Is Shanghai crowded on public holidays, and how do you avoid it?

Yes, considerably, and not by a small margin. The same place during a holiday and after it are different trips, and the difference is not the queue but your own pace.

The difference is not marginal

On the main holidays the sights, riverside, old city and popular streets fill at once. This is not merely busier: a city walk becomes a run of queues, for tickets, doors, photographs, lunch. Walk the same route after the holiday and the question is no longer whether the day is worse but whether it works.

Which periods to avoid

Periods to mark: the Spring Festival travel period; the National Day holiday in early October; the spring and early-summer holidays of Qingming, Labour Day and Dragon Boat; the summer school holidays; the New Year holiday. Each is crowded for its own reason: family visits, a national holiday, family travel, year-end concentration. Dates move each year, so check the official calendar, not last year’s memory; the monthly guide has the detail.

The worst for a sightseer is National Day: the Bund, Yu Garden and Nanjing Road have no quiet window. Spring Festival runs the other way.

Spring Festival: a different crowd

Spring Festival is the exception: it does two things at once. The crowds are real: Yu Garden, the Bund and the old city are no easier than at National Day. But part of the usual population leaves, so the busiest business districts, the metro and some neighbourhoods empty, and the open shops and street sounds change; that quiet is worth seeing. The cost is many small restaurants and one-person businesses closing; what remains is mostly chains and malls. The two are not the same trade: National Day is the city as usual with more people, Spring Festival is sights more crowded and the city unlike itself.

How to avoid it: move dates, or move the day

For a traveller whose dates are fixed there is no choice, and only planning buys anything back; anyone who can shift by a stretch makes the problem disappear.

If the dates will not move, move the shape of the day: out early, taking the outdoors and the best-known places in the first stretch after opening; when the crowd peaks at midday, go indoors or leave the centre for an ordinary neighbourhood, a park or a smaller museum; back to the riverside in the evening. Book timed-entry venues ahead through the venue’s own channel. On peak days avoid the obvious places; make the ordinary city the main line: food markets, community parks, small galleries, bookshops. Use the metro, not a car: congestion and taxi scarcity arrive together.

What breaks first: taxis and ride-hailing, hard to get and surging; restaurant queues, mostly taking no bookings; popular museums, whose same-day places are gone; intercity train tickets, sold out on popular departures; hotel rates, rising most directly. The first few cannot be fixed on the day, only pre-empted.

The crowd is concentrated too: even on the fullest day only a handful of points fill, and a residential neighbourhood, a park or a stretch of riverside further along is as busy as usual.

One honest last point: if your dates land on a holiday and cannot move, do not give up on Shanghai, but accept a different trip: booked ahead, started early, walked less and ridden on the metro more, with the main sights in the morning and some places out of reach. Protect the two or three you most want and leave the rest to the city.