Thailand
Thailand has no standing holidays statute. The list is set annually by royal decree, which means it changes more often than most national calendars and has been used both to add days and to remove them. Roughly fifteen days a year, dominated by royal commemorations and the Buddhist lunar calendar.
The holiday calendar
- New Year's Day - 1 January
- Songkran - 13, 14 and 15 April, three consecutive days
- Labour Day - 1 May (dropped 2019, restored 2024)
- Coronation Day - 13 May
- Asarnha Bucha - 15th day of the 8th lunar month (dropped 2019, restored 2024)
- King's Birthday - 28 July
- Passing of King Bhumibol - 13 October
- Chulalongkorn Memorial Day - 23 October
- Father's Day - 5 December, also the birthday of King Bhumibol
- New Year's Eve - 31 December, a public holiday since 2018
Royal decree, not statute
Thailand is the outlier in Southeast Asia here. Neighbouring calendars are fixed in law; Thailand announces its holidays by royal decree each year, and the decree both lists the days and can adjust them. The practical result is that Thai holidays are announced with less lead time than the rest of the region and can shift by policy decision rather than by calendrical necessity. It also means a holiday can effectively be abolished - as 4 July was in 2024 - without any act of the legislature.
The 2024 changes
Two removals and one addition in the same year made the 2024 calendar unusually generous. Labour Day on 1 May and Asarnha Bucha were both dropped in 2019 and restored in 2024, while the old National Day on 4 July - marking the 1932 revolution that ended the absolute monarchy - was repealed. That holiday is still widely observed unofficially and has never lost its popular character, but its removal from the official list is a live political point.
Where the Buddhist calendar sits
Three of the listed days follow the lunar calendar rather than a fixed date, and they move about eleven days earlier each Gregorian year: Songkran is fixed by solar term (13-15 April) while Asarnha Bucha tracks the full moon of the eighth lunar month. The closely related Lao rocket festival, Boun Bang Fai, falls on that same date and is celebrated across the Laos border region on the same full moon. The water and lantern festivals run a full lunar half-year later: Loy Krathong on the full moon of the twelfth lunar month, and Makha Bucha on the fifteenth of the third.