Hoi An lantern festival dates: every full moon to 2027

Below are the next fifteen nights, through December 2027, and what's planned for the first Hoi An International Lantern Festival this December.

Hoi An lantern nights, October 2026 to December 2027

We found no year-ahead list from Hoi An, so we worked these out ourselves. Each lunar month starts on the day of the new moon in Vietnam time, and the lantern night is thirteen days later. We then checked the method against dates officials have already given. A report credited to Da Nang's tourism office put the September 2026 night on 24 September, the 14th of the 8th month, and the government's Tet notice puts the first day of the Year of the Goat on 6 February 2027. Our method gives both.

What happens on a lantern night

The city's culture centre describes it plainly: along the streets, lantern light takes over from electric light, and the heart of the old town turns off its white lights altogether. Visitors come to float flower lanterns on the Hoai River for peace and luck, and many come back to Hoi An specifically to catch "Đêm phố cổ" again. The ancient town page covers the streets themselves, and the ticket guide covers what you pay to go inside the old houses.

Here's what one of those nights looked like on the 15th night of the first lunar month in 2011, from a report the town's heritage office republished. Thousands of Vietnamese and foreign visitors flocked to the old quarter to float flower garlands on the Hoai River. Two foreign tourists posed for a photo at a lantern stall on Nguyen Phuc Tan Street, an engaged couple walked among the coloured lanterns, and an Australian couple stopped to buy a flower garland of their own. That evening was a special first-month festival rather than an ordinary monthly night, but it's the same river and the same garlands. (Hoi An World Heritage)

The first Hoi An International Lantern Festival, 3 to 6 December 2026

Da Nang's city government has planned Hoi An's first international lantern festival for the first week of December, under the theme "Hoi An, Colours of Heritage". It's timed for the anniversary of the old town's UNESCO listing on 4 December 1999. What the official plan and the city's tourism office list:

The festival doesn't land on a monthly lantern night: 3 to 6 December falls late in the 10th lunar month, and the December lantern night is 22 December. If you can only make one trip, the useful overlap is later. With the installations planned to stay up into February, the lantern nights of 22 December, 21 January and 19 February should get both the dimmed old town and the festival displays. We didn't find a ticket price or an hour-by-hour programme in what's been published so far.

Our take

Pick the lantern night first and build the Hoi An days around it, not the other way round. Get to Hoi An a day early, see the streets in daylight, and be at the river before dark, because the crowd on a lantern night runs to thousands. For late 2026, 23 October is still in the wet season, so check the month-by-month weather and our October guide for central Vietnam before you commit. If December suits you better, go for the festival week or the 22 December night and accept that you'll get one, not both, unless you stay three weeks. February's 19th is the one night that should combine everything, but it's also two weeks after Tet, still inside the rail and airline Tet peak, so book transport early.

How we checked this

The description of the lantern night comes from Hoi An's culture and sports centre, published on the city's creative-city site. The festival details come from Da Nang's tourism promotion centre and from Báo Đà Nẵng, Tuổi Trẻ and Dân tộc và Phát triển reports on the city's plan, all from late July to September 2026. The dates in the first table are our own calculation, checked against the two official dates named above. The full list of sources is in our sources file.

What we could not confirm

None of the 2027 dates come from Hoi An itself, because we found no year-ahead list from the city. The festival's programme by hour, any ticket price for the festival spaces, and whether the December lantern night will add anything special weren't in the plan as reported. We'll update this when Hoi An announces them.

Photo (cover): Christophe95 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0