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Taiwan Rep / Notes

Kaohsiung called 22 weekday typhoon days in ten years. Do fastener factories stop too?

A typhoon day in Taiwan closes government offices and schools. The announcement doesn't by itself close your supplier's plant. We counted ten years of official announcements for the fastener counties and read the rules on what private employers must do.

Updated October 13, 2026. Counts are from the Directorate-General of Personnel Administration's archive of announcements, read the same day.

The short version

  • From 2016 to 2025, Kaohsiung announced a full-day closure of offices and schools across the whole city on 22 weekdays. Tainan did on 20, Taichung and Changhua on 13 each, Taipei on 11.
  • The years are lumpy. Kaohsiung had none from 2019 to 2022 and eight in 2024. All 22 fell between July and November.
  • The announcement binds government offices and schools. For private companies, the rules leave it to employer and workers, so a factory isn't automatically required to close.
  • What a factory can't do, under a Ministry of Labor guideline, is treat disaster-related non-attendance as unauthorized absence or penalize workers for it. Customs isn't covered by local closures, though clearance and cargo moves can still be disrupted.

Every summer, Taiwan's evening news reports which cities have called a typhoon day (颱風假), and buyers with orders in the south start asking whether their shipment will slip. The common assumption is that a typhoon day closes everything. It doesn't. The national rule binds government offices and schools, and leaves private employers to work it out with their staff. This note covers how often typhoon days have actually hit the counties where most fastener plants sit, what the rules require of a factory, what keeps running, and how to plan an order around it.

How often it happens where fasteners are made

The Directorate-General of Personnel Administration (人事行政總處) keeps an archive of its natural-disaster closure page: 500 entries, one for each day with announcements, back to July 2001. We downloaded all of them and could parse 476; the 24 we couldn't are all from 2013, outside our window. For 2016 through 2025 we counted a day when a county's own line said offices and schools close today for the full day, across the whole county, Monday to Friday. Entries that only record the closure standard as "reached" (the wording used for days off), half days and closures limited to a few districts are left out of the main count. The snapshots don't name the cause, so heavy-rain closures are counted along with typhoons; we use "typhoon day" the way people in Taiwan do, for both.

YearKaohsiungTainanTaichungChanghuaTaipei
201632333
201711000
201821110
201901002
2020 to 202200000
202344221
202487555
202544220
Total2220131311

Taipei is there for comparison. Kaohsiung matters most because it has the largest cluster of plants in our factory count, which found 137 of 366 in-production plants with fastener words in their names there, 78 of them in Gangshan district. An average of 2.2 weekdays a year sounds harmless. The average hides the shape. Four years in a row had none, and 2024 had eight, including four weekdays in a row from October 1 to 4. All 22 Kaohsiung days fell between July and November: nine in July, three in August, three in September, six in October and one in November. That is what these ten years show, not a guarantee about other months.

A few things sit outside the main count. Kaohsiung also called three weekday closures that started in the afternoon or evening: September 27, 2016, August 23, 2018, and October 4, 2023. On September 15, 2016, which was the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday, the city recorded the standard as reached. And on dozens of other dates the closure was limited to particular districts, neighborhoods or schools, most often Taoyuan (桃源), Namasia and Maolin in the mountains. None of those localized entries named Gangshan, Luzhu, Alian or Yanchao. We left them out because they weren't city-wide, which doesn't mean no plant was affected.

2026 so far, in the archived records available when we checked: Kaohsiung closed city-wide on Friday, June 26 and Monday, August 24, and recorded the standard as reached on Saturday, July 11 and Sunday, August 23. The latest archived date was September 2, 2026.

What the rule actually closes

A day off for offices and schools still leaves the question your shipment depends on: does the plant close? Not because of the announcement. The rule behind the announcements is the Regulations on Suspension of Work and Classes due to Natural Disasters (天然災害停止上班及上課作業辦法), last amended April 24, 2026. Article 2 says it applies to government agencies at every level and to public and private schools. Article 18 deals first with public enterprises and special institutions, which apply the rules by analogy, and then, in its second paragraph, with private enterprises: stopping work is handled through consultation between employer and workers under the Labor Standards Act or other laws.

So the mayor's announcement doesn't oblige your supplier to close. A separate Ministry of Labor guideline (天然災害發生事業單位勞工出勤管理及工資給付要點, last amended September 19, 2025) covers workers affected by closure announcements or by disaster-blocked roads:

In practice a plant may close, or run with reduced staffing within those agreements, the worker protections and its safety obligations. These rules don't reveal your supplier's staffing plan, so we infer only this much: a full line on a typhoon day can't be assumed, and it's worth asking.

What keeps running

Even where a city closes, Article 2 excludes staff whom the head of an agency assigns to necessary shift, disaster-response or other special duties. The Directorate-General's own page lists customs alongside transport, police, fire, coast guard and medical services as agencies that serve the public all year and run shifts, so a local closure announcement doesn't suspend them. That doesn't guarantee your clearance goes smoothly: inspections, brokers, warehouses and cargo movements can still be disrupted, so confirm with your forwarder.

Whether your container moves is a different question. Trucking, terminal work and vessel movements depend on road access, staffing, weather, port restrictions and the decisions of the operators involved. None of that is in the closure archive, so we can't tell you from this data how often a typhoon day also stops loading at Kaohsiung port.

What this means for an order

The timing rules give you some warning. For a full-day closure, the authority is to announce between 7 pm and 10 pm the evening before. If conditions worsen overnight it can still announce by 4:30 am, an afternoon closure is to be announced by 10:30 am the same day, and outside those times it can announce whenever circumstances require (Article 10). Sometimes that leaves time to change a truck booking. It doesn't recover a lost production day.

A hypothetical shows where the risk sits. Say your bolts finish heat treatment on a Tuesday, plating takes two days at an outside shop, and the container cut-off is Friday. If Kaohsiung calls Wednesday and Thursday off, the plating shop may be short-staffed both days, and the truck to the port may not run. If the cut-off doesn't move, the container sails without you.

Three things help:

So does a typhoon day stop a fastener plant? The announcement doesn't require it to. Whether the plant slows down depends on its staffing, its processors and the roads, and in a year like 2024 Kaohsiung called eight such weekdays. Plan for the possibility, not for the announcement.

Need eyes on the line before cut-off?

When a shipment is tight, we can visit the plant and its outside processors, check what's finished, packed and labeled, and tell you in English what we saw against your container date.

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Counts are our own reading of the Directorate-General's daily snapshots: county-wide, full-day closures announced for that day, Monday to Friday. They don't measure lost production. This is a practical guide for buyers, not legal advice.

Sources