2026 Korea Market Calendar: Trading Hours, Holidays and Key Dates

A Global Investor’s Guide — updated July 29, 2026.

Updated July 29, 2026: Rewrote the trading-hours section. Korean stocks are no longer a 09:00–15:30 market — alternative exchange Nextrade (NXT), live since March 2025, extends trading to 08:00–20:00 KST. Added the full NXT session table, the KRX/NXT interaction rules, and KRX’s own extended-hours timeline (as of July 2026). Holiday and event dates are unchanged.

Updated August 24, 2026: Replaced the holiday table with the actual KRX non-trading calendar, verified against the exchange’s own holiday feed and against our own index database. The previous table listed Korean public holidays, which is a different list: it showed June 6, August 15 and October 3 (all Saturdays in 2026, none of them market closures) and omitted the substitute Mondays and the restored July 17 Constitution Day that actually close the market. Added the substitute-holiday rule, the September 28 answer, and the year-end schedule. Trading-hours and session content is unchanged.

Trading Korean equities effectively means respecting the local clock and calendar. Korea observes long holiday breaks that can halt the market for several consecutive days, and it has recurring dates — from options expiry to a nationwide exam day — that reliably shape liquidity and volatility. And since 2025 the trading day itself has stretched to twelve hours across two venues. This guide maps out the essentials for 2026.

⏰ What Time Does the Korean Stock Market Open and Close?

Korean stocks trade from 08:00 to 20:00 KST (GMT+9), Monday to Friday. The Korea Exchange (KRX) runs the official regular session from 09:00 to 15:30, and the alternative exchange Nextrade (NXT) adds a pre-market from 08:00 and an after-market that runs to 20:00. Most English-language references still quote only the 09:00–15:30 KRX window. That has been out of date since March 2025.

The practical consequence for an overseas investor: for the several hundred most-traded KOSPI and KOSDAQ names, you have a twelve-hour window to work an order, not six and a half. For US-based investors, the NXT after-market (15:40–20:00 KST) is roughly 02:40–07:00 ET during US Eastern Daylight Time — still unsociable, but it overlaps the European morning and closes the gap that used to force you to trade Korea entirely blind to Wall Street’s prior close.

KRX (the main exchange) — official sessions

Source: Korea Exchange, Guide to Trading in the Korean Stock Market (KRX Global), and Korean broker market-rule disclosures. As of July 29, 2026.

Nextrade / NXT (the alternative exchange) — extended sessions

Source: Nextrade — Market Overview (official, English); session detail per Korean broker NXT disclosures (Shinhan Securities, Mirae Asset Securities, Daol Investment & Securities). As of July 29, 2026.

🏛️ What Is Nextrade (NXT)?

Nextrade is South Korea’s first alternative trading system (ATS), launched on March 4, 2025, ending the Korea Exchange’s decades-long monopoly as the country’s only stock venue. It was licensed to do two things KRX had never been pushed to do: trade longer and charge less. It lists nothing itself — it matches trades in stocks already listed on KOSPI and KOSDAQ, and it covers a subset of them (the larger, more liquid names), not the entire market. For the full story — how it works, why the regulator caps its growth, and how foreign investors can reach it — see our full guide to Nextrade.

Crucially, NXT is a trading venue, not a regulator. Listing, disclosure and market surveillance stay with KRX. That is why NXT deliberately goes dark during the two windows when KRX forms the official opening and closing prices — and why the KRX close, not the last NXT print, remains the reference price for the following session.

🌍 Can Foreign Investors Actually Use the Extended Hours?

Yes, but only through a broker that routes to Nextrade — and not every broker does. Access is a brokerage question, not a market-access question, so check before you assume you have twelve hours.

