Holidays in South Korea

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in South Korea

Twenty-Eight Strikes to Close the Gates

Long before mechanical clocks reached the Korean peninsula, the Joseon capital of Hanyang, now Seoul, told its half a million residents when to move and when to stay put through a single bronze bell. Bosingak, first hung in the fifth year of King Taejo's reign in 1396, sat at the crossroads of the walled city and governed the opening and closing of its eight gates. At around four in the morning the bell was struck thirty-three times in a ritual called paru, a number drawn from the thirty-three heavens of Buddhist cosmology, releasing the city from its overnight curfew. At roughly ten at night it was struck twenty-eight times for injeong, a number tied to the twenty-eight constellations that ancient astronomers used to divide the sky, after which the gates shut and anyone caught in the streets without official business risked arrest.

The bell survived fires, foreign invasions and the collapse of the dynasty that built it, and picked up its present name only in 1895, under Emperor Gojong, when the schedule itself had already begun shifting toward the round hours of a modern clock rather than the old watch divisions. Its curfew function ended with Joseon rule, but the bell was given a new civic purpose in 1953, only months after the Korean War's armistice, when authorities revived the practice of ringing it thirty-three times at midnight on New Year's Eve, a ceremony now drawing crowds of over a hundred thousand to Jongno each 31 December and, for one night a year, closing the nearest subway station simply to manage the numbers.

Seven Years, Two Reversals

Korea's modern standard time has changed direction twice, and neither change was really about longitude. In 1908 the Korean Empire fixed its legal time to the 127.5th meridian east, an offset of eight and a half hours from Greenwich that closely tracked the peninsula's own geographic position. That lasted only until Japan's colonial government, ruling Korea outright from 1910, moved the clock to the 135th meridian in 1912 to align it with Japan Standard Time, nine hours ahead of Greenwich.

After liberation, the arrangement briefly reversed itself for reasons that had little to do with practicality and everything to do with symbolism. In March 1954, the government of President Syngman Rhee restored the pre-colonial 127.5-degree meridian, an explicit repudiation of a time zone imposed by a departed occupier, even though it meant Korea now differed by half an hour from Japan and from most of its trading and military partners. The arrangement held for seven years until the military government that seized power under Park Chung-hee in 1961 reversed it again that August, citing the practical costs of coordinating with the United States forces stationed in Korea and with Japan, restoring the 135-degree meridian that the country has kept ever since. In between, for a few months in 1988, Seoul briefly observed daylight saving time during the Summer Olympics, largely so that daytime events could air live during prime time on the American East Coast.

The Thirty-Minute Gap Between Brothers

For nearly three years, the two Koreas kept different clocks despite lying on almost exactly the same line of longitude. In August 2015, to mark the seventieth anniversary of liberation from Japanese rule, North Korea introduced what it called Pyongyang Time, setting its clocks back thirty minutes to the old 127.5-degree meridian and framing the move explicitly as a rejection of the time zone Japan had imposed in 1912, a zone South Korea had itself briefly abandoned for the same reason more than sixty years earlier.

The half-hour gap created small but real friction, complicating scheduling for the rare cross-border contacts that still occurred, from family reunions at Mount Kumgang to communications through the liaison office at the shared border. It ended almost as suddenly as it began: in the run-up to the 2018 inter-Korean summit, North Korea announced it would abandon Pyongyang Time and realign with the South, a gesture explicitly framed around Korean unity rather than any change in the underlying politics. Clocks in Pyongyang moved forward again on 5 May 2018, and for the first time since the division of the peninsula, both Koreas have kept the exact same time since.

Everyone Woke Up a Year Younger

Until the summer of 2023, a newborn in South Korea was already considered one year old on the day of birth, and gained a further year not on their own birthday but collectively, along with everyone else in the country, at midnight on New Year's Day. Combined with a separate "counting age" used in some legal contexts and the ordinary birthday-based international age used in hospitals and passports, South Koreans routinely carried three different ages at once, a source of enough everyday confusion and legal dispute that the National Assembly voted in December 2022 to eliminate two of them.

The law took effect on 28 June 2023, and more than fifty million people became, on paper, one or two years younger overnight. International age became the default for contracts, healthcare and most administrative purposes, though the older "counting age," under which everyone still turns a year older on 1 January rather than on their birthday, was deliberately kept in place for a handful of matters, including military conscription, school enrolment and the legal age for drinking and smoking. A government survey taken beforehand found that more than eighty-six percent of South Koreans already planned to use their new, younger international age in everyday conversation, suggesting the law was less a behavioural shift than a formal catching-up with habits already underway.

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