A long Thai holiday does not shut the transport market. It rearranges it for about ten days. Most of what an operation overpays in that period goes on the ordinary working days either side of the break, bought late.
Almost everything that sets those costs is published in advance. Who will be closed, which roads a large truck may not use and on which days, and what a driver costs on which day are all written down somewhere official. The plan comes from reading them early, not from negotiating hard in the second week of April.
A holiday is three calendars, not one
The government calendar. The Cabinet sets the official holidays and adds special ones. At its meeting on 12 November 2024 it added three: Monday 2 June 2025, Monday 11 August 2025 and Friday 2 January 2026. The last of those was fixed 416 days ahead. The same resolution then asked state enterprises, the Bank of Thailand and the Ministry of Labour to consider whether their own sectors should follow. A special government holiday does not, on its own, close a private company.
Each employer's calendar. Under Section 29 of the Labour Protection Act, every employer must announce its traditional holidays to its staff in advance: at least thirteen days a year, including National Labour Day, chosen by considering the official holidays, religious holidays and local custom. Your customer's receiving dock follows that announcement, not the Cabinet's. So does your carrier's driver roster, and so does your own warehouse.
The road calendar. For both Songkran and New Year in the past year, the chief traffic officer for the Kingdom published a regulation in the Royal Gazette barring large trucks from named stretches of highway on named days. It is the only one of the three that directly changes what a truck can do, and it comes out last.
The first practical step follows from the second calendar. Every customer that employs people already has a written holiday announcement for the year, because the law requires one. Ask your largest customers for theirs, and put their closed days on your plan before anyone books a truck.
The road calendar: seven sections, six days
The Songkran 2026 regulation was signed on 19 March and published on 26 March. It barred trucks of ten wheels and over, in both directions, from Friday 10 to Sunday 12 April and from Tuesday 14 to Thursday 16 April, on these seven sections.
| Road | Kilometre markers | Length | Area |
|---|---|---|---|
| Highway 1, Phahonyothin | 99+800 to 106+150 | 7 km | Saraburi |
| Highway 1, Phahonyothin | 332 to 347 | 15 km | Nakhon Sawan |
| Highway 2, Mittraphap | 15+600 to 102 | 87 km | Saraburi to Nakhon Ratchasima |
| Highway 35, Rama II | 15 to 53 | 38 km | Samut Sakhon |
| Highway 117 | 0+000 to 7 | 7 km | Nakhon Sawan |
| Highway 304 | 165 to 222 | 57 km | Prachinburi to Nakhon Ratchasima |
| Highway 348 | 71 to 83 | 12 km | Sa Kaeo to Buriram |
The New Year regulation before it was signed on 11 December 2025 and published on 17 December. It listed the same seven sections, with the same kilometre markers, and barred the same vehicles on Tuesday 30 and Wednesday 31 December and from Friday 2 to Sunday 4 January.
Five things in those two documents matter for planning.
- It is published about two weeks ahead, but it repeated. Fifteen days' notice for Songkran, thirteen for New Year. That is too late to plan from and early enough to check against. Two holidays four months apart used an identical list, so the sensible working assumption is the last list, confirmed when the new one appears.
- The ban days are the travel days, not the main holiday. Monday 13 April, the first day of Songkran, was not a ban day. Neither was Thursday 1 January. The regulation gives dates and no time of day, so a ban day is lost on that section for the whole day.
- It covers ten wheels and over. A six-wheel truck is outside it.
- It is short. The seven sections add up to 223 kilometres. A lane that touches none of them is not affected at all, and none of them is on Motorway 7 or the other main roads between Bangkok and the Eastern Seaboard. The two longest, 87 kilometres of Highway 2 and 57 kilometres of Highway 304, both run towards Nakhon Ratchasima, so any ten-wheel lane between central Thailand and the northeast should assume it is affected until it has checked.
- Exemptions arrive late and narrow. A second Songkran regulation, published on 8 April, two days before the ban began, let fuel tankers travel in every province around the clock until 30 April. It was written for one kind of load. Do not plan on one being written for yours.
What each kind of day costs, and why
Split the holiday period into three kinds of day. The reasons they cost more are different, and so are the answers.
The working days before the break. In law these are ordinary days, and the carrier pays its drivers the ordinary rate. What makes them expensive is demand: work that would have moved during the break is pulled into them. A premium on these days has no cost behind it inside the carrier. It is the price of booking late into a crowded week, which makes it the most avoidable premium of the three. A peak that comes back every year is the one kind of peak that can be bought at an agreed rate instead of a spot rate, because both sides can see it coming.
The restricted days. Here the cost depends on the lane. On a lane crossing one of the seven sections, a ten-wheel trip either moves to another day, splits into smaller vehicles, or takes a longer road, and each of those has a price you can work out months ahead. On every other lane these are normal days, and a holiday premium quoted for them is a price for the date, not for the road.
The holidays themselves. Here there is a real cost, and the law sets it.
What a driver costs on the holiday itself
Four provisions decide it for a carrier's employed drivers, where Songkran is one of the carrier's announced holidays.
- Section 56 requires wages to be paid for traditional holidays. The exception for staff paid by the day or the hour applies only to the weekly rest day, not to traditional holidays, so every employed driver is paid for Songkran whether or not they drive.
