Two countries' calendars almost never line up — and tracking the one that isn't yours is worth more than any weekday rule of thumb.
Track your own country's public holidays and you'll still get blindsided at the checkpoint — the holiday that actually catches you off guard is almost always the other side's. Malaysia and Singapore run two separate calendars, and neither one warns you when the other is about to spike traffic.
A Malaysian public holiday, especially a Johor-specific one, tends to hollow out the JB-side morning commute — fewer Johor residents heading into Singapore to work that day — while pulling in extra Singapore-based leisure traffic heading the other way, since it's a good day to visit family or eat across the border. A Singapore public holiday does something closer to the reverse: JB-based workers who commute daily into Singapore get the day off too, cutting that morning surge, while Singapore residents use the free day to head into JB instead.
Either way, the effect skews the causeway's usual two-way jam in one direction rather than balancing it out — which is exactly why a holiday that isn't on your own country's calendar can still catch you off guard.
The same "eve of a holiday" effect that makes a Friday the worst weekday window (see our timing guide) applies here too, amplified. A holiday that falls beside a weekend creates a long weekend on one or both sides, and the eve of that stretch behaves like several Fridays stacked on top of each other. When a public holiday lands on the same date in both countries — Deepavali and Christmas both do this in 2026 — expect the pull to run in both directions at once rather than favouring one.
Public holidays spike hard on a single day. School holidays spread the same effect over one to several weeks, since family day-trips don't cluster on the first morning the way a one-off holiday does. Malaysia's version is regional — Johor sits in Kumpulan B, one of several state groupings with its own holiday weeks, so a school holiday elsewhere in Malaysia doesn't necessarily move Johor traffic. Singapore's school holidays apply nationwide, so there's no regional filter to check on that side.
Causeway Kaki tracks all four of these independently, updated on a regular poll. As tracked on 2 September 2026:
| Dates | Where | What |
|---|---|---|
| 29 Aug – 6 Sep 2026 (in progress) | Malaysia (Johor / Kumpulan B) | Term 2 school holiday |
| 5–13 Sep 2026 | Singapore (nationwide) | School holiday |
| 16 Sep 2026 | Malaysia (National) | Malaysia Day — public holiday |
| 8 Nov 2026 | Malaysia (Johor) & Singapore | Deepavali — public holiday, both sides |
| 25 Dec 2026 | Malaysia (National) & Singapore | Christmas Day — public holiday, both sides |
Sources: Malaysia public holidays — MEF (mef.org.my); Singapore public holidays — data.gov.sg's official public holidays dataset; Malaysia school holidays — publicholidays.com.my, filtered to Kumpulan B (Johor); Singapore school holidays — MOE's published 2026 school terms press release. Snapshot taken 2 September 2026 from Causeway Kaki's own tracked calendar — dates shift and new events get added, so treat this table as a sample, not the full list.
None of this tells you how bad today specifically is going to be. A public holiday's overall pull is a real, repeatable pattern — but the actual queue at 9am on any given holiday still depends on weather, how many people had the same idea, and whether anything unrelated is also happening at the checkpoint that morning. Same rule as every other "typical" claim on this site: useful for planning around, not a substitute for checking before you leave.