The mistake is almost always the same, and it is not carelessness: it is a silent assumption. The importer looks at the lead time the supplier quoted, adds the sea transit, marks the date in the calendar and works to it. What they do not know is that the lead time was quoted by someone who also had no idea how many of their workers would come back after the holiday.
This guide gathers the whole Chinese calendar for 2027, explains what each holiday actually does to the production line, and shows what changes in your buying plan. It applies wherever you import from, because the holiday belongs to China, not to the destination.
When Chinese New Year 2027 falls, and why the date moves
Chinese New Year, or the Spring Festival, falls on the first day of the first month of the Chinese lunisolar calendar. Because that calendar combines the cycles of the moon with the solar year, the date shifts every year within a window running from the middle of January to the middle of February. That is why there is no point memorising it: in 2026 it was 17 February, in 2027 it is considerably earlier.
In 2027, the first day of Chinese New Year is 6 February, a Saturday, and it opens the year of the Fire Goat. The eve, known as chúxī, falls on 5 February, a Friday.
The eve deserves attention because its status changed recently. Until 2024 it was not a statutory holiday in China, despite being the most important night of the year for Chinese families. The revision of the national holiday regulation, in force since 1 January 2025, brought the eve into the statutory list and raised the country's total from 11 to 13 holiday days.
Why this matters to you: making the eve a statutory holiday pushed the effective start of the shutdown a day earlier and locked the Spring Festival in as a block of at least eight consecutive days, by law. The floor went up.
The factory does not stop for eight days: it stops for a month
Here is the difference between reading the law and understanding the operation. Chinese law guarantees a minimum of eight consecutive days off for the Spring Festival. No serious supplier will deny that. The problem is that the number describes the holiday, not the factory.
Chinese manufacturing rests to a large extent on migrant labour: people who live in Guangdong or Zhejiang province but whose families are a thousand, two thousand kilometres away. The Spring Festival is the only long journey many of them make all year. That produces three knock-on effects that no official calendar shows:
- They leave early. Anyone travelling a long way asks for time off before the official date, and the line starts emptying days or weeks before the formal holiday.
- They come back in waves. The workers do not all return on the same day. The factory reopens with a fraction of its team and rebuilds capacity over weeks.
- Some of them never come back. This is the traditional moment to change jobs in China. The factory has to hire and train replacements, and that is where quality wobbles.
The practical result, seen year after year, is that effective production is compromised for two to four weeks, not for the eight days in the law. In 2027, with the date on 6 February, that means a risk zone running roughly from the end of January to the beginning of March.
The mistake that costs the whole season Accepting without question a delivery date that crosses the Spring Festival. A supplier promising to ship "in the first week of March" is promising with the factory still rebuilding, with new workers on the line, and with everybody else's backlog queued ahead of yours.
The mistake nobody spots in time Assuming that finished production means shipped goods. A batch can be ready before the holiday and still sit for weeks in the warehouse, because the customs broker, the carrier and the port itself are also running at reduced pace. Produced is not shipped.
The full Chinese calendar for 2027
The dates below are fixed, because they derive from the lunisolar calendar and the solar markers, and do not depend on any administrative decision. These are the ones you plan around.
| Holiday | Date in 2027 | Day | Impact on production |
|---|---|---|---|
| New Year (Western calendar) | 1 January | Friday | Low. Usually yields three days |
| Chinese New Year’s Eve | 5 February | Friday | Official start of the shutdown |
| Chinese New Year (Spring Festival) | 6 February | Saturday | Critical. Two to four weeks in practice |
| Qingming (Tomb Sweeping Day) | 5 April | Monday | Low. Natural bridge with the weekend |
| Labour Day | 1 May | Saturday | Moderate. Usually yields five days |
| Dragon Boat (Duanwu) | 9 June | Wednesday | Low. A single isolated day |
| Mid-Autumn (Zhongqiu) | 15 September | Wednesday | Low. One isolated day |
| National Day (Golden Week) | 1 October | Friday | High. Usually yields seven days |
Two readings jump out of the table. The first is that 2027 has two significant shutdown blocks, February and October, and the rest of the year is reasonably continuous. The second is in the detail of the weekday column, and that is where 2027 is different.
