Countdown to Khmer Holidays

About this tool

This page counts down to the next Cambodian public holiday, in days, hours, minutes and seconds, with the date and the Khmer and English name underneath. It picks the next one from the holiday list, ticks once a second, and shows the holidays after it plus a short list of the ones already past, so you can see both how close the next break is and where it sits in the year. It also builds an embeddable widget: choose the language, a full or compact size, a width and a height, and copy either a link or an iframe snippet for a school site, a company intranet or a shop page. It is for the ordinary question of how long until the next day off, and for the people who want that answer on a page they do not have to maintain. It does not send reminders, does not sync to a calendar app, and cannot show a holiday the dataset does not contain. If the government adds a day after the list was compiled, the countdown will not know about it.

How it works

The page is rendered with `getAllHolidaysForCountdown` from `cambodia-holidays-data.ts`, which expands every holiday row for 2025, 2026 and 2027 into one entry per holiday and sorts them by date. `CountdownToKhmerHolidaysClient` takes that list, finds the first entry whose date is not before today, and computes the target as the start of that day in the `Asia/Phnom_Penh` zone through `getStartOfDayInTz`, not as the device midnight. The remaining time is the difference between that timestamp and `Date.now()`, refreshed by a one-second interval, and the days, hours, minutes and seconds are derived from it; when the target is today the panel switches to an "it is today" message instead of a zero countdown. The upcoming list is everything still ahead, and the past list is the last twelve holidays before today, newest first. A multi-day festival counts down to its first day only, because the list stores one entry per holiday rather than one per day. The widget generator builds its link and iframe from the same page, so the embedded copy runs the same calculation.

Use cases

• Seeing how many days are left before the Khmer New Year break starts
• Putting a live countdown on a school or company intranet page with the embed snippet
• Checking which public holiday comes next before booking a short trip
• Planning a product promotion around the next long weekend
• Showing staff the upcoming holiday list beside the countdown rather than in a separate table
• Looking back at the holidays already taken this year to check a leave balance
• Adding a Khmer-language countdown to a Cambodian community page with the language option

Frequently asked questions

• Which holiday is the countdown pointing at?

  The first one in the list whose date is today or later, compared in Cambodia time rather than in your own zone. For a multi-day festival that means its first day: the countdown to Pchum Ben runs to 10 October 2026, the day the holiday starts, not to the twelfth when it ends. If a holiday is today, the panel says so instead of showing zero.

• Where does the holiday list come from?

  From the inkhmer.com dataset in `cambodia-holidays-data.ts`, limited to 2025, 2026 and 2027. It is not the official sub-decree list: it includes Chinese New Year, Meak Bochea, International Children's Day and International Human Rights Day, and it omits Visak Bochea, the Royal Ploughing Ceremony and Peace Day. So a countdown can be aimed at a day that is not a public holiday, or miss one that is.

• Does the countdown keep running when the tab is in the background?

  The interval keeps firing but browsers throttle timers in a background tab, often to once a minute or less, so the seconds can jump when you come back. It corrects itself immediately because each tick recomputes from the current clock rather than subtracting from a stored value. Nothing is lost; the display simply skips the seconds it was not allowed to draw.

• What happens after the last holiday in the list?

  The page says there are no upcoming holidays. The list stops at the end of 2027, so from the last entry of that year onward the countdown has nothing to aim at until a new year is added to the dataset. The past list still works, and the embeddable widget shows the same message rather than a broken counter.

• How does the embed widget work?

  The generator writes a URL and an iframe snippet that point at this same page with the language and size you chose. Paste the snippet into any page that allows an iframe and it renders the countdown there. It is a live embed, not a copy: when the holiday list changes, every embedded widget changes with it. The width and height you pick are fixed, so a compact widget needs less room than a full one.

• Is the countdown time zone aware?

  Yes. Both the target and the current day are resolved in `Asia/Phnom_Penh`, so the countdown reaches zero at midnight in Cambodia, not at midnight where you are. That matters if you are watching from Europe or America: the last few hours will run out at an hour that looks arbitrary on your own clock but is the start of the holiday in Cambodia.

• Does it notify me or add the date to my calendar?

  No. There is no account, no notification permission and no calendar integration; the page only displays. To be reminded, add the date to your own calendar from the Cambodia Holidays page, which lists every holiday for the year and can be printed or saved as a PDF. Nothing about your visit is stored on a server.

• Why is the countdown different from another site?

  Three likely reasons: the other site may use the official sub-decree list rather than this dataset, it may count to the end of a multi-day festival rather than its first day, or it may resolve midnight in a different time zone. A difference of a few hours usually points at the time zone; a difference of days usually points at which day of a festival is being counted.

Data and accuracy

Content last reviewed 21 October 2026