• Broker coverage is uneven. Only member firms connected to NXT can route there, and some connect for part of the day or part of the product set. If your platform only shows a 09:00–15:30 order window for Korean names, it is a routing limitation on your side, not a market closure.
• US-brokerage access exists. Interactive Brokers announced NXT access on June 30, 2026, adding it alongside its existing KRX connection and enabling smart order routing across both venues (Source: Interactive Brokers press release, Jun 30, 2026). This matters for anyone who did not want to open a local Korean account — see our guide on how to buy Korean stocks as a foreign investor.
• The overlap rule that trips people up: stocks eligible for NXT are excluded from KRX’s 16:00–18:00 after-hours single-price session. You do not get both. For those names, the evening venue is NXT.
• Orders carry forward. Unfilled orders entered in the NXT pre-market and main market remain valid into the after-market, so a limit order placed at 08:05 can still fill at 19:00 — a genuinely different risk profile from a same-session order.
• Extended sessions are limit-order territory. Pre- and after-market accept limit-type orders only. Spreads are wider and depth is thinner than the regular session; treat headline prints there with the same caution you would give any thin book.

📅 Is KRX Extending Its Own Trading Hours?

Yes — KRX plans its own after-market from 16:00 to 20:00, scheduled for September 14, 2026, with a 07:00 pre-market pushed back to 2027 (as of July 2026; the schedule has already slipped twice).

Faced with a competitor trading twelve hours, KRX moved to match it. The rollout has been repeatedly rescheduled: an initial 2026 target slipped to September, and on June 19, 2026 the exchange confirmed a split — the after-market goes first, the early-morning pre-market waits. Brokers cited IT build and staffing burdens during mock trading, and an unresolved design question about carrying unfilled orders across sessions on a single order book (Source: Bizwatch, Jun 19, 2026).

Read this as a competitive dynamic rather than a date to trade on. The pattern that matters — and the one Korea’s regulator explicitly wanted when it licensed an ATS (Source: Financial Services Commission) — is that a monopoly exchange is now being forced to compete on hours and fees. That is structurally good for foreign investors, who bear the worst of Korea’s time-zone gap. It also sits inside the wider access-and-governance reform story we track in Korean Stock Market 101 and Taxes, FX and Regulations.

🗓️ When Is the Korean Stock Market Closed in 2026?

The Korea Exchange has 17 non-trading days in 2026. A Korean public holiday and a KRX closure are not the same thing: Memorial Day (June 6), Liberation Day (August 15) and National Foundation Day (October 3) all fall on a Saturday this year — and only two of the three close the market on the following Monday.

Most English-language “Korea market holidays” lists are really lists of Korean public holidays, copied from a general calendar. That is the wrong list. What an investor needs is the list of dates the exchange does not trade — and in a year like 2026, where six public holidays land on a weekend, the two lists diverge on seven dates. The table below is the trading calendar, not the holiday calendar.

Legend: ● = closure we independently observed in our own KRX index database (167 weekdays from January 1 to August 21, 2026 produced 156 trading sessions and exactly these 11 weekday closures). ○ = KRX’s published forward schedule. Source: Korea Exchange — 2026 Market Holidays (횘장일), retrieved August 24, 2026. NXT observes the same calendar — the extended sessions do not run on KRX holidays.

🍂 Is the Korean Stock Market Open on Monday, September 28, 2026?

Yes. September 28 is a normal trading day. Chuseok 2026 falls on Thursday September 24 through Saturday September 26, and because the cluster overlaps a Saturday rather than a Sunday, Korea’s substitute-holiday rule does not generate an extra Monday off. KRX lists no closure for that date.

It is an easy date to get wrong — we found Korean-language calendar write-ups predicting a September 28 day off. The reason is a genuine asymmetry buried in the decree that governs holidays, one that only bites in years where a lunar holiday clips a Saturday.