The 2027 quirk: two holidays landing on a Wednesday
The Chinese rule in force treats single-day holidays in a specific way: they are bridged with the neighbouring weekend, through the compensation of worked Saturdays, to form three consecutive days off. With one stated exception, which is precisely when the date falls on a Wednesday. In that case there is no bridge possible without splitting the week down the middle, and the holiday stays isolated.
In 2027, Dragon Boat falls on 9 June and Mid-Autumn on 15 September, both on a Wednesday. The reading for anyone planning production is straightforward, and it is good news: the two should each cost a single day of downtime, with no long weekend and no compensating Saturday to disrupt the week before or after.
On the other hand Qingming falls on a Monday and Labour Day on a Saturday, which favours bridges in April and May. And National Day landing on a Friday means the October Golden Week should start cleanly, on the 1st.
What to do with this: if you need to squeeze production into the second half of the year, June and September 2027 are more predictable months than usual. October is the month to avoid.
The official 2027 notice is not out yet, and that is not a problem
It is worth separating two things that often get confused, because the confusion breeds unnecessary distrust of the supplier.
The holiday dates are fixed and have been known for years in advance, because they come from the lunisolar calendar. 6 February 2027 is not going to move.
The official arrangement is not fixed. Every year the State Council of China publishes a notice setting exactly how many days off each holiday will carry and which Saturdays or Sundays will be worked in compensation. That is the document that turns "the holiday is the 6th" into "time off runs from the 5th to the 13th, and the Saturday of the 20th is a working day".
That notice comes out at the end of the preceding year. The 2026 arrangement, for instance, was published on 4 November 2025, and set that year's Spring Festival as a block of nine days, from 15 to 23 February, with two compensating Saturdays. By the same logic, the 2027 arrangement is expected around November 2026.
What not to do while the notice is pending Waiting for it before you start planning. If you hold out until November 2026 to decide the order that has to be produced before February 2027, you have already missed the window. The notice adjusts the margin by a few days; it does not change the fact that China stops in February.
What the calendar demands of your buying
This is where the holiday stops being culture and becomes arithmetic. The full cycle of an import from China, from placing the order to goods available in your stock, usually runs between 60 and 120 days, counting production, sea transit and customs clearance. With the February shutdown sitting in the middle of that, the sum changes shape.
Working backwards from 6 February 2027:
- Order placed by November 2026: the comfortable band. There is time to produce, inspect and ship before the factory empties.
- Order placed in December: tight, and heavily dependent on the product. It works if the supplier already holds the raw material and the item needs no new tooling.
- Order placed in January: assume production only really starts in March. Realistic arrival is May.
And there is a pressure almost nobody accounts for: in the weeks before the Spring Festival, everyone wants to ship at once. Demand for vessel space rises, freight rates react, and the importer who joined the queue last is the one left out. The January shipping window is the most contested of the year.
For anyone importing for the Christmas and Black Friday season there is one coincidence that helps and one that hurts. It helps that the buying for that season happens in July and August, well clear of the holiday. It hurts that the first-quarter restock lands exactly on top of the shutdown.
If the make-up of the total lead time is not yet clear to you, it is worth reading first the guide to shipping from China, which sets out modes and transit times, and the one on what importing from China really costs. And if the goal is to lay out the whole year rather than merely survive February, the guide to planning your 2027 sourcing puts this calendar together with the trade fair dates and your own selling seasons.
The October Golden Week, the year's second brake
National Day week, which starts on 1 October, is the second shutdown block in the Chinese calendar and usually yields seven days off. It does not have the devastating effect of the Spring Festival, because it involves no mass migration and the team comes back practically intact, but it stops production and congests logistics in exactly the same way.
