How Public Holidays Work in China

China recognises 7 statutory public holidays nationwide, but the exact dates are not fixed in advance. Each year the State Council publishes an official holiday calendar, usually in late autumn for the year ahead, and employers cannot finalise their schedules until it is released. Three holidays fall on fixed Gregorian dates (New Year's Day, Labour Day and National Day), while Spring Festival, Qingming, the Dragon Boat Festival and the Mid-Autumn Festival follow the lunar calendar and therefore shift by several weeks from one year to the next.

The most distinctive feature of the Chinese system is tiaoxiu, the make-up workday arrangement. To turn a 3 day statutory holiday into a continuous 7 day break, the State Council designates one or two adjacent Saturdays or Sundays as regular working days. This is how the famous 'golden week' holidays around Spring Festival and National Day are engineered. The days off are real, but so are the make-up workdays, and employees are expected to attend on those swapped weekends at ordinary pay because they simply replace a normal working day.

Compensation for genuine holiday work is tightly regulated by the Labour Law. Work performed on a statutory public holiday must be paid at 300 percent of the normal wage, and this premium cannot be replaced by compensatory time off. Work on an ordinary rest day is paid at 200 percent, or the employer may grant a substitute day of rest instead. Make-up workdays created by tiaoxiu do not attract any premium, since they are treated as reassigned normal days rather than rest days.

For payroll and leave planning this creates real complexity. Teams must track which weekend days have been converted into workdays, apply the correct 300 percent or 200 percent multiplier when staff work through a holiday, and rebuild attendance calendars every year once the official dates are announced. Multinational employers running a single global calendar frequently miscalculate Chinese holiday pay for exactly these reasons.