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How much extra stock to order before Chinese New Year 2027

Every forwarder publishes this calendar and stops at order early. Early by how much is the only part of it that costs money.

Marcus VolstedCo-founder, Restocio Published 10 September 2026Updated 10 September 202610 min read

Every source on this page was opened and read, and each one is dated in the Sources section at the foot.

Order what you would normally order, plus your daily sales rate multiplied by the number of days your factory is out of action. For Chinese New Year 2027 that gap runs roughly 49 to 63 days from mid January, so a product selling 8 units a day needs around 440 extra units on top of the ordinary order. The date is public and fixed. The quantity is arithmetic.

Chinese New Year 2027 falls on Saturday 6 February. The Hong Kong government published its 2027 general holidays on 15 May 2026, with the substitute general holiday on 9 February because the second day lands on a Sunday.

A supply outage, not a demand spike

Most planning guides file this holiday next to Black Friday, and the two are opposites. A discount weekend is a demand event: customers do something unusual on one date and the hard part is guessing how much. Chinese New Year is a supply event. Your customers behave exactly as always, and what stops is your ability to buy more. So there is no forecast to make. You size it from the calendar, counting the days you cannot order into and buying them in advance.

Which is why the holiday itself is a red herring. China's statutory Spring Festival holiday is four paid days, raised from three by a State Council amendment effective 1 January 2025, per the law firm Morgan Lewis, 18 November 2024. Four days is a rounding error in an import plan. Everything expensive happens either side of them.

Where the days actually go

The first clock is the workforce. China's Spring Festival travel rush, chunyun, is an officially bounded 40-day window opening 15 days before the new year and closing 25 days after. In 2026 it ran from 2 February to 13 March, per the State Council's own English portal on 22 February 2026. Apply that rule to 6 February 2027 and you get roughly 22 January to 2 March. Nothing is announced for 2027 yet, so treat it as arithmetic, not a schedule.

Then comes the production ramp, the clock that sets your order date. SEKO Logistics, writing on 6 August 2026, puts the pre-holiday slowdown three to four weeks ahead of the date, around 9 to 16 January 2027, with full shutdown between 30 January and 14 February. Factories reopen from about 20 February at roughly 35% of normal workforce and reach full capacity somewhere between 6 and 20 March.

Put those edges together and you have the only number this post needs. Mid January, the last day a factory realistically finishes your goods, to the first three weeks of March, when it produces at a normal rate again, is 49 to 63 days. Work from the middle unless your supplier tells you otherwise.

Working 6 February backward

Shapes for a made-to-order Asian supplier, not quotes. Move every row by a week once your own factory answers an email.

Read the last two rows against today rather than against the holiday. What you will have on the shelf in March 2027 is being decided this autumn, and the part nobody hands you is the quantity.

The quantity, which is where every other page stops

You are not buying the whole wait. Your next order takes a lead time to arrive in any ordinary month, and that lead time already sits inside your normal quantity. What the holiday adds is a stretch of calendar in which placing an order buys you nothing, and that is the only thing you multiply.

Use the rate you would use for any reorder, per variant, counted only over days the product was in stock. A rate taken from calendar days makes anything that keeps selling out look slow, the last mistake you want going into this.

Skip anything already carrying more days of stock than the gap, and anything not made in China. Vietnam is not the exit it looks like, though, because Tet runs on the same lunar calendar.

Units are rarely what stops people. Cash is. Every product from one supplier hits the same deadline in the same fortnight, so the extra lands as a single payment months before any of it sells. That is the mechanism behind being profitable with nothing in the bank.

Why "order 25% extra" cannot be right

Nearly every page about Chinese New Year answers with a percentage. That is the wrong unit, and one division shows why.

Four merchants, one closure, four different answers. A percentage is measured against your order and the outage against the calendar, so they line up only by accident. “Order 25% extra” is right for a merchant who buys about 220 days of stock at a time, and wrong for everybody else.

Air freight does not skip the factory

Anyone who has been through an ordinary stockout knows the escape route: count the days you would be empty before the boat lands, and move just those units onto a faster mode. That is the whole air versus sea split, and it works because the goods already exist.

A closed factory breaks it. Production sits ahead of every route and delays all of them equally, so if your goods have not been made there is nothing at the airport to load, and several dollars a kilo buys you nothing. Of every deadline in an importer's year, this is the one with no expensive rescue behind it. The exception is a supplier who ships from stock, where air works until the warehouse closes and the constraint becomes freight space instead.

How this maps onto Restocio

The two numbers this needs already exist in the app: days of stock, and an order deadline that subtracts your supplier's production days, because goods that have to be made cannot ship early.

Order quantity is built in three steps, and it pays to know which is which. A seed sizes the refill from your coverage target and today's stock, a projection re-sizes it on what your stock will be the day the boat lands, and faster freight is then added on top rather than carved out. The recommendation is the sum of all three, so a spreadsheet that stops at the seed under-orders the products under the most time pressure, as our replenishment guide works through in full.