It also carries a scheduling implication for anyone travelling. The autumn edition of the Canton Fair takes place after the Golden Week, which means anyone combining the fair with factory visits finds suppliers picking their rhythm back up. It is a period in which booking a meeting takes more notice than usual, and in which hotels and flights around Guangzhou are more contested.
Anyone planning to travel to China in 2027 should look at the holiday calendar before buying a ticket: travelling during the Golden Week means finding factories closed, and travelling during the Spring Festival means finding the whole country closed.
What cannot be sorted out from a distance
Everything above depends on one piece of information that you, twelve thousand kilometres away, have no way of getting on your own: what is actually happening inside that particular factory.
A supplier who says "we will ship before the holiday" may be telling the truth, may be optimistic, or may be buying time. All three sentences land identically in your inbox. And this is where the distance charges you:
- Knowing whether production has actually started. The difference between an order in production and an order queued for production shows up in no message, and it is what decides whether you ship in January or in March.
- Knowing whether the batch was loaded or is sitting in the warehouse. Goods finished before the holiday but not shipped before the holiday are goods that will not move until March.
- Knowing who is on the line after the restart. The team that made your sample in November may not be the team that makes your order in March. This is the time of year when pre-shipment inspection stops being a precaution and becomes a necessity.
- Having somebody to talk to when the deadline slips. Chasing by email, in another time zone and another language, at a moment when the factory is running on half its team, rarely changes anything.
That is why the Spring Festival period is, every year, what most separates the importer who has someone in China from the one who does not. Not because the holiday is unpredictable, it is the opposite of that, but because only someone on the ground can tell the delay that can be recovered from the delay that has already cost the season. Pre-shipment inspection and being there in person exist for precisely that difference.
Frequently asked questions about Chinese holidays in 2027
When is Chinese New Year 2027?
The first day of Chinese New Year 2027 is 6 February, a Saturday, and it opens the year of the Fire Goat. New Year's Eve, which since 2025 is also a statutory holiday in China, falls on 5 February, a Friday. The date moves every year because it follows the Chinese lunisolar calendar, not the Western one.
How many days do Chinese factories stay shut for Chinese New Year?
The statutory holiday guarantees at least 8 consecutive days, but that is the floor set by law, not the reality inside the factory. In practice production is commonly down for two to four weeks, because much of the workforce is migrant and travels thousands of kilometres: many workers leave before the official start and come back after it. The restart is gradual too, because part of the team never returns and has to be replaced and trained.
How late can I place an order and still clear the Chinese New Year 2027 shutdown?
As a rule of thumb, anyone who wants goods produced and shipped before the shutdown should place the order around November 2026, allowing for the usual 60 to 120 days between order and delivery at your warehouse. An order placed in December or January runs a real risk of only entering production in March, which pushes arrival to May. The exact timing depends on the product, the volume, and whether the supplier already holds the raw material.
Has the official Chinese holiday calendar for 2027 been published?
Not yet. The holiday dates themselves are fixed by the lunisolar calendar, but the official arrangement, which sets how many days off each holiday gets and which Saturdays are worked in compensation, is published by the State Council at the end of the previous year. The 2026 arrangement came out on 4 November 2025. The 2027 one is therefore expected around November 2026.
Besides Chinese New Year, which other holidays stop production in China?
National Day Golden Week, which starts on 1 October and usually yields seven days off, is the second significant shutdown of the year. Labour Day, on 1 May, usually yields five days. Qingming, Dragon Boat and Mid-Autumn are single-day holidays that are sometimes bridged with the weekend. None of them comes close to the impact of Chinese New Year.
Why should Dragon Boat and Mid-Autumn not become long weekends in 2027?
Because both fall on a Wednesday in 2027: Dragon Boat on 9 June and Mid-Autumn on 15 September. The Chinese rule in force bridges single-day holidays with the neighbouring weekend to form three days off, except precisely when the date falls on a Wednesday. In practice the two should each cost a single day of downtime.
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