- Section 62 requires an employer who has an employee work on a holiday to pay, on top of that, at least one more times the hourly rate for every hour worked. An eight-hour Songkran day therefore costs at least twice an ordinary day's wage.
- Ministerial Regulation No. 12, clause 6 sets overtime in land transport work, including overtime on a holiday, at one times the hourly rate unless the employer agrees to pay the ordinary overtime rates. Hours past the normal day on Songkran do not multiply again.
- Section 29, fourth paragraph, read with Ministerial Regulation No. 4. Where the work is of a kind named in that regulation, the employer may agree with the employee on another day off in place of the traditional holiday, or pay holiday pay instead. Transport work is named. A driver on a substitute-day agreement drives Songkran as an ordinary day, at ordinary pay.
That gives a buyer three things to use.
- A holiday premium has a ceiling you can work out. If driver wages are 15 per cent of a trip price, doubling them for one day explains about 15 per cent more for that day. Use your own estimate of the share. The point is that the wage argument can never be larger than the wage share.
- It applies to the holiday, not to the days around it. A holiday rate quoted for 8 or 9 April has no wage behind it.
- It depends on the roster. Ask whether the drivers on your work that week are on holiday pay or on substitute days, because the answer changes what a holiday rate is paying for. These rules are about employed drivers. An owner-operator hired as a subcontractor is paid for the trip rather than a wage, so the price of that truck on a holiday is simply what it takes to get it.
Move the work, or pay for the day
Most of the avoidable premium sits on the days before the break, and the obvious answer is to move work a week earlier. That is not free either. Whoever holds the stock for the extra week pays to hold it. The useful question is which loads to move.
For one load:
- Cost of moving it earlier = value of the load × annual carrying rate × days earlier ÷ 365
- Cost of not moving it = the premium for shipping on the crowded day
Take a carrying rate of 20 per cent a year, a move of 7 days, and a premium of 2,500 baht a load. Substitute your own three numbers.
| Value of the load | Cost of holding it 7 days longer |
|---|---|
| 200,000 baht | 767 baht |
| 500,000 baht | 1,918 baht |
| 1,000,000 baht | 3,836 baht |
| 2,000,000 baht | 7,671 baht |
The break-even value is 2,500 × 365 ÷ (0.20 × 7), about 652,000 baht. Below it, moving the load a week early is cheaper than paying the premium. Above it, paying the premium is cheaper.
That runs against instinct. The natural move is to pull the most important orders forward first, and important often means valuable, which is exactly where holding stock costs the most. The loads to pull forward are the low-value, bulky ones, which cost little to hold and still fill a truck.
Two cautions. Delivering early moves the holding cost to the customer, so moving a load is a commercial conversation rather than a scheduling one, and the customer's floor space often runs out before the arithmetic does. And moving work earlier only helps if the earlier days have room in them. Count vehicle-days by working day, not by month: April loses days to the holiday while the ordinary day stays as busy as it was, which is the trap in planning peaks by the month.
On a restricted lane, price the three options now
For each ten-wheel lane that crosses one of the seven sections, write down three costs well before April.
- Move the trip off the ban days. The cost is the holding arithmetic above, or a delivery date the customer has to accept.
- Split it into vehicles under ten wheels. Two smaller loads usually mean two vehicle-days instead of one. Check that the weight and the volume actually divide before assuming they do.
- Take a road outside the seven sections. The cost is extra distance, extra driving time, and a longer day for the driver under the hours rules.
The cheapest of the three becomes the plan for that lane, and the plan goes to the carrier with the booking.
Put it in writing before the regulation exists
The next two long holidays are already on the calendar. New Year's Eve and New Year's Day fall on Thursday 31 December 2026 and Friday 1 January 2027. Songkran 2027 runs from Tuesday 13 to Thursday 15 April, which leaves Monday 12 and Friday 16 April as single working days between the holiday and a weekend. Chakri Day on Tuesday 6 April leaves Monday 5 April the same way. Friday 2 January 2026 was exactly that kind of day, and it became a special government holiday. On days like these, check each customer's own announcement rather than assuming either way.
- Now. Collect your customers' 2027 holiday announcements as they are issued. Mark every single working day trapped between a holiday and a weekend as uncertain until each customer confirms it.
- Two to three months before each holiday. Agree in writing with each carrier: the vehicles and dates you need, which dates carry a holiday rate and what it is, and whether the drivers on your work are on holiday pay or substitute days. Anything left to the final week is short-notice work, with the costs set out in how much notice a truck booking needs.
- When the regulation is published, about two weeks before. Check the list against your lanes. If it matches the last one, nothing changes. If a section has been added, rerun the three options for that lane only.
- The first two working days after the break. Plan them as a second, smaller peak. Orders that could not be placed during the holiday arrive together, and a ten-wheel vehicle that detoured around a section on the return days comes back into the pool late.
What to do differently this year
- Ask your largest customers for their written 2027 holiday announcements, and plan from those rather than from the government list.
- Treat any special government holiday as a question for each customer, not an answer.
- Check every ten-wheel lane against the seven sections now, using the 2026 list, and cost the three options for any lane that crosses one.
- Pull low-value, bulky loads forward. Above your own break-even value, ship on the day and pay for it.
- Challenge holiday rates quoted for working days. On the holiday itself, accept a premium only as far as the driver wage share explains it, and ask how the drivers are rostered.
- Agree holiday capacity and rates in writing months ahead, not in the fortnight after the regulation appears.