Korea Public Holidays: What's Open and When

The 2026 changes, and how substitute days work

Two dates joined the list in 2026. Workers' Day, 1 May, became a public holiday for government offices from 1 May itself, and Constitution Day, 17 July, was reinstated ten days later, on 11 May, eighteen years after it was dropped. The amendment never names Constitution Day, incidentally - the rule widened to cover the national holidays as a set, and it fell inside. Most of the Korean holiday lists you will find online still predate all of this.

The part worth learning properly is what happens when a holiday lands on a weekend. Nearly all of them come back as a substitute holiday on the next working day, Saturday overlaps included. Seollal and Chuseok work differently: their three-day runs only produce a substitute when one of those days falls on a Sunday, so a Saturday inside the break buys you nothing. New Year's Day and Memorial Day never move at all.

The next two breaks show both halves of that. Chuseok 2026 is a three-day holiday, Thursday 24 to Saturday 26 September, with no Sunday inside it, so no substitute follows and Monday 28 September is an ordinary working day. Seollal 2027 falls on Sunday 7 February and does earn one, on the Tuesday. If you have seen the 6th on a calendar somewhere, that calendar was probably Chinese: the new moon that sets the date arrives at 23:56 on the 6th in Beijing and 00:56 the next morning in Seoul, so the two countries keep Lunar New Year a day apart that once, then line up again from March. The cabinet can also declare a temporary public holiday at a few weeks' notice, so a long weekend can appear after you have booked. If your dates are still open, the seasonal guide is the other half of this decision.

Palaces and museums close on different days

The four palaces in central Seoul stagger their closing days rather than share one, so there is no day of the week when all of them are shut. Most people do not pick a bad day; they pick a good day and then walk to the one palace that happens to close on it. The four open at 09:00 year-round and close at a time that varies by site and season. Jongmyo Shrine works differently - entry on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday is by timed guided tour, the first English one at 10:00 - and a few of the Joseon royal tombs open much earlier, at 06:00 or 07:00 depending on which one, while the rest keep to 09:00.

Holidays turn that inside out. A regular closing day that collides with a public holiday or a substitute holiday is cancelled: the site opens, and the closure moves to the first non-holiday day after it. Whether that adds up to a shut day after the break depends on which weekdays the break covers. The 2026 Chuseok holiday runs Thursday to Saturday and touches neither a Monday nor a Tuesday, so nothing moves at all - Changdeokgung, Changgyeonggung, Deoksugung, the royal tombs and Sungnyemun Gate close on Monday 28 September as they always do, and Gyeongbokgung, Jongmyo and Chilgung on Tuesday the 29th.

Through the Seollal and Chuseok breaks the palaces, Jongmyo Shrine and the Joseon royal tombs open free of charge, Changdeokgung's Huwon (Secret Garden) excepted, and Jongmyo drops its timed-entry booking for the duration. Those free days are announced year by year rather than fixed, and the 2026 Chuseok notice is not out yet, so read the heritage service's own notices before you build a morning around it. Entry is a few thousand won the rest of the time, which What Things Cost sets next to everything else.

One rule most visitors arrive with is worth dropping: museums close on Mondays. That is a European habit, not a Korean one. The National Museum of Korea opens on Mondays and keeps no weekly closing day - it shuts on 1 January and on the Seollal and Chuseok days themselves, the exact inverse of the palaces, and its permanent and special exhibition halls take the first Monday of March, June, September and December, so 7 September in 2026. MMCA is where the rule half-returns: the Seoul branch has no weekly closing day either, but Gwacheon, Cheongju and Deoksugung all close on Mondays - and MMCA Deoksugung sits inside the palace of the same name, which closes on Mondays too. A Monday there finds both gates shut.

Shops, malls and supermarket closing days

The line you will read everywhere is that big supermarkets close on the second and fourth Sunday of the month. It is not a national rule. Treating it as one costs you a wasted trip in both directions. What the law does is hand each district office two closing days a month to assign. It tells them to use public holidays, which in practice meant Sundays for years, but a district can shift them onto weekdays once the interested parties there agree - and plenty have. Two districts of the same city routinely differ.

Check the branch instead. The chains publish closing days on the page for that specific store, and Naver Map and Kakao Map usually carry it in the listing too. Thirty seconds there beats any general claim about Korean supermarkets.

Department stores sit outside the scheme entirely and keep their own calendar. Lotte, Shinsegae and Hyundai close on Seollal and Chuseok day itself. Chuseok in 2026 is Friday 25 September, and most branches take a second day with it, usually the Thursday before and sometimes the Saturday after, while the odd one closes for that day alone. Two stores of the same chain in the same city can take different ones. What settles it is the page for the branch you are heading to, and most of those pages already show the September dates; that is about as much notice as these calendars give, weeks rather than months.

Convenience stores are the usual fallback, and mostly a good one. Round-the-clock opening is a majority rather than a guarantee, though - by 2024 roughly one GS25 in four had stopped opening 24 hours. Small restaurants and market stalls shut over the holidays too, which is how a convenience store ends up being dinner; Food & Cafés has what is worth picking up in one.

Banks, offices and pharmacies

Bank counters keep shorter hours than almost anything else here, and they close completely at weekends and on public holidays. Airports are the exception, though what runs around the clock there is the currency exchange counter rather than a bank branch. Government offices and post offices follow the same weekday-only pattern, so anything that needs a person behind a desk has to happen on a working day.

Pharmacies are where the gap shows. A public night pharmacy scheme keeps around 240 of them open late across the country, but late stops well before dawn, and after that a hospital emergency room is the only thing left open. Finding which pharmacy near you is open is the harder half, and the two numbers usually given for it let a visitor down at exactly the wrong hour. 129, the health and welfare line, works weekday office hours; its after-hours recording covers emergency welfare, mental health and child abuse, not pharmacies, and only in Korean. 120, the city and provincial call centres, answers in Korean around the clock but in other languages only on weekday daytimes. E-Gen, the national emergency portal, runs the same search, though not on its English pages.

That leaves 1330. The travel hotline is awake when nothing else is, open on holidays, and staffed in your language, which makes it the practical way for a visitor to have an open pharmacy found for them in the middle of the night. The rest of the numbers worth saving before you land are in Travel Essentials.

First and last trains

The subway starts around 05:30. The last train is quoted as 01:00 on weekdays, midnight at weekends and on public holidays. That 01:00 is the number that catches people: it describes when the last train reaches the end of the line, not when it passes through your station. Board somewhere in the middle and your real last train can be a good hour earlier than the figure you read.

So look up the station rather than the system. The map apps give first and last departures for the platform you are standing on, and the same times are posted at the gates. The cards and the apps themselves are covered in Transport & Payment, along with the taxi option for when you misjudge it.

Holidays get extra services, but not a fixed amount of them. Seoul extends running times across the subway network over the big breaks, and both the list of lines and the length of the extension are decided fresh each year and announced close to the date - one year an extra hour, another year two. Plan a holiday night on the normal timetable until you have seen the notice.