Tết Trung Thu 2026 fell on Friday 25 September, and Hội An's formal lantern night on Thursday the 24th. Here is what the town's four-day programme actually held, and when the festival falls in 2027.
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*Updated 23 October 2026. This year's festival has passed. Mid-Autumn 2026 fell on Friday 25 September (the 15th of the eighth lunar month) and Hội An's lantern night on Thursday 24 September (the 14th). The next Mid-Autumn is Wednesday 15 September 2027, with the lantern night on Tuesday 14 September 2027: see our 2027 guide. The last three monthly lantern nights of 2026 fall on Friday 23 October, Sunday 22 November and Tuesday 22 December.*
Tết Trung Thu, the Mid-Autumn Festival, is observed throughout Vietnam on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month and is the second most important traditional festival in the Vietnamese calendar after Tết Nguyên Đán, the Lunar New Year. In 2026 it fell on Friday 25 September. Across Vietnam it is principally a children's holiday, marked by mooncakes, paper lanterns shaped as fish or stars, and lion-dance troupes in residential streets. In Hội An, where the lantern is already a year-round symbol of the town and the full-moon Lantern Festival runs every lunar month, the Mid-Autumn window brings one of the busiest lantern nights of the year.
The Hội An World Cultural Heritage Conservation Centre (Trung tâm Bảo tồn Di sản Văn hóa Thế giới Hội An) ran a four-day programme, Hội Tết Trung Thu Bính Ngọ – Hội An 2026, from 22 to 25 September, the 12th to the 15th of the lunar month. As the centre announced it on 20 September:
• A Thiên Cẩu exhibition, photographs and objects on the Thiên Cẩu (heavenly dog) dance, the Mid-Autumn tradition that is Hội An's own, 22–25 September at the Museum of Folk Culture, 33 Nguyễn Thái Học.
• A hands-on space at the same museum: making paper lanterns, decorating Thiên Cẩu heads and paper masks, and folk games (ô ăn quan, đập niêu, stilt walking), with riddles and a treasure hunt for children.
• Âm nhạc và trăng (Music and the Moon), folk songs and children's Mid-Autumn songs with a traditional ensemble, at 19:00 on 23 and 25 September at the Sa Huỳnh Culture Museum, 149 Trần Phú.
• Đêm phố cổ (Old Town Night), 18:30 to 21:00 on 24 September, the lantern night: poetry recitation, tuồng opera, folk song, traditional martial arts, Chinese chess and cờ làng, bài chòi and calligraphy, staged by local clubs to re-create Hội An street life of the early twentieth century.
• Bài chòi, part of that night, is the central-Vietnam song-and-card game that UNESCO inscribed as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2017.
• Heritage status. Mid-Autumn in Hội An has itself been a national intangible cultural heritage since Decision 228 of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, 14 February 2023; the certificate was presented in Hội An on 28 September 2023.
The atmosphere is more familial than touristic. Vietnamese families bring their children for the lanterns and the Thiên Cẩu. The mood is closer to a small-town festival than to a heritage-site spectacle, even though the lantern aesthetic is the same.
The festival itself is one night, but in 2026 the programme ran four, and the decorations were up for longer. This is how the dates fell:
22–23 September. The programme opened at the Museum of Folk Culture, with the Old Town already decorated before the heaviest crowds arrived. Music and the Moon played on the evening of the 23rd.
24 September, the Lantern Festival night. The 14th of the lunar month, the eve of Mid-Autumn, and Hội An's formal full-moon Lantern Festival (Đêm Rằm Phố Cổ): the Ancient Town closed to motor traffic in the evening and was lit by lanterns and candles, with Old Town Night from 18:30 to 21:00. This was the peak lantern evening of the Mid-Autumn window.
25 September, Mid-Autumn day itself. The holiday proper and the most family-centred night, when the children's celebration peaks even though the formal Lantern Festival fell the evening before. Music and the Moon played a second time at 19:00.
26 September. A quieter morning after the festival, a good day for the spa or a beach morning.
After the festival. The town returned to its ordinary rhythm. The monthly lantern night comes back on the 14th of each lunar month, which for the rest of 2026 means Friday 23 October, Sunday 22 November and Tuesday 22 December.
Planning a trip around this? See dates at our quiet riverside hotel on the Thu Bồn. Check availability →
Mooncakes (bánh trung thu) come in two main families: bánh nướng (baked, with a golden pastry crust) and bánh dẻo (steamed, with a soft glutinous-rice exterior). The standard fillings are lotus seed paste, mung bean, mixed nuts and dried fruit (thập cẩm), or salted egg yolk. Hội An's family bakeries and the market sell them through the eighth lunar month.
An unopened box is one of the better Vietnamese food gifts to take home. Keep it sealed and go by the date printed on it.
Mid-Autumn 2027 falls on Wednesday 15 September 2027 and the lantern night on Tuesday 14 September 2027. If Hội An repeats the 2026 pattern of the 12th to the 15th of the lunar month, the programme would run from Sunday 12 to Wednesday 15 September 2027. The 2027 programme has not been published yet; we will add it when it is. We have no measured date by which festival week sells out, so we will not quote one: if your dates are fixed, book when you fix them. Booking direct on our website saves 15% on rooms.
We do not recommend a day trip from Đà Nẵng. On lantern nights the Old Town is closed to motor traffic, so a car drops you at the edge and has to collect you there again in festival traffic. If you want the festival, sleep in Hội An.
The riverside-hotel rhythm suits Mid-Autumn week. The Old Town is 3.2 km away, about 10 minutes by bicycle (bicycles are included with every room), which gives you flexible re-entry across the busy days; the spa is an antidote to the festival's sensory load; and the quiet, dark river you come back to after the crowds is part of the experience. The festival's floating candles are released on the other side of Cẩm Nam island, in front of the Old Town, and cannot be seen from the hotel. We suggest four or five nights across the festival window, so the festival does not take over the whole trip.
The Mid-Autumn window brings one of the busiest lantern nights of the year. We are on the quiet south bank of the Thu Bồn, about 10 minutes by bicycle from the Old Town: close enough to ride into the middle of it, far enough to sleep afterwards. See our riverside rooms or read about the quiet side.
Tết Trung Thu is one of the better reasons to time a Vietnam trip around a date. In 2026 it fell on a Friday; in 2027 it falls midweek, on a Wednesday, with the lantern night on the Tuesday before.
How we dated this page: lunar dates converted with Hồ Ngọc Đức's Vietnamese lunar calendar algorithm (UTC+7) and checked against VTC News (via Vietbao, 15 September 2026) and Xem Lịch Âm, both read on 17 October 2026. One English calendar, vietnamtourism.com (updated 11 October 2026), lists Saturday 26 September 2026; the Hội An programme itself, which dated its 22–25 September run as the 12th to the 15th of the eighth lunar month, puts the 15th on 25 September. Programme from Đà Nẵng Fantasticity (21 September 2026) and Công lý (24 September 2026), both citing the Hội An World Cultural Heritage Conservation Centre. Correction, 17 October 2026: from April until today the Vietnamese, French, German and Korean versions of this page gave Thursday 17 September 2026 for the festival and shifted every night around it; the English always gave 25 September. We have also removed a herbal bath (we do not offer one), a procession of five craft guilds, a mooncake-bakery recommendation and several crowd and traffic figures that we could not verify.
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