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Business Days in May 2027 for China

May 2027 has 18 working days under the Chinese national holiday calendar. May 2027 contains 3 Chinese national holidays on weekdays. The month covers 31 calendar days, of which 10 are Saturday and Sunday. That count drives invoice cycles, payroll runs, and any contract that defines deadlines as a number of working days in China.

working days

18

Calendar Days

31

Weekend Days

10

public holidays

3

Work Weeks

3.6

May 2027 business day calendar
SunMonTueWedThuFriSat
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Labour Day (day 1)
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Labour Day (day 2)
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Labour Day (day 3)
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Labour Day (day 4)
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Labour Day (day 5)
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public holidays in May 2027

Mon, May 3Labour Day (day 3)
Tue, May 4Labour Day (day 4)
Wed, May 5Labour Day (day 5)

China May deadlines

Labour Day is two statutory days, 1 and 2 May, since State Council Order No. 795 amended article 2 of the Public Holiday Measures with effect from 1 January 2025; the notice for 2025 records that the change added one day. The notice for 2026 arranged five days off, 1 to 5 May 2026, and made Saturday 9 May 2026 a working day. The VAT return and the Enterprise Income Tax prepayment for a period that ended in April are due within 15 days of the period ending, which is 15 May. Statutory rest days can move that date: in its notice for 2026 the State Taxation Administration applied article 109 of the implementing rules of the Tax Collection Administration Law, under which a last day that is a statutory rest day gives way to the day after the rest and three or more consecutive rest days inside the period extend it by those days. 31 May ends the five months that article 54 of the Enterprise Income Tax Law gives for the annual return and final settlement of a tax year, which article 53 fixes as the calendar year. The annual settlement of individual income tax on comprehensive income, which article 5 of State Taxation Administration Order No. 57 of 2025 opens on 1 March and closes on 30 June, runs through the whole of May.

Sources for these dates

Checked October 14, 2026. All sources

Day-of-Week Distribution

The count of each weekday in May 2027. Useful for shift scheduling, weekly recurring billing, and any rota that depends on a specific day of the week landing in-month.

DayCount
Monday5
Tuesday4
Wednesday4
Thursday4
Friday4
Saturday5
Sunday5

China reporting cycles and business-day rules

Chinese tax filing periods are not all monthly. Article 30 of the VAT Law (增值税法, in force since 1 January 2026) sets tax periods of ten days, fifteen days, one month or one quarter, fixed for each taxpayer by its tax authority; a taxpayer on a monthly or quarterly period files and pays within 15 days of the period ending. Article 43 of the Law's implementing regulations opens the quarterly period to small-scale taxpayers, to banks, finance companies, trust companies and credit cooperatives among general taxpayers, and to other taxpayers determined by the State Council's tax and finance authorities. Enterprise Income Tax (企业所得税) is prepaid monthly or quarterly as the tax authority determines (article 127 of the implementing regulations as revised in 2024), with the prepayment return due within 15 days of the month or quarter ending and the annual return and final settlement within five months of the year ending (article 54 of the Enterprise Income Tax Law). The annual settlement of individual income tax on comprehensive income is done between 1 March and 30 June of the following year (article 5 of State Taxation Administration Order No. 57 of 2025). A rest day can move these dates: under article 109 of the implementing rules of the Tax Collection Administration Law, a period whose last day is a statutory rest day ends on the day after the rest, and a period containing three or more consecutive statutory rest days is extended by those days. For 2026 the General Office of the State Taxation Administration applied that article to the year's holiday notice and fixed each month's filing deadline in its notice of 10 December 2025 (税总办征科函〔2025〕64号). Payment systems keep their own calendars: the People's Bank of China sets the hours of the High Value Payment System (大额支付系统), with separate arrangements for weekends and statutory holidays, and the operator of CIPS, the cross-border renminbi payment system, publishes that system's working calendar (article 15 of its Business Rules, in force since 1 February 2026). Holidays come in two layers. Article 2 of the State Council's holiday Measures (全国年节及纪念日放假办法) gives all citizens thirteen days off across the year, and for each of the years 2024 to 2026 the General Office of the State Council issued a notice with that year's arrangement: the days taken off and the Saturdays and Sundays worked in exchange. Where a year of this site's China data names no notice, its dates are this site's own projections, to be checked against that year's notice once it is issued.

Sources for these rules

Checked October 13, 2026. All sources

May 2027 working days compared by country

Working-day counts vary across countries because each country observes its own public holidays. The table below shows May 2027 under 11 of the site's 25 holiday calendars; the summary above gives China's own count.

