Thailand Public Holidays 2027: Employer Work Rules Guide

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Last updated on สิงหาคม 22, 2026

What the Labour Protection Act actually requires, what the cabinet calendar does not, and how to pay staff correctly when they work the day.

A client called us last November in a mild panic. Their Bangkok office had copied the Bank of Thailand calendar straight into the staff handbook, closed on all of it, and felt generous.

A labour inspector disagreed. The handbook was missing Khao Phansa, which is fine. It also failed to announce the year’s list in advance, which isn’t.

That is the trap with Thailand public holidays. There are three overlapping calendars in this country, and only one of them creates a legal duty for you. Copy the wrong list and you can be closed on days you did not owe while short-changing staff on days you did.

This guide sets out the rules for private employers. You’ll get the 2027 calendar, the remaining 2026 dates, the pay multipliers with worked examples, and the penalties for getting it wrong.

How many public holidays must you give in Thailand?

Thirteen. That’s the floor, and it comes from Section 29 of the พระราชบัญญัติคุ้มครองแรงงาน พ.ศ. 2541 (พ.ศ. 2541).

The section is short and it does three things. It fixes the minimum at not less than thirteen traditional holidays per year. It requires that National Labour Day be one of them.

And it obliges you to announce the list to your employees in advance.

The 13-day minimum and National Labour Day

Most foreign employers get the number right and the announcement wrong. Announcing “in advance” means before the year starts, in writing, where staff can see it. A calendar circulated in March for a year already underway does not cure a January breach.

National Labour Day on 1 May is compulsory. You cannot swap it out for Christmas or for a day that suits your production schedule better. Everything else in your thirteen is your choice, provided the days are genuine traditional or annual official holidays.

In our experience

Foreign-managed companies routinely assume the government’s list is the legal standard. It isn’t. The cabinet list governs government offices.

Your duty is your own announced list. Publish fourteen or eighteen days and that becomes your contractual standard.

Going above thirteen is fine. Quietly dropping back down next year is not, because it worsens an existing employment condition.

Government list, bank list, your list

Here is where the confusion starts. The three lists genuinely differ, and the differences are not trivial.

Holiday	Cabinet list (government)	Bank of Thailand list (banks)	Private employer duty (LPA)
National Labour Day (1 May)	Not a holiday	Holiday	Compulsory
Royal Ploughing Ceremony	Holiday	Not a holiday	ไม่จำเป็น
Khao Phansa (Buddhist Lent)	Holiday	Not a holiday	ไม่จำเป็น
Songkran (13, 14, 15 April)	Holiday	Holiday	Optional but near universal
All other recurring days	Holiday	Holiday	ไม่จำเป็น
Cabinet “bridge” long weekends	Holiday	Follows cabinet	Not binding

The cabinet’s standing list has held 19 recurring days since the 2019 revision that added Coronation Day and Queen Suthida’s birthday. So government offices get more days than the statutory minimum. That is a policy choice, not a legal obligation you inherit.

Why does the Bank of Thailand list matter, then? For a different reason. It tells you when banks close, which drives your payroll cut-off dates and your supplier payment runs.

Treat it as an operations input, not a legal one.

Thailand public holidays 2027: the full calendar

The table below is the working 2027 calendar. Bank of Thailand hadn’t published its formal B.E. 2570 announcement when we compiled this in August 2026.

The cabinet had approved no special bridge days for 2027 either. We flag the unsettled dates.

Date	Day	Holiday	Notes for employers
1 Jan	Fri	New Year’s Day	Follows Fri 31 Dec 2026 and a weekend. Long break either side.
21 Feb	Sun	Makha Bucha	Falls on a Sunday.
22 Feb	Mon	Substitution day	In lieu of Makha Bucha.
6 Apr	Tue	Chakri Memorial Day	Isolated Tuesday. Expect leave requests for Monday.
13-15 Apr	Tue-Thu	Songkran	All three on weekdays, so no substitution arises.
1 May	Sat	National Labour Day	Compulsory. Falls on a Saturday. See the substitution rules below.
3 May	Mon	Bank in-lieu day	Banks only. Not automatically your obligation.
4 May	Tue	Coronation Day	Confirmed across sources.
TBA May	TBA	Royal Ploughing Ceremony	Date set annually by royal astrologers. Not yet announced. Government only.
20 May	Thu	Visakha Bucha	Lunar date, verified against the full moon.
3 Jun	Thu	HM Queen Suthida’s Birthday	Fixed date.
18 Jul	Sun	Asarnha Bucha	Falls on a Sunday. Some calendars show 19 July. See the note below.
19 Jul	Mon	Khao Phansa	Government holiday. Not a bank holiday.
20 Jul	Tue	Substitution day	Expected in lieu of Asarnha Bucha. Not yet official.
28 Jul	Wed	HM King Vajiralongkorn’s Birthday	Fixed date.
12 Aug	Thu	HM Queen Mother’s Birthday	Mother’s Day.
13 Oct	Wed	Passing of King Bhumibol	Nawaminthara Maharaj Day.
23 Oct	Sat	Chulalongkorn Day	Falls on a Saturday.
25 Oct	Mon	Substitution day	In lieu of Chulalongkorn Day.
5 Dec	Sun	King Bhumibol’s Birthday	National Day and Father’s Day.
6 Dec	Mon	Substitution day	In lieu of 5 December.
10 Dec	Fri	Constitution Day	Three-day weekend.
31 Dec	Fri	New Year’s Eve	Three-day weekend into 2028.

