Chuseok Traffic: Korea's Biggest Jam Happens on Purpose, Twice a Year
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Watching the Koreans
Chuseok Traffic: Korea's Biggest Jam Happens on Purpose, Twice a Year
In short
Korea's highway authority forecasts Chuseok traffic down to the hour and publishes the numbers days in advance, and tens of millions of people drive into the jam anyway. That's not a planning failure — it's evidence of how much weight is still attached to showing up in person.
A four-hour drive is annoying. A four-hour drive that everyone involved knew, days in advance, was actually going to take nearly ten hours — and got in the car anyway — is something else. That's the reality of Chuseok travel in Korea: the Busan-to-Seoul return trip, which normally runs around four hours, was projected to take up to 9 hours and 50 minutes at its worst during the 2025 Chuseok holiday, according to Korea Expressway Corporation estimates (Asia Business Daily). And people went anyway, in the tens of millions.
That's the part that's easy to miss if you only look at the traffic numbers. This isn't a country caught off guard by a predictable holiday rush. Korea's highway authority publishes the projected worst hours before they happen, hour by hour, route by route — and the roads fill up on schedule regardless.
A drive that can take 10 hours and 30 minutes
The Korea Expressway Corporation's 2025 Chuseok forecast laid out specifics that read almost like a weather warning: on the first day of the holiday, estimated travel time from Seoul was seven hours to Busan, six hours and ten minutes to Mokpo, and six hours to Daegu. The return leg was worse — up to 9 hours and 50 minutes for the Busan-to-Seoul trip at its peak, more than double what the same drive takes on an ordinary day, and creeping toward triple in the worst pockets of congestion.
Those aren't rough guesses. They're built from traffic modeling detailed enough to identify the single most congested departure windows in advance: 10 to 11 a.m. on the day before Chuseok and the following morning were each expected to account for 14.8 percent of all outbound departures, while 2 to 3 p.m. on the last day of the holiday was projected to carry 16.4 percent of the return traffic — a level of precision most countries reserve for election forecasting, not a family road trip.
The nation moves at once — literally
The scale involved is what turns this from "a bad travel day" into a genuine logistical event. Korea Expressway Corporation projected that an average of 7.75 million people would travel each day of the 2025 Chuseok holiday period, with the single busiest day expected to reach 9.33 million — in a country with a total population of roughly 51 million (Korea Herald). Passenger cars carried the overwhelming majority of that traffic, and average daily traffic on the expressway network itself was projected at 5.42 million vehicles, with a record 6.67 million expected on Chuseok day itself.
Put simply: for a few days every autumn, a double-digit percentage of the entire country's population is simultaneously on the move, most of it by car, most of it converging on the same handful of highway corridors at the same handful of preferred departure windows. No single accident or unexpected event is required to create the jam. The jam is just what happens when that many people choose the same few hours to travel.
No single accident or unexpected event is required to create the jam. The jam is just what happens when that many people choose the same few hours to travel.
This isn't a surprise. It's a forecast.
What separates Chuseok traffic from an ordinary holiday rush elsewhere in the world is how openly it's forecast and reported on, year after year, without the predictions changing much. In 2025, the seven-day holiday period ran from October 3 to 9, extended by its overlap with National Foundation Day and Hangeul Day, and Korean outlets like the Korea Herald and Korea Times covered the resulting congestion in near-real time, tracking which highways were worst on which day almost like a sports broadcast.
That level of public tracking means nobody driving into the jam is doing so by accident. The government publishes projected peak windows before the holiday starts specifically so people can try to avoid them, and millions of people see those numbers and travel during the peak windows regardless — not out of ignorance, but because the timing that's worst for traffic is often the timing that actually works for a family gathering.
The name gives away the scale
Korean media has a specific term for this phenomenon, and it's not a traffic term — it's a term about people:
minjok daeidong (민족대이동)
minjok daeidong (민족대이동) — literally "the great migration of the nation," the term Korean media uses for the mass wave of holiday travel around Chuseok and Seollal.
The choice of word matters because it reframes what's happening. A "migration" implies a destination that matters enough to justify the cost of getting there — in this case, the family home, often a parents' or grandparents' house outside the city, where Chuseok's ancestral rites and shared meals are meant to happen in person rather than over video — the same pull that drives the cash-gift obligations of its sibling holiday, Seollal, a few months later. Sitting in a car for ten hours is treated as a toll worth paying for a specific kind of presence that a phone call can't substitute for.
Why extending the holiday didn't fix it
Korea's own attempts to soften the problem are instructive, because they've mostly worked around the edges rather than solving anything. Stretching the 2025 holiday to seven days, rather than the traditional three, was meant to spread travel out and reduce the single-day crush — and traffic coverage from that period shows it partially worked, with congestion easing to more normal levels by the Wednesday afternoon partway through the break. But the peak days were still projected and still arrived close to on schedule, because a longer window doesn't change when people actually want to be with their families: everyone still prefers to travel out around the same day and return around the same day, holiday length notwithstanding.
Government advisories encouraging staggered travel, and reporting nearly a million people flying instead of driving during the same period, both nudge the numbers slightly. Neither comes close to flattening the curve. The pull toward the same narrow travel windows is strong enough that no amount of extra calendar space fully absorbs it.
Knowing exactly how bad it'll be, and going anyway
The most telling detail in all of this isn't the ten-hour drive or the 9.33-million-people-in-a-single-day figure — it's the fact that none of it is a surprise to the people living through it. Korean drivers heading out for Chuseok generally know, going in, roughly which hour will be worst, roughly how long the drive will take at that hour, and roughly how much better it would be if they left at 3 a.m. instead. A meaningful number of them get in the car during the worst window anyway, because that's when the rest of the family is arriving too.
And for a lot of travelers, the traffic jam turns out to be the easy part of the holiday. Once everyone's actually gathered at the parents' house, surviving the unsolicited advice and relentless personal questions from relatives is very often the second ordeal — the one that starts right after the first one, sitting in traffic, finally ends.
For a foreign visitor trying to make sense of it, the useful comparison isn't a holiday weekend rush back home — it's closer to a scheduled, voluntary evacuation that repeats twice a year, every year, with the exit routes and the worst hours already mapped out in advance. Nobody is forcing anyone onto the highway. The pull toward the family table is simply strong enough that tens of millions of people choose the ten-hour version of the trip over not making it at all.
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