How to Plan Shipments According to China's Production Calendar

Chinese New Year 2027 falls on February 6, and official holidays legally begin on the eve, February 5, lasting at least six days. How long they will actually last, the State Council will announce only in late autumn. For a factory, this means scheduled downtime plus several weeks of ramp-up on both ends. For your shipment, this means recalculating the dispatch date well in advance while your supplier is still answering emails.

Factories shut down before the official date and resume later

The official calendar of non-working days in China is approved by the PRC State Council, setting the framework for the entire country. However, factories operate not by the government schedule, but by their workshop capacity and workforce—many workers travel home to other provinces for several weeks, well beyond the official nine days. Very few suppliers accept new orders into the current production cycle right up to the first calendar day off, and they resume full capacity well after the final holiday day.

In January 2026, Kommersant, citing market participants, estimated the actual logistics slowdown window at approximately two weeks around the New Year date, despite only nine official days off. A Digital FEA expert quoted by Kommersant in the same article described the impact even more bluntly: Chinese New Year is not a week of downtime, but a full month, counting from the last batch the factory managed to dispatch to the first one it takes into production after the holidays.

We factor this very window of about a month into our calculations, spanning both sides of the official holidays. If you place an order right up against the holiday boundary, your most critical deadline is the exact date your supplier stops accepting orders for that production cycle. Only the supplier can tell you that date.

How to calculate the order placement deadline

There is no single number of weeks that fits all cases because every shipment has its own supplier and transit leg. However, the formula works for any shipment.

Add together the manufacturing time for your batch with a specific supplier, a buffer in case they stop accepting orders earlier without notice, the time needed for freight booking and the transit itself along the selected route, plus a post-holiday recovery allowance—ranging from a few days after short holidays to two weeks after extended ones. The date you get by counting this total time backward from your required delivery date is your order placement deadline.

Phased planning timelines are published by freight forwarders like SEKO Logistics and iContainers. Their numbers vary because they are calculated for their own standard routes.

Vladivostok, Zabaikalsk, and Novorossiysk are not factored into those schedules, so applying someone else's timeline to your shipment will not work. We calculate this period specifically for your shipment: route, port, mode of transport, and actual cargo readiness date at the supplier.

Official Chinese holiday calendar for 2026

The official public holidays in China for 2026 were approved by the PRC State Council on November 4, 2025. We review this schedule each time it is released and calculate customer buffers based on it. Seven holiday periods and working weekend shifts are arranged so that official holidays form a single extended block rather than scattered short breaks.

The Spring Festival in 2026 lasts nine days, a record for the PRC. The extended days off are compensated by working Saturdays on February 14 and 28. The Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day remain two separate holidays this year. There are only three working days between them, September 28–30, and it is easy to mistake them for an ongoing holiday break. How many days off does China accumulate over the year across all seven periods? Thirty-three days, although some would have fallen on regular weekends anyway.

The State Council publishes this schedule anew every year in late autumn or early winter. Dates for the Spring Festival, Dragon Boat Festival, and Mid-Autumn Festival shift each year because they follow the lunar calendar. If you are reading this article in a year other than 2026, check the latest State Council announcement for that year and calculate buffers using the same formula. You do not need to recalculate days from this table. The buffer principles remain the same; only the calendar dates change.

What is known about 2027 before the State Council decree

As of September 2026, the holiday schedule for 2027 is not yet available. The State Council issues it anew each year, and the publication window varies more than commonly thought. Over the past four years, announcements were released on December 8, 2022; October 25, 2023; November 12, 2024; and November 4, 2025—a spread of more than six weeks. We do not wait for the decree to start planning, and we advise you not to either.

Calculations can be made because part of the holiday schedule is enshrined in law and does not depend on administrative decisions. The Provisions on Public Holidays revised in November 2024 established specific days for each holiday, and Article 6 requires compensating any public holiday falling on a Saturday or Sunday with an adjacent workday. The dates of the festivals themselves are calculated according to the lunar calendar a century ahead. Together, this provides baseline holiday blocks for 2027 that will not be shortened.

This is the minimum baseline, not the finalized schedule. The State Council usually extends holidays using working weekend days; over the past two years, the Spring Festival lasted eight to nine days. The law does not guarantee this duration, so plan for the minimum and adjust once the decree is issued. Keep in mind that since the 2024 reform, Spring Festival holidays officially begin on New Year's Eve, which in 2027 falls on Friday, February 5.

Reference websites often diverge specifically on the eve date. For the 2027 Spring Festival, they quote three different windows: February 5–11, February 6–12, and February 6–14—with one website claiming its version is official while contradicting itself. We do not use unverified dates in our calculations or share them with clients until the State Council issues its official notice.

Two points are already clear. There are two weeks between the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day in 2027, meaning there will be no combined Golden Week like in 2020. Additionally, the spring travel rush (Chunyun) around the Spring Festival officially lasts forty days—fifteen days before and twenty-five days after. By this formula, in 2027 it will span roughly from January 22 to March 2. Exact dates are announced separately, typically in December or January.