CountryBusiness DaysHolidays this month
🇺🇸United States20Memorial Day
🇬🇧United Kingdom19Early May Bank Holiday, Spring Bank Holiday
🇨🇦Canada20Victoria Day
🇦🇺Australia21None
🇮🇳India19Eid ul-Adha, Buddha Purnima
🇵🇭Philippines20Eid'l Adha (approximate)
🇫🇷France19Ascension, Lundi de Pentecôte
🇩🇪Germany19Christi Himmelfahrt, Pfingstmontag
🇯🇵Japan18Constitution Memorial Day, Greenery Day, Children's Day
🇲🇽Mexico21None
🇸🇬Singapore19Hari Raya Haji, Vesak Day

How May 2027 compares year over year

May 2026 also had 18 working days, so the working capacity is unchanged year over year. On the surrounding months, April 2027 has 20 working days and June 2027 has 19. Looking forward, May 2028 has 15 working days under the same Chinese national holiday calendar.

Using this calculator in China

The 18-day count for May 2027 is this calculator's count of business days in the month: use it to see how many of them fall inside a filing period. A VAT taxpayer whose tax period is a month or a quarter files and pays within 15 days of the period ending (article 30 of the VAT Law, 增值税法, in force since 1 January 2026), and an enterprise files its monthly or quarterly prepayment return for Enterprise Income Tax (企业所得税) within 15 days of the month or quarter ending (article 54 of the Enterprise Income Tax Law). A company listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange discloses its annual report within four months of the financial year ending, its half-year report within two months of the half-year ending, and its quarterly reports within one month of the first three and the first nine months ending (rule 5.2.2 of the exchange's Stock Listing Rules, April 2026 revision).

Sources for these rules

Checked October 13, 2026. All sources

How May 2027 is shaped

The headline count answers how many working days May 2027 contains. It does not answer where they sit, and for anything measured in consecutive days rather than cumulative days that second question is the binding one. What follows is derived entirely from the Chinese national holiday calendar and a working week that treats Saturday and Sunday as the weekend, with no assumption about how any particular obligation behaves.

The middle month of the second quarter

May runs 31 days and sits in the middle of Q2, the position with neither a quarter opening nor a quarter close to anchor it. It shares its weekday alignment with January in a common year, so the two months carry the same underlying structure twelve months apart. A 31-day month always carries three weekdays five times, which is what makes its working-day count the most sensitive of the four month lengths to where it starts.

In May 2027 that comes to 18 working days across 31 calendar days, against 20 in April 2027 and 19 in June 2027.

The month opens across a weekend

The 1st of May is a Saturday, a weekend day under the Chinese national calendar, whose week runs against a Saturday and Sunday weekend. Nothing that settles on working days moves on it. A month that opens this way loses its first working day to the calendar before any holiday is counted, and monthly cycles keyed to the 1st all resolve forward to the same date, which concentrates them.

The month's first working day is Thursday, May 6, and May 2027 carries 18 working days in total.

Five working stretches

May splits into five working stretches. That is the ordinary shape of a month whose only interruptions are its weekends, and it means the month's internal boundaries are all predictable a year in advance: nothing here depends on a holiday date moving.

The working days of May 2027 arrive in stretches of 2, 5, 5, 5, and 1 day. The longest unbroken stretch runs five days, from May 10 to May 14. A task needing more consecutive working days than that cannot be completed inside a single stretch, whatever the month's total looks like.

The month is front-loaded. It opens with two consecutive days and closes with one, so capacity thins toward the end. Work deferred out of the first stretch arrives in a shorter one, which is how a schedule that looked comfortable in week one stops fitting.

Three weekdays occur five times

A 31-day month contains four full seven-day cycles and three days over, so exactly three weekdays occur five times and the other four occur four times. In May 2027 the three are Sunday, Monday, and Saturday. Which three it is follows entirely from the weekday the month opens on, which is why the working-day count of a 31-day month moves year to year even when its holidays do not.

Only Monday among them is a working day, so part of the surplus is absorbed by the Saturday and Sunday weekend and never reaches the working total. That split is why two months of the same length can carry different working-day counts without any holiday being involved.

A month with several closures

May 2027 carries three Chinese national closures on working days: Labour Day (day 3) on May 3, Labour Day (day 4) on May 4, and Labour Day (day 5) on May 5. At this density the month's working-day total stops being a useful planning number on its own, because the days that remain are cut into short stretches rather than distributed evenly.

The run structure above is the figure to plan against. Where several closures cluster, a month can hold a respectable total and still offer no stretch long enough for a multi-day deliverable, and only the run lengths show that.

The closure arrives before any working day has passed, so May is interrupted before it has started and the whole of its 18 remaining working days sit after the break.

The closures around this month

May 2027 carries three Chinese national closures of its own, and the months on either side add their own. Where a deadline sits close to a month boundary, the closure that moves it is as likely to be outside the month as inside it.

