Chinese New Year 2027: Factory Shutdown Dates and Order Cut-Offs

Chinese New Year is the one date in the sourcing calendar that moves every order placed after it. For 2027 the festival falls on Saturday 6 February, and a factory in Yunhe County — China's wooden toy cluster — will not be running at full capacity from mid-January until roughly mid-March. This page sets out the dates we actually stop and restart, the last order cut-offs for European and North American delivery before the holiday, and what changes if you miss them.

The dates that matter in 2027

Two things are fixed and one is not. The festival date is fixed. The pattern of when factories stop and restart is stable enough to plan against. The official national holiday is announced by China's State Council each November, so the exact public holiday dates for 2027 are confirmed only a few weeks before they happen — which is precisely why buyers who wait for the announcement are already three weeks late.

The table below is what we plan our own 2026/2027 production calendar against. Treat the official row as "to be announced" and the practical rows as the ones that decide whether your container sails in January or in April.

2027 Chinese New Year calendar for a Yunhe wooden toy factory

What actually stops, and what does not

A China-based factory does not stop on one day. It winds down, and the winding down is the part buyers underestimate.

What stops first: the workforce. Most production staff in Yunhe travel back to other provinces for the holiday. Travel demand is heaviest in the last two weeks before the festival, so people leave early. In practice the last full production week at our plant is in the first half of January, even though the festival itself is in February.

What stops with it: painting and drying lines, because they need continuous skilled staffing; the sub-contractors that do specialist work such as metal fittings, fabric components and some laser steps; independent AQL inspection companies, which are booked out one to two weeks before the shutdown and close completely over it; and new-sample development, which needs engineers rather than only machine time.

What does not stop: quotations, order confirmation and deposits. Which is the practical point — a deposit paid in December does two useful things while the machines are idle. It reserves FSC timber at pre-holiday prices rather than at post-holiday prices, and it puts your order at the front of the queue for the restart, ahead of every buyer who waited for the January rush.

What restarts slowly: everything. The plant reopens one to two weeks after the official holiday ends, but reopening is not the same as running flat out. Staff return over a two to three week window, sub-contractor queues have to clear, and inspection capacity has to be booked again. For planning purposes, assume full capacity is back around mid-to-late March 2027.

Order cut-off table: place the PO by this date

The table assumes a catalogue item, a standard 30-day production run, no new tooling, sailing from Ningbo, port-to-port transit of 30–40 days to Northern Europe and 20–30 days to the US West Coast, plus one to two weeks for destination clearance and inland delivery. Custom tooling, new packaging or a new timber specification adds two to four weeks and should be planned a month earlier than the dates below.

US West Coast: subtract roughly ten days from each arrival date, because the sea leg is shorter. US East Coast: treat it as similar to Northern Europe. If your order needs a specific carrier or an inspection certificate dated before the holiday, move the cut-off forward by three weeks.

Read the table the other way round and the message is blunt: for most European importers, the practical deadline to be on the water before Chinese New Year is the second week of January 2027, and to be sure of that, the purchase order has to be with us in the first half of November 2026. Miss it and the next realistic arrival is mid-May, not March.

Why the calendar bites harder on wooden toys than on plastics

Chinese New Year affects every Chinese factory. It affects wooden toy production in four specific ways that are worth knowing before you negotiate dates.

• Timber is bought before it is needed. FSC-certified beech, birch and pine come from sawmills that also close. Ordering material after the holiday means queueing behind every other factory that is also restarting, and mill lead time is itself two to four weeks.
• Painting and drying depend on weather, not just on machines. Water-based finishes need controlled temperature and humidity. February in Zhejiang is cold and damp, and a plant coming back on a partial crew runs its drying lines at reduced throughput for the first weeks.
• Sanding runs in stages. A quality wooden toy is sanded two to three times between coats, not once. Every stage is labour, and labour is the resource that leaves first and returns last.
• Child-safety testing is a hard gate. EN 71 and ASTM F963 test reports, chemical migration results and the CPC documentation for US importers are issued per item and per production run. If a coating or a timber supplier changes, the test has to be repeated — so a rushed post-holiday restart can move a shipment by weeks on its own.

A buyer's checklist for the January to March window

1. Confirm the festival date in your own calendar and work backwards from your shelf date, not from your purchase date.
2. Decide by mid-October whether Q1 stock is pre-holiday or post-holiday. Both are viable; drifting between them is what hurts.
3. Pay the deposit before the factory stops if you want pre-holiday timber prices and priority on the restart.
4. Freeze the specification early — artwork, packaging dieline, age labelling and the target market's test requirements. Specification changes after the holiday restart are the single most common cause of a missed spring window.
5. Book inspection capacity at the same time you book production, not when the goods are nearly ready.
6. Ask your factory to confirm, in writing, the last date it can accept a vessel booking, not just the last production date.
7. If you sell into the EU, remember that the responsible person and the technical file are your obligations: the factory provides the test reports and declarations, but the file has to exist before the goods arrive, not after.

If it helps, send us your target arrival month and we will tell you the latest PO date we can work with for that specific item, including the inspection and documentation steps.

Download the 2027 calendar

Both files carry the same dates as the tables above, ready to drop into a planning sheet or forward to your own forwarder. Reusing the dates in an article, a buyer guide or a logistics note? Please credit Yunhe Kid Times Toys & Games Factory (Bettermu), China and link back to this page.

• 2027 Chinese New Year calendar (CSV) – one row per milestone plus the four EU order cut-off dates, for your own spreadsheet.
• 2027 Chinese New Year calendar (PDF, one page) – printable version with the milestone table, the cut-off table and the buyer checklist.

Related pages: Wooden toy manufacturer in China (factory page) · MOQ, samples and lead time · Wooden toy price guide · How to choose a wooden toy manufacturer · Contact and quotation