Date to watch

Asarnha Bucha 2027 is contested. The Thai lunar calendar and the astronomical full moon both point to Sunday 18 July, with Khao Phansa on Monday 19 July. A few English-language calendars publish 19 and 20 July instead.

Don’t lock your July 2027 shift roster until the official announcements appear. We expect them in the second half of 2026.

Remaining 2026 public holidays

Six dates are left in 2026 as of late August. Two of them create three-day weekends, and one applies only in Bangkok.

Date	Day	Holiday	Employer note
13 Oct	Tue	Passing of King Bhumibol	Nationwide.
16 Oct	Fri	Special holiday, Bangkok only	Approved for the World Bank and IMF Annual Meetings. Government and banks in Bangkok. Not binding on private employers.
23 Oct	Fri	Chulalongkorn Day	Three-day weekend.
5 Dec	Sat	King Bhumibol’s Birthday	Falls on a Saturday.
7 Dec	Mon	Substitution day	In lieu of 5 December.
10 Dec	Thu	Constitution Day	Nationwide.
31 Dec	Thu	New Year’s Eve	Rolls into 1 January 2027 for a four-day break.

Note what is not on that list. Two extra bridge days for June and July 2026 were proposed. The cabinet withdrew them in December 2025 over concerns about the impact on employers.

A viral post in May 2026 claimed they’d been approved. The government spokesperson denied it and the Anti-Fake News Centre logged the claim. Several HR teams had already published revised calendars by then.

The moveable Buddhist holidays

Four of Thailand’s holidays move each year with the lunar calendar. They are Makha Bucha, Visakha Bucha, Asarnha Bucha and Khao Phansa. Each is tied to a full moon in a specific Thai lunar month, and Khao Phansa always falls the day after Asarnha Bucha.

Think of them the way a British employer thinks of Easter. The date shifts, the entitlement doesn’t, and your rota software won’t work it out on its own.

The Royal Ploughing Ceremony is different again. An auspicious date is chosen each year by the Bureau of the Royal Household, usually in May. It’s a government holiday only.

Substitution days and how they actually work

Section 29 paragraph two handles the collision case. When a traditional holiday falls on an employee’s weekly holiday, the employee takes the substitute on the next working day.

A couple of details trip people up.

First, the rule keys off the employee’s weekly holiday, not off Saturday and Sunday. If your security team’s weekly holiday is Wednesday, a holiday landing on their Wednesday triggers a substitution. A holiday landing on their Sunday, which is a normal working day for them, does not.

Second, the substitute is a full paid holiday. It carries the same Section 62 and Section 63 pay consequences if someone works it.

Employers sometimes treat the in-lieu day as a discretionary favour. It isn’t.

Cabinet special holidays are not binding on you

Every year or two the Thai cabinet announces an extra day to bridge a holiday to a weekend. The aim is usually to stimulate domestic tourism.

These bind government offices, and the Bank of Thailand usually follows for banks. Private employers are free to ignore them.

Most companies close anyway, because half their counterparties and all the banks are shut. That’s a commercial decision with a payroll consequence.

Close on a day that isn’t on your announced list and you still owe full wages for it. You cannot deduct it, and you cannot force staff to take annual leave for it without agreement.

Practical drafting point

Add a clause to your work rules saying the company may observe additional government-announced holidays at its discretion. State that doing so in one year creates no entitlement in later years. We put this in every set of work rules we draft. It costs nothing and it kills the “but we got it last year” argument.

Holiday pay in Thailand: what you owe and when

This is where the money is, and where most disputes start. Three sections do the work.

Pay for the holiday itself (Section 56)

Section 56 requires you to pay wages equal to a working day for weekly holidays, traditional holidays and annual leave. For monthly-salaried staff this is invisible, because the salary already covers the month.

Daily-paid and hourly-paid staff are the exception on weekly holidays only. Section 56 expressly carves them out of paid weekly holidays.

But they’re fully entitled to paid traditional holidays and paid annual leave. Read that twice. It’s the single most common payroll error we see in factories and construction firms.

Working on a holiday (Section 62)

Section 62 splits by whether the employee is entitled to holiday pay for that day.

