🌕 Chuseok 2027: Sep 14 (Tue) – Sep 16 (Thu)
Chuseok is Korea's biggest holiday. Most of the country travels to their hometown on the same days. If a friend is coming to Korea around then, this is the page to send them — it answers the question everyone living here gets asked every year: "will anything be open?"
⚠️ The short version
Official holidays are Sep 14 (Tue) – Sep 16 (Thu). Sep 16 (Thu) is a Sunday, so it is effectively a four-day break — and then Sep 17 (Fri) is a Monday, the most common weekly closing day in Korea. Plan around both, not just the holiday.
What actually closes
We track opening hours for 5,731 restaurants and 1,756 cafés registered in Korea Tourism Organization data. Here is what they say themselves:
| What the listing says | Restaurants | Cafés |
|---|---|---|
| Says it closes for Chuseok / Lunar New Year | 441 | 40 |
| Says it is open year-round (연중무휴) | 2,897 | 1,140 |
| Closes every Monday | 958 | 276 |
The Monday-after trap
Sep 17 (Fri) is a Monday. Monday is the single most common closing day in Korea — 958 restaurants (17%) and 276 cafés (16%) in our data close every Monday. So "we'll just go after the holiday" walks straight into it. The first fully normal day is the Tuesday.
How it differs from the holiday you may know
Chuseok falls on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month, so the date moves every year. Korea makes it a three-day public holiday — the day before, the day itself, and the day after. If you know American Thanksgiving, the feel is similar: family, food, and the entire country travelling at once. The difference is that Korea is small and the travel is compressed into those few days, which is why intercity buses, trains and highways fill up and why so many small businesses simply shut.
What is open
We could not find a festival running across this holiday in our data. That is unusual; check the festival search below.
No festival in our data runs across these dates.
Traditional markets, day by day
Korea's five-day markets (오일장) open on a fixed cycle of date endings, so we can say which ones fall on each holiday day. Of the 112 markets whose cycle we know:
What this page does not cover
We only write what our own data supports. Visas and K-ETA, transport cards, SIM cards and flight prices are not our data, so we do not cover them. Plenty of sites do — and getting those wrong would cost you more than our staying quiet.
Source: Korea Tourism Organization public data (opening hours, festivals, traditional markets) and the Korean government public-holiday calendar. Opening-hours figures are counted from 5,731 restaurants and 1,756 cafés on 2026-10-18. Businesses change holiday hours at short notice — always confirm before travelling.
Taking the trip home
A small Korean brand called kory puts city names on everyday things — hair rollers, hair ties, claw clips, scarves.
We help make kory, so this is not a paid placement — but it is a link we have an interest in. That is why it sits here at the bottom and nowhere else. Product pages and the shop home are in English; a few other pages there are still Korean only.