How does Taiwan mark Halloween?
萬聖節
- Local date
- October 31, 2026
Halloween appears nowhere in Taiwan's Act on the Implementation of Commemorative Days and Holidays. Administered by the Ministry of the Interior, the Act names twenty commemorative days in Article 3 and twenty-eight festivals in Article 5, running from Lunar New Year and Tomb-Sweeping Day to Immigrants' Day, and Halloween is in neither list. Article 5 does leave an opening — item 28 admits "other days approved by the competent central authority" — but no ministry has used it for Halloween, and Article 6(3) states that festivals outside the enumerated ones carry no day off at all. What Taiwan has instead is municipal, and it is run frankly as shopping-district economics. Taoyuan City Government's Halloween City opened its fifth edition on 26 October 2024 at the Taoyuan Arts Plaza and the Arts Green Park and ran nine days, to 3 November. Tainan's Hai'an tourist shopping district held a two-day Halloween party in 2025 on Hai'an Road in West Central District — a costume parade, a DJ party and close to a hundred market stalls — with the city government wiring it into the Tainan Shopping Festival prize draw. Ask whether Taiwan gets the day off and the answer is a flat no; ask where Halloween happens and the answer depends on which city hall.
What is this topic?
No country on this board has made Halloween on 31 October a public holiday. What differs is how far each government goes anyway. The United States leaves it out of the federal holiday statute, yet the FDA polices costume contact lenses as medical devices and one Ohio city moves trick-or-treating to 29 October in 2026. Japan has no national rule at all and two Tokyo wards with ordinances of their own — one of whose mayors published a request that people stay away. Brazil never gave the day off, and then legislated a rival festival onto the very same date.
Sources and dates
Dates follow local time zones, calendars, and official notices. Check the source when a date is estimated or locally variable.