Macau Obligatory Holidays 2026

Macau publishes around twenty public holidays a year, but only ten of them are “obligatory” holidays under Article 44 of the Labour Relations Law (Law No. 7/2008). Those ten are the legal floor: every employee is exempt from work on them without losing basic remuneration, and the entitlement applies from the first day of employment — there is no probation requirement. The other ten public holidays are observed by the government and most of the city, but they are not part of the private-sector minimum.

Pay works differently depending on how you are paid. For monthly-paid employees, basic remuneration already includes obligatory holidays, weekly rest days, annual leave and paid sick leave, so resting on an obligatory holiday attracts no extra payment and no deduction. For employees paid by actual time worked or actual output — daily, hourly or piece rates — basic remuneration covers only the weekly rest day, so the employer must additionally pay one day’s basic remuneration for each obligatory holiday, even when the employee rests.

An employer can require work on an obligatory holiday without the employee’s consent only in three situations set out in Article 45: facing major loss or force majeure, an unforeseeable increase in workload, or where the employee’s work is indispensable to keeping the business running. When that happens the employee is entitled to a compensatory rest day designated by the employer within three months — the date must be set at least three days in advance — which by agreement may be replaced with one day’s basic remuneration. Monthly-paid staff receive an extra day’s basic remuneration or the compensatory day; time- and output-paid staff receive the normal pay for the work done plus one day’s basic remuneration or the compensatory day.

One more rule catches people out: if a paid weekly rest period overlaps an obligatory holiday, the overlapping day counts as the obligatory holiday, and the employer must arrange the weekly rest within the following thirty days. In other words the two entitlements do not cancel each other out.

The ten public holidays that sit outside the obligatory list in 2026 are Good Friday (Apr 3), the day before Easter (Apr 4), Buddha’s Birthday (May 24), the Tung Ng or Dragon Boat Festival (Jun 19), the day following National Day (Oct 2), All Souls’ Day (Nov 2), the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (Dec 8), the Winter Solstice (Dec 22), Christmas Eve (Dec 24) and Christmas Day (Dec 25).

The split is not arbitrary — it broadly follows the Chinese-versus-Catholic line of Macau’s dual heritage. The obligatory ten are almost entirely Chinese and state occasions: New Year’s Day, the first three days of Lunar New Year, Ching Ming, Labour Day, the day after Mid-Autumn, National Day, Chong Yeung and SAR Establishment Day. Most of the Catholic feast days inherited from the Portuguese era, plus the Winter Solstice and Buddha’s Birthday, sit on the non-obligatory side.

In practice the distinction matters most in retail, hospitality and gaming, where operations run through the holidays. Many Macau employers do grant the full twenty days, and casino and hotel groups typically go further with shift premiums — but that is contract or policy, not the statutory minimum. Public-sector staff follow the government calendar, which uses the wider public-holiday list.