A 12-month Vietnamese festival calendar with verified Gregorian dates: Vesak, Vu Lan, Mid-Autumn, Tết 2027, Hùng Kings 2027, plus every Hội An lantern night.
Linh Trần
Hội An local & culture writer
Vietnam runs on two calendars. The Gregorian one for school, work, and the National Day on 2 September. The lunar one for nearly every festival that matters culturally — Tết, Hùng Kings, Phật Đản (Vesak), Vu Lan, Tết Trung Thu, and the monthly full-moon Lantern Festival in Hội An. This post is a practical 12-month calendar from now (8 May 2026) through mid-2027, with verified Gregorian dates, what each festival actually means, and how the rhythm of a hotel shifts on those days.
Today is 2026-05-08. Festivals already past in 2026 — Tết (17 February) and Hùng Kings (26 April) — are listed in the 2027 calendar below. Festivals still upcoming this year are listed in their normal 2026 slots.
Phật Đản — Buddha's Birthday — is the next major Vietnamese festival, and it falls in the next two to three weeks.
Phật Đản marks the birth of Siddhārtha Gautama. In Vietnam, the festival follows the East Asian Buddhist convention of the 8th day of the 4th lunar month (rather than the South Asian May full-moon convention). For 2026, the Vietnam Buddhist Sangha has set the celebration period from lunar 1/4 to 14/4 — corresponding to 17 May to 31 May 2026 in the Gregorian calendar — with the official ceremony day on 24 May 2026 (lunar 8/4).
What it looks like: pagodas across Vietnam decorate with lanterns and flowers; temples hold processions and chanting; many Buddhist families eat vegetarian for the day. Hội An's pagodas — Phước Lâm, Chúc Thánh, Vạn Đức — host evening services worth attending.
At the hotel: No public-holiday closures. The town runs normally. Pagoda visits are quieter and more reverent than the lantern festivals. We can suggest a respectful evening route on request.
Hội An's defining monthly event is the Lantern Festival on the 14th day of every lunar month, the night before the full moon. Streetlights in the Old Town go off, lanterns come on, the Hoài River fills with floating candle-lanterns, and the town glows for four to five hours.
Upcoming Gregorian dates from today onward:
The September full moon (the Mid-Autumn one) and the first lantern night after Tết tend to be the busiest. May, June, July are gentler.
At the hotel: Old Town fills heavily on lantern nights. From our riverside hotel on the Thu Bồn south bank in Cẩm Nam, the lanterns are a 10-minute walk and the return after dinner is a quiet retreat away from the crowd. See our piece on sunset and moon viewing along the Thu Bồn for vantage points that work on lantern nights.
Vu Lan falls on Thursday 27 August 2026, the 15th day of the 7th lunar month.
Vu Lan is Vietnam's most important festival of remembrance and filial piety. Its rituals draw on the Buddhist Ullambana tradition and on Vietnamese ancestor veneration. Adults wear a rose pinned to the chest at pagoda services — red if their mother is still living, white if their mother has passed. Families visit graves, prepare offerings, and read the names of departed ancestors.
At the hotel: Pagodas are full. The Old Town is more reflective than festive that night. The lantern festival on 26 August (the night before) is bigger than the average month because Vu Lan visitors are already in town.
Tết Trung Thu falls on Friday 25 September 2026, the 15th day of the 8th lunar month.
In Vietnam, Tết Trung Thu is primarily a children's festival. Children carry star-shaped lanterns through the streets, lion dance troupes perform on every block, and families gather for mooncakes (bánh trung thu) — dense pastries filled with lotus seed paste, mung bean, salted egg yolk, or modern flavours like green tea and durian.
In Hội An, Trung Thu is one of the most beautiful nights of the year. Children's lanterns thread the Old Town. The Hoài River fills with floating lights. Lion dancers visit shops for blessings. The lantern night on 24 September (the day before) is busier than usual; Trung Thu itself, the 25th, is the main event.
At the hotel: Booking demand spikes. We hold mooncake at breakfast for guests staying that week. The town runs late.
*Vietnam's National Day, Quốc Khánh, falls on a fixed Gregorian date: 2 September.* It marks the date in 1945 when Hồ Chí Minh read the Declaration of Independence in Hanoi's Ba Đình Square.
National Day is a public holiday and one of the country's main domestic-travel weekends. Hội An sees a surge of Vietnamese visitors, especially from Hanoi and Saigon. The Old Town is decorated with red flags and yellow stars. Hotels often run at peak occupancy on the closest weekend.
At the hotel: Domestic-traveller-heavy. Restaurants fill earlier. Booking ahead is essential for early September.
Vietnam is not a Christian-majority country, but Christmas (Giáng Sinh) is widely celebrated as a secular festival in cities and tourist towns. Hội An's Old Town decorates lavishly. Cafés serve mulled wine. There is a slight Western-tourist seasonal peak from mid-December to early January.
Vietnamese New Year on the Gregorian calendar — Tết Dương Lịch — is observed on 1 January 2027 as a one-day public holiday. It is much smaller than Lunar New Year, which is the cultural main event.
Tết 2027 — the Year of the Horse — falls on Saturday 6 February 2027. The official Vietnamese public holiday runs 3–11 February 2027, but in practice many businesses close earlier and reopen later.
Tết is the largest festival in the Vietnamese year. Whole families travel to ancestral homes. Cities empty; villages fill. Houses are cleaned, debts settled, peach blossom and kumquat trees set up at the door. The first three days of the lunar year (in 2027: Saturday 6 February, Sunday 7 February, Monday 8 February) are the most sacred — the days when ancestors are believed to visit, and when family meals are largest.
Practical hotel impact: Domestic flights and trains book out four to six weeks in advance. Some restaurants close for a week to ten days. Some tailors and small shops close for two weeks. Hoi An itself — being a tourist town — stays more open than smaller towns, but the texture of the place shifts noticeably to a quieter, more domestic mood.
Should you visit Vietnam at Tết? It is a question we get often. The honest answer: visit during the week before Tết to see the preparation — flower markets, calligraphy stalls, the city in motion — and stay through the first day or two for the cultural experience. Stay at a hotel rather than try to find dinner; many places eat at home. Don't plan major travel on lunar 1/1 itself.
Hùng Kings' Festival 2027 falls on Friday 16 April 2027, the 10th day of the 3rd lunar month.
Giỗ Tổ Hùng Vương honours the legendary Hùng Kings, founders of the first Vietnamese state (Văn Lang) some 4,000 years ago. The main ceremony is held at the Hùng Temple complex in Phú Thọ Province, north of Hanoi. It has been a public holiday since 2007.
At the hotel: A long weekend for Vietnamese travellers. Domestic tourism in Hội An rises. International impact is small.
Phật Đản 2027 is expected to fall around 13 May 2027 (lunar 8/4). Confirm closer to date.
This is the same festival as the May 2026 entry above — moved one lunar cycle on. The pattern is the same: pagoda decorations, vegetarian meals, evening services.
A few notes for travellers planning around Vietnamese festivals:
For more on the lunar rhythm of Hội An — the moon phases, river light, why nights feel different at the 14th — see our moon page. For month-by-month weather and travel windows, see our 12-month Vietnam calendar. For the broader rhythm of Hội An's quieter side, see our Cẩm Nam, Cẩm Kim, Cẩm Thanh guide.
Festivals are how Vietnam keeps time. If you visit on a festival day, the country shows you something it doesn't show on ordinary Tuesdays. If you visit on an ordinary Tuesday, you get the country at its working baseline. Both are worth knowing.
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