The Chinese factory calendar

Here is the 2026 arrangement as the State Council published it, because the exact shape is the useful part and the make-up days are the half everybody drops.

New Year's Day, 1 to 3 January, three days — with Sunday 4 January a working day. Spring Festival, 15 to 23 February, nine days — with Saturday 14 February and Saturday 28 February working days. Qingming, 4 to 6 April, three days. Labour Day, 1 to 5 May, five days — with Saturday 9 May a working day. Dragon Boat, 19 to 21 June, three days. Mid-Autumn, 25 to 27 September, three days. National Day, 1 to 7 October, seven days — with Sunday 20 September and Saturday 10 October working days.

Now look at what September and October do in 2026. Mid-Autumn ends on Sunday 27 September and National Day starts on Thursday 1 October. That is ten non-working days inside the thirteen from 25 September to 7 October, with exactly three working days in between — and it lands squarely on the weeks that carry pre-Christmas shipping. That is arithmetic on the published notice rather than a forecast, and it is the sort of thing that is obvious in October and invisible in July.

No dates are printed here for 2027, because the State Council has not published that arrangement. The timetable itself is reliable, though: the 2025 arrangement was issued on 12 November 2024 and the 2026 one on 4 November 2025, so a planner can expect the next one in early November and should build the year's calendar then.

It is tempting to treat them as one category. They behave differently, and the difference is about who goes where.

Spring Festival is the one that empties the factory. It is the once-a-year journey home for a workforce that mostly lives a long way from where it works, so the disruption is longer than the holiday at both ends and the reopening is a curve rather than a date. That has its own page and it is the only one of the seven that deserves one.

The long October run is a public holiday, not a migration on the same scale. It closes offices, banks, government departments and much of the freight trade for a working week, and it moves an enormous number of people around the country as tourists rather than as returning workers. What proportion of factories run through it is not something this page will assert: it varies by factory, by order book and by year, and nobody measures it.

The three-day runs are the ones that catch people out. Qingming, Dragon Boat and Mid-Autumn are not on a Western calendar, they are announced in a document most foreign buyers never see, and a three-day run plus its adjacent weekend removes most of a working week from customs, forwarding and inspection. A buyer who did not know it was happening experiences it as an unexplained silence and an inexplicably late container.

And Labour Day is now a five-day run, not the long weekend it used to be — one of the two days added by the 2024 reform went there. It is the sort of detail that is easy to be a year out of date on.

Most buyers brace for a production delay and get a logistics one. Production is the part of the chain most likely to absorb a holiday, because a factory can work around it, bring people back early, or simply run a shorter month. The things that cannot absorb it are the things that run on the public calendar.

Freight. Sailing schedules, space allocation, empty-container availability and haulage all thin out around a national run, and they thicken with a rush on either side. No rate or percentage is published here; the direction is not in dispute and the number is not measurable from outside a booking desk.

Customs and government offices. Export declaration, inspection where a scheme requires it, certificates of origin and anything else that needs a stamp from a public body all stop with the calendar and restart with a queue. A shipment that is ready on the last working day is not the same as a shipment that has cleared.

Third-party inspection. Inspectors are people with the same holidays. A booking that assumes an inspector is available in the week of a run will be the last thing to break, and it breaks at the point where you have no time left to fix anything.

So the rule of thumb is: a holiday inside your PRODUCTION window is a scheduling problem, and a holiday inside your SHIPPING window is a cost. Move the second one out of the way first.

Build the calendar once, in November. When the following year's arrangement is published, put all seven runs and all the make-up working days into whatever you actually plan in. It takes ten minutes and it is the only way the three-day holidays stop being surprises.

Then ask your suppliers for their own days. The published arrangement is what the state sets; a factory's actual days can be shorter or longer, and its office and its production line can differ from each other. Ask specifically, in writing, and ask for the line rather than the company.

Book freight before the run, not into it. A booking made in the week before a national holiday is competing with everybody else's. And a container that misses its sailing does not wait a day; it waits for the next sailing on that service.

Do not put a critical gate immediately after a run. An inspection, a first-article approval or a sign-off scheduled for the first day back is scheduled for the day when the fewest people are at their desks and the queue is longest.

And keep it proportionate. Most holidays do not need a special plan; they need to be visible. The failure mode is not "we did not have a contingency", it is "nobody knew it was a holiday" — and that one is fixed by a calendar rather than by a process.