• Entitled to holiday pay (the monthly-salaried case): you add not less than one times the hourly working-day rate for the hours worked. The salary covers the first 100%, so the total is 200%.
• Not entitled to holiday pay (the daily-paid weekly-holiday case): you pay not less than two times the hourly working-day rate.

Overtime on a holiday (Section 63)

Hours beyond normal working hours on a holiday attract not less than three times the hourly working-day rate. There is no cap on the multiplier stacking with anything else. Three times is three times.

สถานการณ์	ประเมิน	ส่วน	ความหมายในทางปฏิบัติ
Holiday not worked, monthly-salaried	100%	56	Already inside the monthly salary. No extra line item.
Traditional holiday not worked, daily-paid	100%	56	Pay one day’s wage even though nobody worked.
Weekly holiday not worked, daily-paid	0%	56	Expressly excluded. This is the one carve-out.
Normal hours worked, employee has holiday pay right	+100%	62(1)	One extra day on top of salary. Effective 200%.
Normal hours worked, no holiday pay right	200%	62(2)	Double the hourly working-day rate.
Overtime hours worked on a holiday	300%	63	Triple the hourly working-day rate.
Overtime on an ordinary working day	150%	61	For comparison.
You failed to give the holiday at all	62 and 63 rates	64	Treated as if you ordered the employee to work it.

Two worked examples

Numbers make this concrete. Assume an eight-hour normal working day in both cases.

ขั้นตอน	Somchai: monthly salary THB 30,000	Malee: daily wage THB 400
Hourly working-day rate	30,000 ÷ 30 ÷ 8 = THB 125	400 ÷ 8 = THB 50
Works 8 normal hours on Chakri Day	Salary covers it, plus 8 × 125 = THB 1,000	8 × 50 × 2 = THB 800
Plus 3 hours overtime that day	3 × 125 × 3 = THB 1,125	3 × 50 × 3 = THB 450
Total extra for the day	THB 2,125 on top of salary	THB 1,250

The monthly divisor of 30 is the convention Thai labour officials apply, and it is what the Labour Court will expect to see. Using 22 or 26 working days instead inflates the hourly rate and quietly overpays. Using 31 underpays, which is the version that gets you an inspection.

Under Section 70 you must pay holiday pay and holiday overtime pay by the agreed payday. On termination the clock is much tighter: everything owed must be settled within three days.

When can you require staff to work on a holiday?

Section 25 is the gate. The default is that you cannot order it.

You may require holiday work without consent in two situations. The first is work whose nature requires continuous performance, where stopping would damage the work. The second is genuine emergency work.

Beyond that, Section 25 lists sectors where holiday work may be required. Hotels, entertainment venues, transport, food and beverage outlets, clubs, associations and medical establishments are all named. Ministerial regulation can add more. If you’re running a resort in Phuket or a logistics operation, you are probably inside this exception.

Everyone else needs the employee’s prior consent, on each occasion. A blanket contract clause saying the employee agrees to work holidays whenever asked doesn’t satisfy this.

The consent must be specific and it must come first. Get it in writing, even a dated email or a signed roster acknowledgement.

The Section 64 trap

Section 64 is the provision employers never see coming. Fail to give the holidays required by Sections 28, 29 or 30 and the law steps in. It treats you as if you’d ordered the employee to work them.

You then owe holiday pay and holiday overtime pay at the Section 62 and 63 rates for every one of those days. Across a workforce of 60 people over three years, that arithmetic gets ugly fast.

Who is exempt: managers and special categories

Not every employee is entitled to the premium rates. Section 65 lists the exceptions, and Section 66 adds a sting for one of them.

Section 65 covers employees with authority to act for the employer on hiring, paying remuneration, cutting wages or dismissal. It also covers a short list of operational roles.

Railway operations, water gates, water level readings, firefighting and public disaster prevention are all in there. So is work outside the premises where hours can’t be fixed, plus watching over property outside normal duties.

All of them lose the right to overtime pay under Section 61 and holiday overtime pay under Section 63. Categories two through eight still receive money equal to the hourly working-day rate for hours actually worked.

Category one, the managerial group, is treated differently. Section 66 says an employee under Section 65(1) is not entitled to holiday pay under Section 62 either, unless the employer agrees to pay it. So a genuine manager who works Songkran gets nothing extra by default.

Careful

The Section 65(1) test is about actual authority, not job title. Calling someone “Assistant Manager” while they have no power to hire, discipline or dismiss won’t defeat an overtime claim.

Thai labour courts look at what the person actually does. We’ve seen employers lose six-figure back-pay claims on exactly this point. If you rely on this exemption, make the delegation of authority documented and real.

Penalties for getting holidays wrong

The Act splits penalties by how serious the breach is, and the split is not intuitive. Failing to give the holidays is the cheaper offence. Failing to pay for them is the expensive one.

