Mid-Autumn Falls on September 25. The Mooncake Boxes Are Already Out.

Mid-Autumn Festival lands on Friday, September 25, 2026, the fifteenth night of the eighth lunar month. Mainland China is off September 25 through 27 for the break. In Hong Kong, the statutory holiday is usually the day after the festival night; this year that falls on Saturday, September 26.

The holiday is a harvest and reunion festival. Families gather for dinner when they can, set out fruit and cakes, light lanterns in many neighborhoods, and look for the full moon. The Chang’e story that sends a woman to the moon is popular heritage lore. On an ordinary table it still means share something round, pour tea, and leave room to look up.

Mooncakes carry the date into the kitchen. The classic Cantonese cake is dense, often filled with lotus-seed or red-bean paste, sometimes a salted egg yolk, sometimes a five-nut mix with candied peel and seeds. Modern boxes add snow-skin and ice-cream styles. One cake is meant for several people, cut into wedges.

Gift tins already sit in Chinese bakeries and many Asian grocery aisles in the weeks before the festival. Far from a mainland holiday schedule, that early shelf is how September 25 arrives: a shared pastry, a pot of tea, and a night that does not need a banquet.

The same lunar full moon is Korea’s Chuseok. South Korea’s public holiday block this year runs September 24 through 26. The table there leans on songpyeon, half-moon rice cakes steamed over pine needles, plus ancestral rites and a hometown trip when the trains allow it. Japan’s Tsukimi and Vietnam’s Tết Trung Thu keep their own sweets and lantern customs under the same seasonal moon.

Friday, September 25 is the night. The boxes are already out.