CNY 2027 Order Deadline Calculator
Chinese New Year 2027 begins Saturday, February 6 — 11 days earlier than 2026. If you planned last year's order in mid-January and shipped fine, that same schedule this season misses the boat. This calculator maps your lead time onto the real shutdown calendar — when workers actually leave, when export trucks actually stop, and when lines actually run at full speed again.
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Your last safe order date
The real 2027 shutdown calendar
The official holiday is 8 days. Your supplier's production reality is closer to five weeks of disruption. Plan against this, not the State Council table:
| What | When (2027) | What actually happens |
|---|---|---|
| Workers start heading home | ~Jan 18 – Feb 3 | Line staff leave in waves on staggered train tickets; overtime capacity disappears first, then second shifts. Output quietly drops 2–3 weeks before the holiday. |
| Courier / trucker cutoff | ~Jan 29 | Export trucking and customs declaration slow to a crawl; final sailings overbooked. Book space 2–3 weeks earlier than you think you need. |
| Official holiday | Feb 6 – ~Feb 13 | Expected 8 days (State Council schedule typically published Oct–Dec). Offices closed, everyone off. |
| Skeleton crews return | ~Feb 14 – 20 | Lantern Festival (Feb 20): 30–60% line attendance. Assembly runs, but yields suffer — the worst week to start a new SKU. |
| Full production restart | ~Mar 1 | The real restart for most export factories. Anything promised "right after the holiday" lands here, not Feb 14. |
| Price adjustment window | March | New-year quotes move up 3–10%: labor, raw materials, and RMB direction all reprice in this window. Lock repeat-order pricing before you go silent for the holiday. |
What buyers get wrong
- "The holiday is only 8 days." For you, the importer, it's a 3–5 week production canyon (late Jan → early March) plus a February of partial attendance. The calculator above uses the conservative trucker cutoff; your factory's real last production day is earlier than the day they quote you.
- Accepting goods rushed in the final fortnight. Pre-CNY rush jobs are the classic quality disaster: new temp workers, double shifts, skipped inspections. If your goods-ready date lands inside Jan 20 – Feb 3, score your supplier's red flags first and put a third-party QC hold on the shipment.
- Radio silence ≠ ignored. Between Jan 25 and Feb 20 your emails sit unread. Send your engineering changes, artwork approvals, and PO confirmations before Jan 15 — or expect a mid-March resolution.
- Repricing shock. A quote from December is dead by March. Lock a volume commitment at pre-CNY pricing with a validity clause — one of the 25 templates in the Playbook handles exactly this.
Two ways to play it
- The wall play (pre-CNY): order early, land goods before the canyon, sleep through February with inventory in your warehouse. Costs capital; buys certainty.
- The bridge play (post-CNY): place the PO in November–December at old pricing, agree a March ex-works date, skip the rush-job risk entirely. You wait, but you wait cheap. Note the March repricing — your locked price is the whole point.
Running tight? Landed Cost Calculator tells you what an air-freight rescue costs per unit — usually it argues for the bridge play.
Free to embed on your site: <iframe src="https://assassinationss.github.io/cny-deadline.html" width="100%" height="1300"></iframe> · Next: score your supplier with the Red-Flag Checker