthday on 19 May is a commemorative date rather than a day off, and so are the other four occasions people assume close the country. Banners go up, state television marks it, and offices, shops and schools work a normal day.

The same applies to the mid-autumn festival, Christmas, Women's Day on 20 October and Teachers' Day on 20 November. Of those, mid-autumn is the most visible: mooncakes in every shop, lanterns and lion dances in the streets, and nothing shut.

Which big days are not public holidays?

Four more dates run as working days, and the mid-autumn festival is the one visitors mistake most often. It falls on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, fills the streets with lanterns and lion dances, and closes nothing at all.

Christmas is not observed as a holiday nationally, though Ho Chi Minh City decorates hard and the Catholic districts fill on Christmas Eve. Shops open as normal on 25 December.

The seventh lunar month, the ghost month, is a period rather than a day, and it changes behaviour rather than opening hours. The ghost month page explains what shifts during it.

How should you plan around all this?

Book the late-April and early-September blocks early, or route around them. Domestic flights double in price and sleeper trains sell out weeks ahead. A coastal hotel that costs 800,000 dong in March asks twice that for the 30 April weekend.

Inland and mountain destinations absorb the holiday better than the coast does. Ha Giang, Mai Chau and the central highlands stay manageable on a weekend when Nha Trang does not.

And treat the whole question as secondary to the weather, which decides far more about a trip than the calendar does. The best time to visit guide sets out the seasons region by region.