What you did wrong	Breached	Penalty section	Exposure
Gave fewer than 13 holidays, or failed to announce the list	s.29	s.146	Fine up to THB 20,000
Did not give a weekly holiday or annual leave	s.28, s.30	s.146	Fine up to THB 20,000
Did not pay wages for a holiday	s.56	s.146	Fine up to THB 20,000
Underpaid holiday pay or holiday overtime pay	s.62, s.63	s.144	Up to 6 months prison, fine up to THB 100,000, or both
Failed to give holidays, so deemed holiday work unpaid	s.64	s.144	Up to 6 months prison, fine up to THB 100,000, or both
No written work rules with 10 or more employees	s.108	s.146	Fine up to THB 20,000

Fines are not the real risk. Section 9 is. Unpaid wages, overtime pay, holiday pay and holiday overtime pay carry interest at 15% per annum from the due date.

Withhold payment deliberately and without reasonable cause and it gets worse. An additional surcharge of 15% runs for every seven-day period the money stays unpaid.

Read that surcharge again. It is per seven days, not per year. A deliberate withholding that runs for a few months compounds into something no finance director wants to explain.

Claims typically start with a complaint to a labour inspector at the Department of Labour Protection and Welfare. The inspector can issue an order to pay.

From there it goes to the Labour Court, where filing is free for employees and lawyers aren’t required. That asymmetry is deliberate. It means small claims get litigated here that would never be worth pursuing elsewhere.

Step-by-step: setting your holiday calendar

Here’s the process we walk clients through each Q4.

1. Pull the official lists in October or November. Take the cabinet resolution and the Bank of Thailand announcement for the coming year. Both usually publish in the second half of the preceding year.
2. Pick your days, minimum thirteen. Start with 1 May because it is compulsory. Add Songkran and New Year because staff expect them. Fill the rest from the cabinet list.
3. Check what you did last year. If you gave sixteen days for three years running, dropping to thirteen is a reduction in employment conditions and needs consent. Match or exceed the established practice.
4. Map the substitutions. Work out which holidays land on each employee group’s weekly holiday. Shift teams and office teams often produce different answers.
5. Write it into your work rules. Section 108 requires employers with ten or more employees to have work rules in Thai. Holidays and the rules for taking them are a mandatory item, as are the rules governing overtime and holiday work.
6. Announce and post it before the year begins. Physical notice board and intranet. Keep a dated copy. This is your evidence if an inspector asks.
7. Brief payroll on the multipliers. Especially the monthly versus daily-paid distinction under Section 62. Test it against a real December payslip before January.
8. Keep the records. Section 114 requires wage payment documents showing working days, hours and the amounts of overtime pay and holiday pay. Section 115 requires two years of retention.

If your headcount crosses ten mid-year, the work rules must be in place within fifteen days. That deadline catches a lot of growing startups.

ของเรา Thailand employment law guide for employers covers the wider compliance picture. We also keep an employment agreement template for Thailand with the right holiday clauses already in it.

คำถามที่พบบ่อย

ThaiLawOnline สามารถช่วยเหลือคุณได้อย่างไร

We’ve been advising employers in Thailand for more than 30 years. Holiday compliance is one of the cheapest problems to fix before it turns expensive. If your current handbook was translated from a head-office template, it almost certainly does not satisfy Section 108.

We draft and register work rules, audit payroll multipliers against the Act, and defend employers at labour inspection and in the Labour Court. We also handle ใบอนุญาตทำงานในกรุงเทพฯ, social security registration และ minimum wage compliance for the same clients.

Already in a dispute? Read สิ่งที่ควรรู้ก่อนขึ้นศาลในประเทศไทย. Then consider whether การระงับข้อพิพาททางเลือก gets you a better outcome. Employees can review their side of the ledger in our guide to employee rights in Thailand.

Setting up in Thailand from scratch? Start with การจดทะเบียนบริษัท and the wider business law framework, then build the employment layer on top. ติดต่อเรา เพื่อขอคำปรึกษา.

ประเด็นสำคัญ

• Thirteen paid traditional holidays is the statutory floor under Section 29, and 1 May is compulsory.
• Announce your list in writing before the year starts. Failing to announce is itself a breach.
• The cabinet list and the Bank of Thailand list are not your legal duty. Your announced list is.
• Cabinet bridge holidays do not bind private employers. Close if you like, but pay full wages.
• Monthly staff working a holiday get one extra day. Daily staff get double. Overtime on a holiday is triple.
• Daily-paid staff are excluded from paid weekly holidays only. They still get paid traditional holidays.
• Section 64 turns a failure to give holidays into a deemed order to work them, with pay to match.
• Underpayment carries prison exposure under Section 144 plus 15% interest and a 15% per-seven-day surcharge.
• Ten or more employees means written work rules in Thai within fifteen days, holidays included.