Vietnamese festival calendar

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Vietnamese holidays: how do official days off, folk festivals, and commemorative days differ?

Most traditional Vietnamese holidays (Lunar New Year, Mid-Autumn Festival, Vu Lan, Đoan Ngọ...) follow the lunar calendar and repeat on the same lunar date each year, so their solar-calendar date shifts annually; some modern days (National Day, Vietnamese Teachers' Day...) follow the solar calendar and fall on a fixed date.

This page merges three different kinds of days into one calendar for convenience, but they are NOT interchangeable: "official public holidays" are the very small set of paid days off under Vietnamese labor law (New Year's Day, Tết, Hùng Kings' Commemoration, April 30, May 1, September 2); "folk festivals/observances" are inherited customs that aren't days off work but are still widely marked (Mid-Autumn, Vu Lan, the Kitchen Gods send-off...); "commemorative days" are state- or industry-designated days honoring a group (Teachers' Day, Vietnamese Women's Day...), with no religious or folk-belief basis.

The "official"/"major"/"festival" tags on the calendar work along two axes: the first is legal status (whether it's a paid day off by law), the second is how nationally widespread a day is (major: most Vietnamese people know it and take part in some way even without time off, e.g. Mid-Autumn) versus a festival tied to a specific region or ethnic community (e.g. the Katê festival of the Chăm people). This is a relative grouping for display purposes, not a ranking of one belief system's or region's importance over another.

The lunar dates for regional festivals were compiled and checked against public sources, but exact details (how many days it runs, whether it's held every single year) can vary by locality and year, treat this as a starting point for looking things up, not an official announcement from any festival's organizing committee.

Historically, setting the dates for Vietnamese holidays was tied to an imperial "calendar-issuing" ceremony: each year the royal astronomical office compiled a new calendar, which the emperor then distributed to localities, letting people know the dates of Tết and the new/full moon days for ancestor worship and village festivals. This tradition explains why the lunisolar calendar still sits at the center of Vietnamese religious and folk life even though the solar calendar has been the official administrative calendar since French colonial rule.

Beyond the three main groups above, this page also distinguishes Kinh-majority festivals from those of Vietnam's 53 ethnic minority groups, which have their own distinct calendars and religious meanings rather than being scaled-down versions of Kinh festivals (for example, the Khmer Chôl Chnăm Thmây New Year follows the Khmer Buddhist calendar and does not coincide with Lunar New Year). Grouping them into one calendar is for lookup convenience, not an implication that they share a common origin or level of popularity.

When a lunar holiday falls near the end of a short month (only 29 days) or coincides with a year that has an inserted leap month, working out the matching solar date can be more complex than simple addition; this tool calculates it directly through the standard lunisolar conversion algorithm (see the Lunar Calendar tool for more) so it stays accurate in these edge cases.