Chinese New Year 2027: Cut-Off Dates and What to Book Before December

Chinese New Year falls on 6 February 2027, but the factories that matter to your order will start closing in mid-January, and the vessels that carry the last pre-holiday cargo will be full by the end of December.

The holiday itself is one week. The disruption around it runs closer to six, and it is planned for in November, not January.

The real calendar

Chinese New Year is not a single date in the logistics calendar. It is a sequence of four events that overlap.

Factories close first. Most begin releasing workers two to three weeks before the holiday, and many stop accepting new orders earlier than that because they cannot finish them.

Ports then congest. Every shipper tries to load in the same window, which produces a spike in gate moves, trucking shortages and missed vessel cut-offs in the two weeks before the holiday.

Carriers blank sailings during and after the holiday, because demand collapses. That removes capacity from a schedule that was already tight.

And then the backlog clears in the second half of February, when factories restart at partial capacity and every shipment deferred in January tries to move at once.

What actually ships before the holiday

Not everything. Cargo that is already produced and gated in by mid-January generally moves. Cargo still in production in mid-January generally does not, regardless of what the booking says.

The constraint is not vessel space in the last week, it is factory output in the three weeks before. A supplier that promises a 25 January completion is usually promising something they cannot deliver once workers start leaving.

This is why the useful planning question in November is not what sails on 1 February, but what will be finished by 10 January.

The cut-off sequence to plan against

Work backwards from the holiday, in weeks rather than dates, because the exact cut-offs vary by carrier and port each year.

Six weeks out, roughly late December: book the space and confirm the allocation in writing. This is the point at which rates for pre-holiday sailings start to move.

Four weeks out, roughly early January: confirm production completion dates with each supplier, and confirm that raw materials are on hand. Suppliers who are waiting on components will not finish.

Two weeks out: gate in. Containers that arrive at the terminal in the final week are the ones most likely to be rolled, and there is no later sailing to recover on.

One week out: nothing new should be starting. If a booking is still being created at this point, it is a post-holiday shipment with a pre-holiday label on it.

Two practical additions to the sequence. Book trucking capacity for the pre-holiday weeks at the same time you book the vessel, because drayage tightens before terminal space does. And confirm the carrier's blank sailing plan for the two weeks after the holiday before you commit to an arrival date.

Products with long production lead times

Furniture, machinery, custom cabinetry and anything with a finishing stage are the categories where January promises fail most often, because they have the longest tail between order and container.

For those categories the planning horizon is not 6 February. It is the first week of December, when the production slot has to be secured.

Goods with short production cycles, packaging materials, basic hardware and stock items, can run later. But they compete for the same vessel space, so the booking still needs to be early.

The post-holiday arrival gap

The disruption does not end when factories reopen. Vessels that blanked sailings leave a gap in arrival schedules through late February and March.

Importers who planned for a 1 March restock often find that the first available sailing after the holiday arrives in mid-March, and that the vessel is carrying everyone else's deferred cargo as well.

On the U.S. side this shows up as a second congestion event at the destination ports, which is why the demurrage exposure in March can be worse than in January.

The second-half-of-February surge is worth planning for explicitly. Factories restart at partial capacity, so a supplier that promised full output on the first working day is usually delivering at sixty to seventy percent for a fortnight.

A planning table to fill in

For each open order, record four dates: production completion confirmed by the supplier, gate-in deadline at the origin port, vessel cut-off, and estimated arrival at the destination port.

Then add one line: earliest date the goods must be on a shelf. If that line is earlier than the estimated arrival plus your inland transit, the order needs to move, and it needs to move in November.

The importers who come through the holiday without a disruption are not the ones with the best carrier relationship. They are the ones who wrote those four dates down in November and acted on the first one that slipped.

If you are already behind

By early January some orders are already late, and the useful question changes from how do I ship everything to what do I ship first.

Rank by margin and by replenishment urgency, not by order date. A high-margin SKU that sells through in three weeks is worth air freight. A low-margin SKU with eight weeks of cover can wait for the post-holiday sailing.

Then split the shipment deliberately. Sending part of an order by air and part by sea is often cheaper than sending all of it late, because the air portion protects the shelf and the sea portion protects the margin.

Every year the same sentence appears in February: the factory said it would be ready. The planning work that prevents it happens eleven weeks earlier, and it takes about an hour per open order.