To make that chain see the closure, put the gap where the app already looks. Raise the supplier's production days by the days the factory will be out, for the cycle that spans the holiday, then set it back. Both the deadline and the projected quantity come off that same lead time, so both move. Put the days in a safety buffer instead and the deadline stays where it was, which is the mistake the lead-time post is about.

What none of this can tell you

We plan from your sales history and from the lead times you and your suppliers give us. Your factory's actual holiday schedule is not something we know, and no software does. Every date on this page is a planning window built from published sources, not a promise from your supplier. Ask your factory for their last shipping day and their reopening date in writing, and plan on whichever is later.

Two smaller limits, plainly. Restocio has no per-supplier holiday calendar today, which is why the step above is a manual edit rather than a button. And the transit half is not ours to promise either. The freight forwarder Forto put China to Europe sea freight at 30 to 45 days and more on 13 May 2026, with Cape of Good Hope routing adding an estimated 10 to 15 days, and that range moves with the lane and the season. Industry schedule reliability was 62.6% in June 2026, with an average delay of 5.31 days on sailings that did arrive late, per Sea-Intelligence's Global Liner Performance report issue 179, 27 July 2026. Treat any single transit number, this page's included, as a placeholder until your forwarder replaces it.

Common questions

How much extra stock should I order before Chinese New Year?

Multiply your daily sales rate by the number of days your factory is out of action, and add that to the order you would have placed anyway. For Chinese New Year 2027 the outage runs roughly 49 to 63 days from mid January, so a product selling 8 units a day needs around 440 extra units at a 55-day gap. Do it per variant, using a sales rate counted only over the days the product was actually in stock.

When is the order deadline for Chinese New Year 2027?

Chinese New Year 2027 falls on Saturday 6 February. SEKO Logistics puts the pre-holiday slowdown at 9 to 16 January 2027, which is the last date goods will realistically be finished. Subtract your production time from that: mid December 2026 for a 30-day run, early December for a 45-day run. If your supplier ships from stock, the binding constraint is freight space in January rather than production.

Can I use air freight if I miss the Chinese New Year cut-off?

Not if your goods are made to order. Production sits ahead of every shipping mode and delays all of them equally, so a plane cannot carry something the factory has not made. Air freight only rescues you when the supplier ships from stock, and even then only until the warehouse closes. This is the one deadline in the importing year with no expensive way out.

Should I just order 25% or 30% extra like most guides say?

A percentage is the wrong unit. Divide the gap by the days of stock you normally buy at a time and you get the real uplift: a 55-day gap is plus 183% for a merchant buying 30 days at a time and plus 46% for one buying 120 days. A flat 25% is right only for someone buying about 220 days of stock per order. Work in days and convert to units at the end.

Do I need extra stock for every product?

No. Anything made outside the affected region needs nothing, and anything already carrying more days of stock than the length of the closure will sail through it untouched. The add-on belongs on fast movers with a short ordering cycle. Moving production to Vietnam does not exempt you either, since Tet runs on the same lunar calendar, so ask that supplier for their own dates.

How long does the factory shutdown actually last?

Longer than the holiday. China's statutory Spring Festival holiday is four paid days, but SEKO Logistics puts the 2027 slowdown at 9 to 16 January, the full shutdown at 30 January to 14 February, reopening from about 20 February at roughly 35% of normal workforce, and full capacity between 6 and 20 March. The workforce itself is in motion across an officially bounded 40-day travel window, which for 2027 works out at roughly 22 January to 2 March.

Sources

Every source below was opened and read on the date shown against it. Rules, rates and schedules change, so check the current page before you act on a number that matters. If anything here is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will correct it.

• Hong Kong SAR Government, General holidays for 2027 published (15 May 2026) (read 10 September 2026)
• The State Council of the PRC, China sees record daily passenger flow in Spring Festival travel rush (22 February 2026) (read 10 September 2026)
• Morgan Lewis, China Adds Two Days of Paid Statutory Holidays (18 November 2024) (read 10 September 2026)
• SEKO Logistics, Lunar New Year supply chain planning guide for Asia sourcing (6 August 2026) (read 10 September 2026)
• Forto, Shipping from China to Europe in 2026 (13 May 2026) (read 10 September 2026)
• Sea-Intelligence, Global Liner Performance report issue 179 (27 July 2026) (read 10 September 2026)

Marcus Volsted

Co-founder, Restocio

Marcus co-founded Restocio and works on it daily with a Swedish importer who plans their purchasing in it every working day. Restocio is built in Sweden by two founders, one Swedish and one Danish, and Marcus is the Danish one. Most of the examples on this blog come from that store's real ordering decisions rather than from a textbook. Why we are building it.

Related reading

• Supplier lead time, and why yours is probably too short
• Air or sea freight, and how to work out the split
• Black Friday inventory planning, counted backward
• Shopify replenishment, end to end