China's Adjusted Working Days: How Make-Up Weekends Work

Your scheduling tool says China's office is closed on Saturday. The China team says they are working. Both are partly right: on that particular Saturday, the State Council has designated a make-up working day to pay back time borrowed for a longer holiday. It is a deliberate and long-established feature of the Chinese calendar, and it breaks any business-day logic that assumes weekends are always off.

Statutory days versus the actual break

Mainland China's national regulations set a fixed number of statutory holiday days. After amendments that took effect in 2025, the allocation is 13 days:

Yet Spring Festival and National Day usually produce breaks of a week or more. The extra time comes from two sources: the surrounding weekend days, and weekdays that are swapped. The weekdays are declared rest days and repaid by designating nearby Saturdays or Sundays as working days. The arrangement is commonly called tiaoxiu, which means adjusted rest.

How the annual notice works

Each year the General Office of the State Council publishes a notice setting out every holiday period for the following year, including the exact rest days and the weekend working days. It usually appears in the last months of the preceding year. Until it is published, the precise pattern is not known. You can estimate it from the statutory rules and the weekdays the holidays fall on, but treat the estimate as provisional.

Notices typically arrange holidays in one of two ways:

• Bridging to a weekend. A single statutory day on a Tuesday, for example, is joined to the weekend by declaring Monday a rest day and making a nearby Saturday or Sunday a working day.
• Building a long break. For Spring Festival and National Day, statutory days, weekend days and two or more swapped weekdays combine into a block of seven or eight days, repaid by one or more weekend working days before or after.

Hong Kong and Macau have their own holiday systems and do not follow the mainland's make-up days.

Worked example: a National Day pattern

To see the mechanics, take a year in which 1 October falls on a Wednesday and assume no other holiday coincides with it. The pattern below is an illustration of how the arrangement can work, not a specific year's notice.

• Statutory National Day holidays: Wednesday 1, Thursday 2 and Friday 3 October.
• Normal weekend: Saturday 4 and Sunday 5 October.
• Swapped weekdays: Monday 6 and Tuesday 7 October are declared rest days.
• Make-up working days: Sunday 28 September and Saturday 11 October.

The break runs from Wednesday 1 to Tuesday 7 October: seven days made up of 3 statutory days, 2 weekend days and 2 swapped weekdays. The two swapped weekdays are paid back by the two make-up weekend days, so the total number of working days in the year does not change.

Now count five business days from Monday 29 September, three ways.

The first method is a full week early and would put a deadline in the middle of the holiday. The second is two days late. Only the third matches the calendar the China team actually works, and its result lands on a Saturday. The add business days tool uses the official working-day calendar, make-up days included, once the notice is out.

Side effects to watch

• Long working stretches. Make-up days can create runs of six or more consecutive working days next to the break. Expect fatigue and slower responses, and avoid scheduling launches on make-up Saturdays. Recent notices have aimed to limit very long stretches, but the pattern still varies.
• Cross-border mismatch. On a make-up Saturday the China office is working while partners elsewhere are off. Questions raised that day may wait until Monday abroad.
• Payroll and timekeeping. Systems that tag Saturdays as weekends can misclassify make-up days as overtime or skip them in attendance records. Check how your system and contracts handle them.
• Automated jobs. Daily reports set to run on weekdays will miss make-up days and run on swapped rest days unless the calendar is configured correctly.

Spring Festival

The same mechanism builds the Spring Festival break, and because the festival follows the lunar calendar it can fall anywhere from late January to mid-February. Since 2025 the statutory allocation has included Spring Festival Eve, which changes how the break is assembled. Expect the real disruption to be longer than the official break, as many workers travel home and factories wind down early. See the China public holidays page for the current year's arrangement and our methodology for how make-up days are recorded.

Smaller holidays follow the same logic

The swaps are not limited to the two long breaks. Labour Day's two statutory days are often stretched into a five-day break with weekend working days on either side, and single-day holidays such as Qingming or the Dragon Boat Festival are sometimes bridged to a weekend in the same way. Over a year, that can mean several Saturdays or Sundays on which mainland offices are open. A shared calendar that only lists holidays, and not the working weekends, will be wrong on each of them.

What to do with China's calendar

1. Watch for the State Council's annual notice in late autumn and update calendars as soon as it is published.
2. Add make-up working days explicitly, not just holidays, to every shared calendar and scheduling system.
3. Count deadlines with a calendar that knows about weekend working days, using the business days calculator or equivalent.
4. Keep launches and critical handovers away from make-up Saturdays and the days around them.
5. Check how payroll and attendance systems classify make-up days before the first one arrives.