Looking outside the month, the last was Qingming Festival (day 3) on April 6, 2027, 25 calendar days before May began and the next is Dragon Boat Festival (day 1) (approximate) on June 9, 2027, 9 calendar days after it ends.

Across the whole of 2027 the Chinese national calendar puts 22 closures on working days, of which three fall in May. That ratio, rather than the raw count, is what tells you whether a month is carrying more than its share of the year's downtime.

The month ends where a week begins

The final calendar day of May 2027 is the first working day of a week. A single working day of that week belongs to May and the rest to the month following, which is the least amount of closing capacity a month can have. Anything that must be done "in the last week" of May really has to be done before the preceding weekend.

The last working day of May 2027 is Monday, May 31. Counting back from there, the third-to-last is Thursday, May 27, four calendar days before the month closes.

The middle month of the quarter

May is the middle month of Q2. Middle months carry the least visibility in a quarterly cycle: the opening month sets expectations and the closing month is where they are settled, so a shortfall here is the one most likely to be noticed late.

Across the whole quarter there are 57 working days, of which 18 fall in May. The other two months carry April 2027 with 20 and June 2027 with 19. It is the smallest of the three, so the quarter's capacity sits mostly in the other two months and a plan that spreads work evenly across the quarter will over-commit May.

The week's second working day is the scarcest

The second working day of the week is the one May gives least often. Weekly cycles that run one day behind the start of the week, which is where most reporting handovers sit, lose an occurrence relative to the rest.

Counted as worked rather than as occurring, May 2027 gives Monday 4, Tuesday 3, Wednesday 3, Thursday 4, and Friday 4. A weekly commitment pinned to a particular weekday fires that many times in the month, which is the number a rota needs and not the one the calendar shows.

Toward the short end of the year

May sits among the shorter working months of 2027 under the Chinese national calendar. A month reaches this end of the ranking either by being short or by absorbing closures, and the two produce the same headline number while behaving differently: a closure fragments the month, a shorter calendar does not.

2027 carries 239 working days in total under the Chinese national calendar. The longest month of the year is March 2027 with 23 and the shortest is February 2027 with 15, a spread of 8. May ranks 10th of the twelve with 18.

Inside one of the year's denser months

May 2027 carries more than one Chinese national closure, which puts it among the year's denser months. Closures are never spread evenly across a year, so a month's own count says as much about the country's calendar as about the month.

Across 2027 the Chinese national closures fall 6 in Q1, 8 in Q2, 3 in Q3, and 5 in Q4. A further seven holidays land on the Saturday and Sunday weekend and cost no working day at all, which is why a country's holiday count and its working-day loss are different numbers.

The longest uninterrupted run in the 2027 calendar sits between June 11, 2027 and September 15, 2027, 96 calendar days with no Chinese national closure in between. Stretches like that are where multi-week work belongs, and they move from year to year whenever a movable holiday does.

Where the month sits in the year's closure pattern

Closures are not spread evenly across a calendar year. They cluster around fixed anniversaries and around whichever lunar or movable feasts a jurisdiction observes, so two adjacent months can carry very different loads, and the Chinese national calendar is no exception.

2027 opens its Chinese national closures with New Year's Day on January 1, 2027 and ends them with National Day (day 7) on October 7, 2027. The densest month of the year is February 2027 with five closures on working days.

The same count as last year

May 2027 and May 2026 carry the same number of working days, 18 in each. An unchanged total does not mean an unchanged month: the working days sit on different dates and break into different stretches, so a schedule copied forward date by date will not line up even though the capacity has not moved.

May opens 2026 on a Friday, 2027 on a Saturday, and 2028 on a Monday. That movement, one weekday in a common year and two after a leap day, is what makes the three counts differ. The number of closures on working days is the same in both years, so the whole of any difference comes from weekday alignment. Looking ahead, May 2028 carries 15 working days.

Anchor dates that do not fall on working days

Three of the common monthly anchor dates in May 2027 land on a day this calendar does not work. A month with this many blocked anchors pushes several cycles onto the same few dates, because each of them resolves forward to the next available working day and those tend to be shared.

DateWeekdayStatus under the Chinese national calendarFirst working day on or after
May 1SaturdayClosed: Labour Day (day 1)May 6, 2027
May 5WednesdayClosed: Labour Day (day 5)May 6, 2027
May 10MondayWorking dayMay 10
May 15SaturdayWeekendMay 17, 2027
May 20ThursdayWorking dayMay 20
May 25TuesdayWorking dayMay 25
May 31MondayWorking dayMay 31

The final column is arithmetic, not a legal conclusion. Whether an obligation actually moves when its date is not a working day depends on the instrument that sets it, and this site does not assume a shift rule for any jurisdiction. Where a rule is known it is stated in the holiday data methodology and on the country page it applies to.