Korea’s substitute-holiday rule lives in the Regulation on Public Holidays for Government Offices (관공서의 공회일에 관한 규정, Presidential Decree No. 36290). Article 3(1) does not treat all holidays the same way:

The decree’s own wording draws the line explicitly. Article 3(1) item 1 covers national holidays, Buddha’s Birthday, Labour Day, Children’s Day and Christmas when they “overlap a Saturday or a Sunday” (토요일이나 일요일과 검침는 경우). Item 2 covers Seollal and Chuseok only when they “overlap a Sunday” (일요일과 검침는 경우) — the word “Saturday” is absent. Since Saturday is not itself a public holiday under Korean law, a Chuseok day landing on Saturday generates nothing (Source: Korea Ministry of Government Legislation, Presidential Decree No. 36290, effective May 1, 2026).

What this means for the Chuseok break

The practical shape of the 2026 Chuseok closure is two lost sessions, not three. The last trade before the break is Wednesday, September 23; the market reopens Monday, September 28. That is a four-calendar-day gap to carry risk through — shorter than the three-session Seollal break in February, and shorter than the three-day Chuseok breaks foreign desks may remember from other years.

🆕 Why Is July 17 Suddenly a Korean Market Holiday?

Constitution Day (제험절, July 17) became a paid public holiday again in 2026, after 18 years off the list. It stopped being a day off in 2008, and a 2026 amendment restored it — so every Korea trading calendar written before 2026 is missing a session.

The restoration is worth reading closely, because of how it was done. The amended Public Holidays Act (공회일에 관한 법률, Act No. 21338, promulgated February 10, 2026) no longer enumerates individual national holidays in its Article 2. It now defines the category by reference: “national holidays under the National Holidays Act” (⌈국경일에 관한 법률⌉에 따른 국경일). That statute lists five — March 1, July 17, August 15, October 3 and October 9 — and Constitution Day had never left it. It had only been removed from the separate list of paid days off.

So the 2026 change was not “adding a holiday” so much as deleting a carve-out. The knock-on effect for investors is mechanical: Constitution Day now sits in the national-holiday bucket of the substitute rule, so when July 17 lands on a weekend in a future year, the market will lose the adjacent Monday too (Source: Public Holidays Act, Act No. 21338; National Holidays Act, Article 2).

🎆 When Does the Korean Market Close for the Year?

The last trading day of 2026 is Wednesday, December 30. KRX lists December 31 as a year-end market closure — a shutdown that applies to the exchange alone, not to the country. Korean banks and offices work on December 31; only the market is dark.

This catches foreign desks every year, in both directions. December 31 is not a Korean public holiday, so a holiday calendar will show Korea open — but there is no session. And because December 25 falls on a Friday in 2026, the final stretch is thin: a long Christmas weekend, three trading days (December 28–30), then the year is over. Position adjustments, index rebalancing trades and dividend record-date housekeeping — which for a foreign holder also carries Korea’s withholding-tax mechanics — all have to clear inside that window.

KRX publishes its formal year-end operating notice each December, and it occasionally adjusts session times on the final day. Treat December 30 as the last trading day for planning, and confirm the detail with KRX in December.

⚡ Recurring Volatility & Event Dates

– Monthly Options Expiry: The second Thursday of every month. Program-trading flows around expiry can whipsaw the index intraday.

– Quarterly “Witching” Days: In March, June, September, and December, index futures and options expire simultaneously — Korea’s equivalent of “quadruple witching,” with the largest volatility.

– Earnings Season: Quarterly. Bellwethers like Samsung Electronics release preliminary results early in the month following each quarter-end, setting the tone for the market.

– Index Rebalancing: KOSPI 200, MSCI, and FTSE reviews periodically reshuffle constituents, driving passive-fund flows into and out of affected names.

🎓 Uniquely Korean Calendar Quirks

– Suneung (College Exam Day): On the day of the nationwide university entrance exam (typically mid-November), the market opens one hour late, at 10:00 KST, to ease morning commuter traffic for students.

