Chinese New Year 2027: 6 February, and why you should order by December

Chinese New Year 2027 falls on Saturday 6 February, the Year of the Fire Goat. Officially, China stops for a week; in practice, factory activity winds down and then halts over a far wider window, from late January to mid-March. The consequence for an importer is simple: an order meant to ship before the shutdown must be decided and paid for by early December 2026. And this year the trap is the date itself: 6 February is almost three weeks earlier than in 2026.

The date is certain: 6 February is fixed by the lunisolar calendar. The official 2027 public-holiday calendar, however, has not yet been published. In China, the State Council sets the following year's holiday dates each autumn, usually in November or December, along with its system of make-up working weekends. For 2027 the holiday is likely to run eight days around 6 February, but that figure is still to be confirmed. The solid benchmark lies elsewhere: in 2026 the announced official holiday ran from 15 to 23 February, with the New Year on the 17th. In 2027, then, everything comes about three weeks earlier, so do not set your schedule to last year's rhythm.

Why does a one-week holiday turn into a six-to-eight-week window? Because the workshop does not stop dead on the first day, nor return to full output on the last. A large share of China's workforce is migrant: workers head back to their home provinces, often several days before the date, to beat the travel crush. Output therefore falls from late January, production stands still through the break, then restarts slowly. It is that restart, more than the shutdown itself, that costs time.

The restart is slow for a reason that is often underestimated: labour turnover. Many workers wait for their year-end bonus, go home, and a share of them do not return to the same workshop. A factory may reopen well understaffed and take three to four weeks to climb back to full pace, the time to recall or train people. Lead times promised for after the New Year are therefore often optimistic: real capacity in the first weeks of February is not what it was in January.

Hence the deadline that truly matters: the order cutoff. Many factories stop accepting new orders six to eight weeks before the festival, unable to guarantee production otherwise. For an order to be made, inspected and loaded before the shutdown, the decision must be taken and the deposit paid by early to mid-December 2026 at the latest. Quality control, above all, happens before the break, never after: a run rushed out just before the holiday, then shipped by a rebuilt and undertrained team, is precisely where bad surprises come from. Better to inspect while the workshop is still at full tilt.

Freight adds its own pressure. In the weeks before New Year, everyone wants to ship at once: space on board grows scarce and rates tighten, a seasonal move layered onto the already nervous market of 2026. Booking early beats booking at a premium at the last minute. Whatever does not leave before the shutdown risks, at best, waiting on the quay, and at worst missing a selling window.

Our approach comes down to one word: back-planning. We start from 6 February and work backwards, order by order, to fix the deadlines for approval, deposit, production and loading. We check each supplier's own closing dates, which vary from one province and one workshop to the next, rather than trusting the national calendar alone. We bring inspections forward, ahead of the break, and where possible we build a buffer of stock to cover the restart weeks. It is unglamorous work, but it is what keeps a spring order from sitting stuck in February.