Boracay Peak Dates for 2026 and 2027: Holy Week, Labor Day, Christmas

Sources:² is Proclamation No. 1006, signed in 2025;¹ is Proclamation No. 1427, signed on 8 September 2026. In both years Maundy Thursday and Good Friday are regular holidays and Black Saturday is a special non-working day. The Chinese New Year date is the Philippine holiday, not the mainland holiday dates.

Holy Week is the biggest domestic peak. Past counts show how large it gets:

• 2022: during Holy Week, arrivals were 21,252 on 14 April and 22,519 on 15 April, above the DOT’s 19,215 recommended daily threshold, as the tourism secretary said on 18 April 2022³.
• 2023: 5,000 to 6,000 arrivals a day through Holy Saturday, with entry requiring a booking at a DOT-accredited hotel and valid ID that year⁵.
• 2024: Boracay received “more than 13,000” visitors on Maundy Thursday and “over 7,000” on Good Friday, according to a report of April 2025⁴.
• 2025: the town of Malay expected about 59,000 visitors over the Lenten period⁴.

Sources disagree The DOT secretary called 19,215 the “recommended daily threshold” in 2022³. The Tribune’s 2025 report calls 8,500 the island’s “daily capacity”⁴. The sources do not reconcile the two. Treat neither as an entry cap; both describe how far Holy Week counts exceed what officials say the island is meant to hold.

The quiet period also changes. In 2023 the loud-music and party ban ran from 6 p.m. Good Friday to 6 a.m. Black Saturday⁵. In 2025, Memorandum Order No. 2025-33 stopped permits for parties and loud music from 6 a.m. Good Friday, 18 April, to 6 a.m. Black Saturday, 19 April, enforcing a 2009 municipal resolution⁴.

Sources disagree The 2023 and 2025 reports give different start times for the ban, 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. on Good Friday⁵⁴. The ordinance wording can change each year, and no 2027 notice exists yet. Expect the ban on Good Friday and check the town’s memorandum for the year.

Labor Day falls on Friday 1 May 2026 and on Saturday 1 May 2027²¹. The Department of Tourism said the island’s Labor Day event of that era, Laboracay, reached 14,000 visitors a day in 2019³.

The island’s dragon boat festival, the LOVEBoracay International Dragon Boat Festival, ran from 24 to 26 April 2026, with over 50 teams from 14 countries and regions and some 2,000 athletes; organizers were the Boracay Dragon Boat Association, the Philippine Dragon Boat Federation and the Malay local government¹⁰. No source cited here gives 2027 dates for it or for the Labor Day festivities.

The Department of Tourism counted 118,745 visitors to Boracay in its Christmas-break tally for December 2025, ahead of Cebu City (102,124) and Panglao (62,240)⁹. GMA reported on 23 December 2025 that more than 1.8 million people had visited Boracay that year, with 2 million expected by year-end, hotels nearly fully booked, and a full police alert on the island⁸.

Sources disagree SunStar gives Cebu City’s 102,124 for 15-28 December, yet its own text writes “Dec. 15-18” for Boracay’s 118,745⁹. Read the Boracay figure as a mid- to late-December count whose exact window is not confirmed.

In 2027, Christmas Eve is a Friday and Christmas Day a Saturday, with Rizal Day on Thursday 30 December and the last day of the year on Friday 31 December¹. That gives two consecutive weekends, 24-26 December and 31 December to 2 January. See Boracay in December for the weather.

For the baseline, the town’s tourism office recorded 1,759,592 visitors in 2022, and January 2023 brought 177,860, part of 1,040,847 arrivals between 1 January and 15 June 2023⁶. February 2025 totalled 174,966, and the local government braced for March and April 2025 as the peak⁷. No arrivals count for Holy Week 2026 appears in the sources cited here.

For every date in the table, book the room before the flight is fixed, and keep a spare day on the way out: boats stop under storm signals, as described in typhoons and cancelled boats. For Christmas, the 2025 report of hotels nearly fully booked a few days before the holiday is the one data point the sources give⁸.