– First Trading Day of the Year: The market traditionally opens an hour late, around 10:00, following an opening ceremony. On January 2, 2026, NXT ran no pre-market at all and delayed its main market by the same hour — a reminder that the extended sessions are not guaranteed every day (Source: Korean broker market-schedule notices, Dec 2025).

🎯 Planning H2 2026: What Global Investors Should Watch

The second half of the year carries most of Korea’s scheduling risk. Between the multi-day Chuseok closure, quarterly witching, the exam-day open delay, and year-end effects, the final months demand more planning than the calm first half. Here is an action checklist — not another date table:

• Ahead of Chuseok (September 24–25): the market loses two sessions in 2026, not three — last trade Wednesday September 23, reopen Monday September 28. Hedge or trim what you don’t want to carry through the four-day gap, and expect thin liquidity on either side.
• October is the thin month: the substitute Monday for National Foundation Day (October 5) and Hangeul Day (October 9) remove two more sessions from a single fortnight.
• Quarterly witching (September & December, 2nd Thursday): the simultaneous expiry of index futures and options amplifies closing-auction swings. Be cautious with large market-on-close orders — the closing print can move sharply.
• CSAT exam day (mid-November): the market opens one hour late (10:00 KST) nationwide. If you trade the Korean open, adjust your alarms — missing that shifted hour is a classic mistake for overseas desks.
• Year-end (December): track dividend record dates for income holdings, watch for tax-driven selling pressure late in the month, and remember the last trading day is December 30 — December 31 is an exchange-only closure, even though the rest of Korea is at work.

💡 Lingo Check: Calendar Terms

– ATS / Alternative Trading System (대체거래소): A licensed non-exchange venue that matches trades in securities listed elsewhere. It competes on hours and fees but performs no listing or market-surveillance function.

– Nextrade / NXT (넥스트레이드): South Korea’s first ATS, live since March 4, 2025. Trades a subset of KOSPI and KOSDAQ stocks from 08:00 to 20:00 KST.

– Single-Price Auction (동시호가): A call-auction mechanism that matches all orders at one price — used at the open, the close, and after volatility halts.

– After-Hours (시간외): The thin post-close session; prices here often do not carry over to the next day.

– Reference Price (기준가): The prior session’s official KRX closing price, from which the next day’s ±30% daily limit is measured. NXT prints do not set it.

– Witching Day (네 마녀의 날): Literally the “day of the four witches,” Korea’s term for simultaneous futures-and-options expiration.

– Suneung (수능): The national college entrance examination — the one day a year the stock market deliberately opens late.

– Substitute Holiday (대체공휴일): A replacement weekday off granted when a public holiday falls on a weekend. Korea grants it for national holidays, Buddha’s Birthday, Labour Day, Children’s Day and Christmas on either weekend day — but for the Seollal and Chuseok clusters on Sundays only, and for Memorial Day never. Substitute days are full KRX closures.

– Year-End Market Closure (연말휴장일): KRX’s own December 31 shutdown. It is not a public holiday — Korean banks and offices operate normally — so the exchange stops trading a day before the country stops working.

– Trading Day vs. Public Holiday: The two lists are not the same. A Korean public holiday that lands on a Saturday or Sunday costs the market nothing; a substitute Monday or the year-end closure costs it a session while appearing on no holiday calendar.

🛡️ Conclusion: Trade the Clock

A market’s calendar is part of its risk profile. Korea’s long holidays, monthly expiries, and quirks like the Suneung late open are predictable — and predictability is an edge. Always verify exact 2026 dates with the KRX before scheduling trades. Next in our About KoreaMarket series: the ten things every foreign investor must know before buying Korean stocks.

Planning your first trades around this calendar? See our step-by-step guide on how to buy Korean stocks as a foreign investor — via local brokers, ADRs, or ETFs.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Session times are stated as of July 29, 2026 and the 2026 holiday calendar as of August 24, 2026; both can change. Confirm official schedules with the Korea Exchange and Nextrade, and confirm venue access with your broker.