Yi Peng & Loy Krathong 2026: Dates, Events and What to Know

Chiang Mai’s lantern festivals are the city’s biggest event of the year, and the one most worth planning properly. Get the timing and location right and it’s genuinely extraordinary. Get them wrong and you spend the evening in a traffic jam looking at the back of someone’s phone.

Here’s what’s happening for 2026 and how to see it well.

The 2026 dates

The festivals follow the lunar calendar, falling on the full moon of the twelfth lunar month. In 2026 the main celebrations centre on 24 November, with events running for several days either side.

What	When	Notes
Main festival night	24 November 2026	Peak crowds citywide
Surrounding celebrations	Roughly 22–26 November	Riverside, Tha Phae Gate, Old City temples
Large organised lantern releases	Various dates in that window	Ticketed, separate venues outside the city

Exact schedules for individual events are confirmed at different times, and the large commercial releases publish their own dates. We update this piece as details firm up.

Two festivals, one week

It helps to understand that these are two separate things happening together.

Loy Krathong is the national Thai festival. You buy or make a krathong — a small float of banana leaf, flowers, a candle and incense — and release it onto water as an act of letting go. It happens across Thailand.

Yi Peng is the Lanna northern festival, and it’s the one with the sky lanterns. Thousands of paper lanterns released into the night, which is the image that draws people to Chiang Mai specifically.

Chiang Mai is where both happen at once, and at scale. That’s the whole reason the city fills up.

Ticketed versus free

This is the decision that shapes your evening.

The large organised mass releases — held at venues outside the city — are the source of most of the photographs you’ve seen. They’re ticketed, expensive, sell out months ahead, and involve a coordinated release of thousands of lanterns at once. If that specific image is why you’re coming, this is the only way to get it.

The free community celebrations happen across the city: along the Ping River, around Tha Phae Gate, at temples throughout the Old City. There are parades, krathong releases, food stalls, and plenty of individual lantern releases. It costs nothing, it’s what most residents do, and it’s more atmospheric in a way that’s hard to explain until you’ve done both.

Our honest view: unless the mass-release photograph is the point of the trip, the free celebrations are the better evening.

Practical advice

A few things that make a real difference:

1. Book accommodation now. Prices in central Chiang Mai spike dramatically for this window and availability disappears. Staying slightly out and taking a Grab in is often better value.
2. Give up on driving. Roads around the moat and river close or gridlock. Walk, or take a songthaew to the edge of the closures and walk from there.
3. Go early. The riverside and Tha Phae Gate are pleasant at 6pm and shoulder-to-shoulder by 8pm.
4. Buy a krathong from a local vendor, not a hotel. It costs a fraction as much and the money goes to the right place.
5. Check what your krathong is made of. Banana leaf and natural materials, not styrofoam — the river gets cleaned up afterwards and it matters.
6. Respect the lantern rules. Sky lantern releases are restricted in some areas and around flight paths for good reason. Follow local guidance on where and when.

Flights that week

Sky lantern activity affects air traffic, and Chiang Mai International Airport adjusts schedules around the festival most years. If you’re flying in or out on those dates, check your flight status the day before rather than assuming.

If you live here

A word for residents: the temptation is to avoid the whole thing because of the crowds. Some years that’s the right call. But the temple celebrations away from the main tourist corridors — the smaller Old City wats, the neighbourhood gatherings — are quieter, warmer and genuinely lovely, and they’re where the festival actually lives.

Go to one of those instead of the riverside crush and you’ll enjoy it far more.

Want the full annual picture? — See our festivals and events calendar