What is Songkran? The cultural meaning behind Thailand’s famous water festival

Every April, the arrival of traditional Thai New Year, also known as Songkran, turns the nation into a nationwide water festival as revelers grab squirt guns, buckets, and plenty of H₂O in a bid to celebrate new beginnings. 

Similar watery new year’s festivals are also celebrated in South Asian countries such as Cambodia, China, Laos, Nepal, and others. But Songkran is best known for its incarnation in Thailand, where it is a national holiday. 

But Songkran goes far beyond water fights. Deeply rooted in Buddhist traditions of renewal and cleansing, it’s a chance to pursue purification, wash off the past, and generate good luck for the coming year. 

Here’s what to know about the holiday and its wild, wet rituals. 

What is Songkran? 

The festival’s name means “astrological passage” or “movement” in Thai, referring to a Sanskrit word for the sun’s transit through the Thai zodiac. Once calculated by royal astrologers, the modern festival usually kicks off on April 13, the day the sun enters Aries in Thai astrology, and continues through April 15, the official start of the new year. However, the festival’s dates can vary from year to year, as the national holiday’s dates are set by Thai officials. 

The holiday is rooted in Buddhist folk traditions—traditions that run so deep that the festival is now considered a part of the world’s intangible cultural heritage by the United Nations cultural agency, UNESCO. Songkran is thought to have been inspired by similar Hindu festivals such as Holi, and scholars believe it evolved over the years as a celebration of the rice harvest, which peaks in Thailand every April. 

The holiday was the official start of the Thai new year until 1888, when Siam (now Thailand) adopted a solar calendar similar to the internationally used Gregorian calendar, whose new year begins January 1. That solar calendar’s new year began April 1. In 1939, as the nation switched from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional one and began to claim its place on the international stage, Siam renamed itself Thailand. The next year, 1940, the country adopted January 1 as the first day of its year. 

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These Thai calendar moves could have doomed the traditional Songkran celebrations, but the festival endured. Today it’s a national holiday and a mostly secular one, featuring rituals that, in the words of religious historian Klemens Karlsson, fall “somewhere between a staged play, community theater, a festival, and a religious ritual or ceremony.” 

How Songkran is celebrated in Thailand 

Though Songkran traditions vary locally, the holiday generally starts April 13 and plays out over multiple days. The celebration centers around water—seen as a way to purify oneself and earn merit while clearing the way for a prosperous new year. The day before the festival, Thai people spring clean their homes and some public spaces—a reflection of the previous year being “washed away” to make room for the new. On April 13, they visit Buddhist temples. Here, the “spring cleaning” is extended to the Buddha himself as people sprinkle water over statues of the enlightened one. 

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Some also make offerings to their town or village’s preferred guardian deities in an attempt to garner favor for the new year. Monks and elderly people also get “cleaned” as their acolytes and loved ones sprinkle scented water over their hands or wash their feet—gestures of respect and caretaking. People show their devotion with ceremonial drums and frog symbols—considered auspicious in part because frogs’ croaking indicates coming rain in a landscape that relies on monsoons.

The remainder of the modern holiday belongs to revelers, many clad in bright Hawaiian shirts, who take the ritual pouring of water to a fun extreme with massive water fights. Local merchants sell bags of water and buckets of ice. Large crowds of revelers fling water on one another using buckets, bottles, and even water guns, chasing one another in a bid to dunk, saturate, and sprinkle everyone they can. The festivities—which include parades, music festivals, and vendors selling grilled frogs to eat in a nod to the Songkran symbol—now draw large numbers of tourists, generating significant tourist revenue and publicity in Thailand and beyond. 

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Tensions around Songkran

The modern ritual is praised for bringing prosperity and international attention to Thailand and its people. But it can also stretch locales to their limits because of the sheer volume of refuse—and water waste—generated by revelers. 

Each year, the water fights are followed by huge clean-up efforts aimed at removing the trash and cleaning up local landmarks. Water usage rises dramatically during the festival—according to the Nation Thailand, average water use adds another 100,000 cubic meters of water usage per day in Bangkok alone. This has sparked past restrictions on Songkran celebrations in some parts of Thailand. 

Other unintended consequences of the festival include effects on fuel availability and concerns about excessive alcohol consumption at massive Songkran events. 

Will Songkran festivities go forward in 2026? 

Water availability has cast a shadow over Songkran for years as Thailand grapples with climate change and drought. In 2024, drought conditions were so bad that the festivities were canceled in some locations, while a magnitude 7.7 earthquake hampered some celebrations in 2025. 

This year, however, the festival is a go—and Thailand is ready to party. “We want to be clear: Songkran 2026 will take place as planned across every region of Thailand,” said Thapanee Kiatphaibool, who leads the Tourism Authority of Thailand, in a March 2026 statement. “The spirit of this festival and Thailand’s welcome remains unchanged.”