Planning around Chinese New Year

The statutory holiday is a legal instrument and you can read it. Each autumn the State Council publishes the following year's arrangement, naming the exact dates. For 2026 it set Spring Festival as 15 to 23 February — nine days — and the underlying entitlement is smaller than the run: the 2024 reform that added Lunar New Year's Eve to the national holiday rules put the Spring Festival statutory holiday at four days.

The nine days are therefore partly borrowed, not granted. The same notice designated Saturday 14 February and Saturday 28 February as working days. That is how a long run gets built in China, and it means the weekends around a holiday do not behave the way a foreign calendar assumes.

The factory shutdown is not that. It is what happens when a workforce that lives a thousand kilometres away goes home for the only extended period it gets, and it is longer than the holiday at both ends: people leave before it starts because tickets and travel take days, and they come back afterwards on their own schedule. No source publishes a length for it, and this page does not either. It varies by factory, by where its people come from, by the year, and by how good that year was. The sentence "factories close for two to four weeks" is repeated everywhere and rests on nothing.

What is genuinely knowable is your own supplier's plan, and it is a normal thing to ask for in writing: the last shipping date before the holiday, the last date they will accept a new order for pre-holiday delivery, the date the line restarts, and the date the office is contactable. Those are four different dates and a supplier who gives you one number has answered a different question.

China builds long holidays by moving weekends rather than by adding days, a practice called 调休. When a run is created, one or two nearby Saturdays or Sundays are formally designated as working days to compensate.

For 2026 that meant Saturday 14 February and Saturday 28 February were working days, either side of the Spring Festival run. A buyer looking at a calendar sees a weekend; the factory sees a normal working day, and the inspection you assumed could not be booked can be.

It cuts the other way too, and that is the expensive direction. A date you assumed was a working day may be inside a designated run, so an inspection booked for it does not happen, a container does not load, and nobody tells you until the day. Check the year's published arrangement rather than a normal calendar when you are scheduling anything that has to happen on a specific date within about a month of a Chinese holiday.

And note the reform's own stated principle: consecutive working days before and after a statutory holiday are generally not to exceed six. That is a good description of what the borrowed weekends are doing, and a good reason not to assume the days around a holiday follow any pattern you can guess.

This is the part that costs buyers the most, and it is entirely predictable. A factory has a reopening date. It does not have its workforce back on that date. People return over a period, some do not return at all, and the replacements are new to the job even when they are not new to the trade.

So "we are back on the fifteenth" is true and not useful. The two questions that are useful are: when does the line running my product restart, and at what proportion of its people? A good supplier answers both without difficulty because it is managing exactly that problem; a supplier who cannot answer either is telling you something.

And this is the moment when a first-article check earns its keep. New or returning operators on a familiar job produce a predictable class of error — a step done in the wrong order, a tolerance drifting, a component fitted the way the last product needed it. No defect rate is published here for the weeks after the holiday, because none is measured; the mechanism is real, the number is not. What follows from the mechanism is simple: check the first units off the line rather than the last ones, and check them yourself or through someone.

Do not put your most demanding order into the restart window if you have a choice. A new product, a new tool, a changed specification or a first production run all want an experienced line, and the restart is the least experienced the line will be all year.

Everyone plans for the closed weeks. Almost nobody plans for the fortnight before them, and that is where the damage happens.

A factory in the run-up is trying to ship everything. Its own customers all want their goods before the shutdown, its cash needs to be collected before a long unproductive period, and its people are about to leave. That is exactly the condition in which a supplier accepts a delivery date it cannot meet — not dishonestly, but because saying no is worse and the plan might still work.

It is also when substitution happens. A component that has not arrived, from a supplier who has already shut, gets replaced with one that is available — and the substitution is the kind that is invisible in a photograph and obvious in a return rate. A specification that names the parts that may not be changed without approval is worth more in January than in any other month.

And it is when the freight market tightens, because everyone is shipping at once. Space and equipment get scarce and a booking made late is a booking made at whatever the market is doing. No rate or percentage is published here — the shipped freight guides refuse rates for good reasons — but the direction is not in dispute.

So the practical moves are all about moving things earlier rather than later. Agree the last shipping date in writing and work backwards from it, not forwards from today. Book the inspection earlier in the production window than you normally would, because there is no time to rework at the end. And if the schedule only works if nothing goes wrong, treat it as a schedule that does not work.

Decide which side of the holiday your order should land on, deliberately. An order that lands just before it is competing with every other order for the same weeks. An order that lands just after it is being made by a line that is still filling up. The comfortable slots are further from the holiday in both directions than people expect, and choosing one is cheaper than negotiating a rescue in February.

Watch the deposit. A deposit paid immediately before a shutdown buys you a place in a queue that will not move for weeks, and the leverage an unpaid balance gives you is doing nothing during that time either. That is not an argument against paying it; it is an argument for knowing what you have bought and when it starts.

Keep a buffer of the things that stop you selling. Not a general instruction to hold more stock — that costs money and this page is not going to pretend otherwise — but a specific one: the item whose absence stops the rest of your business is the item to have extra of across a shutdown.

Next year's exact dates are published in the autumn, and this page does not print any that do not exist yet. The arrangement for 2025 was issued on 12 November 2024 and the one for 2026 on 4 November 2025, so a planner can rely on the timetable even before the dates exist: build the plan on the lunar timing and your supplier's own answer, then check it against the official arrangement when it appears in November.

And ask early. A supplier asked in October about its shutdown gives you a considered answer; one asked in the second week of January gives you the answer that gets you off the phone.