Net terms dated in May 2027

An invoice dated the 1st of May on calendar-day Net 30 terms comes due on May 31, 2027, a working day under the Chinese national calendar. Terms counted in calendar days move independently of the working week, so the same term written on two consecutive months can settle cleanly in one and roll across a closure in the other.

Invoice dateNet 30, calendar daysNet 60, calendar days
Dated May 1May 31, 2027June 30, 2027
Dated May 15June 14, 2027July 14, 2027
Dated May 31June 30, 2027July 30, 2027

Net 30 and Net 60 are commercial conventions rather than statutory periods, and both are counted here in calendar days, which is how they are almost always written. Where a contract counts in working days instead, use the between-dates calculator with the China calendar selected, because the two produce different dates whenever a closure falls inside the term.

Sources and verification

Official source: State Council of the People's Republic of China (gov.cn) (opens in a new tab)

Cross-checked against this source on October 7, 2026.

See all official sources →

For informational purposes only

This calculator provides general estimates based on business day counting rules. It does not constitute legal advice. Deadlines in legal, regulatory, or contractual matters may be subject to jurisdiction-specific rules, court orders, or statutory exceptions. Always verify critical deadlines with a qualified professional.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many business days are in May 2027 under the Chinese national holiday calendar?
May 2027 has 18 working days under the Chinese national holiday calendar. The month spans 31 calendar days, of which 10 fall on a weekend and 3 are Chinese national holidays that land on a weekday. The remaining 18 weekdays are countable as working days for invoicing, deadline tracking, and contract math.
Which China holidays affect May 2027?
May 2027 contains 3 Chinese national holidays: Labour Day (day 3) on Monday, May 3; Labour Day (day 4) on Tuesday, May 4; Labour Day (day 5) on Wednesday, May 5. The calculator skips each of them. Regional or industry-specific closures may add further non-working days for narrower contract definitions; layer them into the calculator's Advanced options if needed.
Why do Chinese Golden Week closures shift adjacent weekends?
The statutory days off and each year's closure are set by two different instruments, and the weekend working days come from the second. Article 2 of the State Council's holiday Measures (全国年节及纪念日放假办法), as revised by State Council Order No. 795 with effect from 1 January 2025, gives all citizens thirteen days off across the year: one for New Year's Day, four for Spring Festival, one for the Qingming Festival, two for Labour Day, one for the Dragon Boat Festival, one for the Mid-Autumn Festival and three for National Day. Article 7 allows those days to be arranged into longer breaks by moving rest days. For each of the years 2024 to 2026 the General Office of the State Council issued a notice with that year's arrangement: the days taken off and the Saturdays and Sundays worked in exchange (上班). This calculator counts Monday to Friday and leaves out the closure dates in its data. It never counts a Saturday or Sunday, so it does not count the weekend days a notice turns into working days, and a span that contains one of them comes out one business day short of a calendar that follows the notice. For 2026 the Shanghai Stock Exchange's closing schedule lists each make-up day of that year's notice as a weekend closure (周末休市).
Are Hong Kong and Macau covered by this Chinese calendar?
No. The China data covers the days off arranged under the State Council's holiday Measures (全国年节及纪念日放假办法); Hong Kong and Macau publish holiday lists of their own, and this calculator has no calendar for either. Hong Kong has two lists. The Government's gazetted list of general holidays has 17 dated days for 2026 and 17 for 2027, in addition to every Sunday. The Employment Ordinance (Cap. 57) entitles an employee to statutory holidays: 15 since Easter Monday was added on 1 January 2026, 16 from 2028 with Good Friday and 17 from 2030 with the day following Good Friday. The Government of Macau lists 20 public holidays under Decree Law No. 60/2000 for 2026 and 20 for 2027, ten of them in each year marked as obligatory holidays under article 44 of Law No. 7/2008. For a count in Hong Kong or Macau, add the dates under Advanced options as custom dates to exclude.
Why does the business-day count vary year to year?
Two things shift the monthly count for China. First, the day of the week the first of the month lands on changes the count of each weekday. Second, Chinese national holidays anchored to a fixed date shift their weekday across years. Some years a fixed-date holiday lands on a weekend; some countries shift the observance to an adjacent weekday and some absorb it into the weekend. May 2026 also had 18 working days, so the working capacity is unchanged year over year.
When is the last working day of May 2027?
The last working day of May 2027 under the Chinese national calendar is Monday, May 31. The month's last calendar day is Monday, May 31, so the two are the same date this year. Counting back, the third-to-last working day is Thursday, May 27.
How many working days in a row does May 2027 offer?
May 2027 has 18 working days in total, but they do not run consecutively. They arrive in five stretches of 2, 5, 5, 5, and 1 day, so the longest unbroken run is five days, from May 10 to May 14. No working day in the month is isolated between two closures.

Sources for these rules

Checked October 13, 2026. All sources

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