Chinese New Year and your haul

Chinese New Year 2027 is on Feb 6, 2027, 130 days away. The travel period that stops shipping starts Jan 22, 2027 — so the date to have ordered by is Jan 21, 2027, 114 days from now.

What actually happens to your haul

Chinese New Year is not a long weekend. It sits inside the Spring Festival travel period — Chunyun — which begins 15 days before New Year's Day and runs for about 40 days. It is the largest annual human migration in the world: 539 million passenger trips were forecast for the 2026 period. The people who pack your order, drive it to the agent's warehouse and load the international pallet are on that migration.

So the disruption has three stages, and the dates people quote for "the holiday" only describe the middle one. First, sellers stop shipping and stop answering — many list a last shipping date and then go home. Then the official holiday itself, when the agent's warehouse is thinly staffed and QC photos slow to a trickle. Then the backlog: everyone's orders leave at once when sellers return, and international lines take weeks to clear the surge. A parcel can be "in transit" for most of March.

How to plan around it

The dates below are derived from the sourced travel window, not from any one agent's notice. Individual sellers announce their own cutoffs, usually in their listing or storefront banner, and those win.

1. Have everything ordered by Jan 21, 2027That is the day before the travel period begins. Goods ordered before then have the best chance of leaving the seller while the seller is still there. It is not a guarantee — a seller who has already closed will not ship — but it is the edge of the window.
2. Get it to the warehouse, then wait to shipIf your items reach the agent's warehouse before the holiday, they are safe and stored. You do not have to ship internationally before the break; you have to have bought before it. Storage is the point of an agent.
3. Expect nothing to move between Jan 22, 2027 and Mar 3, 2027Treat the whole window as dead time. QC photos, seller replies, domestic courier scans — all of it slows or stops. Chasing the agent inside the window does not speed anything up.
4. Do not ship into the backlog on the fastest lineThe first week or two after the window ends is when every delayed parcel in China ships at once. Paying for the priority line into that surge often buys nothing. If it is not urgent, let the surge pass.

What buyers report each year

This part is experience rather than a published schedule, so read it as what people consistently describe rather than as a rule. Sellers tend to stop shipping somewhere in the week before New Year's Day and come back one to three weeks after it, with smaller Weidian sellers away longest. Agent warehouses usually keep receiving parcels through the break but QC and outbound shipping run on skeleton staff. International lines are the last to recover, because the backlog hits them all at once.

Agents publish their own holiday notices, usually in January, with exact warehouse dates. This page does not print any agent's dates, because none were published at the time it was written and a guessed date is worse than none. When your agent posts theirs, those are the dates to use.

The next 13 months

Every disruption with a confirmed date. Chinese New Year is listed as its whole travel window rather than the single day, because the single day is not what delays your parcel.

Swipe sideways to see the whole table →

Three smaller lunar holidays — Qingming, Dragon Boat and Mid-Autumn — are one-day breaks whose dates shift each year. They are not listed with dates because no per-year schedule was sourced for them; expect a day or two of quiet around each.

Golden Week and the sales

National Day on October 1 is officially three days, stretched to a full week by the government swapping the adjacent weekends — the same mechanism that turns Spring Festival into a Golden Week. It is a real pause but a short one: sellers are back within days, and there is no migration behind it.

The sales are the opposite problem. 618 in June, Singles' Day on 11.11 and Double 12 are not holidays at all; nobody goes home. They jam sellers and domestic couriers with volume, and buyers report a week or two of slower shipping and QC around each. Prices on the platforms drop during them, which is why people order into the jam on purpose.

Where these numbers come from

The dates are official and each is traceable to the source listed. What sellers and agents do around them is reported experience, and is labelled as such above.

• Chinese New Year — dates by year (Wikipedia)
• Chunyun — the 40-day Spring Festival travel period (Wikipedia)
• Public holidays in China — official days and the weekend-swap Golden Weeks (Wikipedia)