Why freight rates and vessel space depend on more than just the calendar

Before holidays, all shippers in China try to dispatch cargo within the same window, yet vessel calls and available capacity are strictly limited. Some ocean carriers blank sailings due to low demand during the holidays themselves, resulting in reduced available capacity in the weeks immediately before and after the holiday despite surging demand. Freight rates surge precisely because of this imbalance, shifting weekly.

Therefore, the booking window before a major Chinese holiday narrows gradually rather than all at once. First, it makes sense to lock in the plan and volume, then book vessel space, and subsequently confirm cargo readiness and shipping documents. During the final week, only shipments that are fully ready with complete paperwork can be accommodated.

Freight forwarder Flexport illustrates this using Chinese New Year as an example. Sea and air freight rates begin rising as early as mid-December ahead of the February holiday and typically normalize one to two weeks after it, while factories operate at reduced capacity for roughly a month in total around the festive period. According to Kommersant, at the peak of the last Spring Festival, freight rates for high-cube containers from China reached $8,000—nearly double the standard rate—while ocean transit times, normally within 30 days, stretched up to ten weeks.

We do not lock in rates a month before booking. Spot rates fluctuate faster than internal budgets can be approved. If your shipment falls into this window, we quote the rate strictly as of the booking date, not from the previous week.

What happens at the border and Russian warehouses when China returns from holidays

Operations recovering in China and clearing backlogs on the Russian side are separate processes that do not coincide chronologically. While Chinese factories are only ramping up to standard production, batches dispatched before the holidays arrive en masse at border crossings and seaports. Inbound freight flow into Russia does not normalize at the same pace as domestic activity in China.

According to Kommersant, market players cite congestion at the Zabaikalsk–Manzhouli border crossing and severe weather restrictions near Ussuriysk as key causes of delays during this period, causing road freight transit, usually taking about 25 days, to extend by 20–25%. We operate via this border point, through the ports of Vladivostok and Vostochny, and via Novorossiysk. Capacity across these routes recovers at varying speeds post-holiday, and we provide lead times specific to your chosen route as of the inquiry date.

A distinct risk during this peak involves third-party cargo rather than your own. In consolidated shipping, customs inspection of any single cargo consignment halts customs release for the entire container, and temporary storage warehouse (TSW) demurrage is billed to the cargo owner even if documentation discrepancies concern another shipper's goods. During peak seasons, when border traffic surges, the likelihood of sharing a container with problematic third-party goods is much higher. That is why our customs broker audits the full document package for our shipments in advance, well before the vessel docks or the train reaches the border checkpoint.

What to do if the timeline no longer works

Sometimes the required buffer periods exceed the remaining timeline. The order was placed late, the supplier confirmed cargo readiness later than promised, or the holidays arrived sooner than expected. In such situations, we offer clients three practical solutions; none completely eliminate delays, but they minimize losses:

• split the consignment into several dispatches, each under its own bill of lading, so that in the event of vessel rollover or third-party customs inspection, you do not risk the entire volume at once;
• for the urgent portion of the consignment, consider a faster though more costly transport leg, such as air freight instead of ocean freight, while shipping the remainder via the standard route;
• choose services with fewer transshipments and no feeder transfers during peak weeks, even if their nominal transit time is slightly longer. A nominally longer direct service often arrives on schedule more reliably than an ostensibly faster route with multiple transshipments.

If none of the options meet your timeline, the honest answer is that the order will not make this cycle. It should be scheduled for post-holiday dispatch, adding an extra one to two weeks for supply chain recovery. It is far better to acknowledge this at the planning stage than when the cargo is already stranded at the supplier's warehouse.

What we do not promise clients and why

We do not quote a fixed delivery date for a shipment overlapping Chinese holidays without a confirmed cargo readiness date from the supplier and verified capacity data for the specific route. A delivery date without these two inputs is speculation rather than a calculation, and we do not turn guesswork into promises.

We cannot control the factory's actual order cut-off date, and post-holiday queues at border checkpoints and ports depend on how many other shippers deferred cargo to the same window. Making guarantees without these factors would leave you carrying all the operational risk alone, whereas our approach is to manage it transparently together.

Instead of an arbitrary date, we provide a qualified timeline detailing what factors influence it, updating the calculation whenever cargo readiness or route bottlenecks change. This may seem less flashy than claiming 'delivery in N days', but it accurately reflects what actually happens to your cargo.

How to request a quote factoring in Chinese holidays

We have been transporting cargo from China and Southeast Asia for fourteen years, operating via our own offices in Moscow, Vladivostok, and Novorossiysk, with a licensed customs broker status and our own vehicle fleet. To calculate exactly when you should place your order, we need the shipment volume and weight, origin city, cargo readiness date, preferred transport route, and delivery destination in Russia.

Once we have these details, we apply the formula to your specific shipment and indicate the cut-off date for order placement, or advise whether splitting the cargo or using faster transport legs is necessary. Request an estimate for shipping from China factoring in upcoming holidays while your cargo readiness date can still be adjusted.