Happy New Year!
As we are turning our calendars to 2019, I’d like to share with you the 2019 Chinese Public Holiday Calendar so you can plan ahead if you’re sourcing products from China.
As you may know, Chinese holidays fall on different dates every year (kind of like Easter or Thanksgiving) because they are based on the lunar calendar.
Long story short, here are the official public holidays in China below. Chinese New Year or Spring Festival is the biggie. Despite officially only being 7 days, in actuality workers will leave work much earlier than the official start and return much later (if at all). So the actual impact could be UP TO A MONTH.
Furthermore, the length of each holiday is not fixed every year. Certain holidays have been shortened from prior years. For example the Labor day holiday in May used to be a weeklong holiday but now it is only 3 days.
To make things even more confusing, for certain holidays there are additional work make-up days before or after the holiday so workers will be expected to work on the weekend in order to get more continuous days off during the week. For example for (Western) New Year’s day, the holiday is for 3 days from 12/30 to 1/1 but Sat 12/29 is a workday! I know, things can get confusing here in China!
Best practice: So plan ahead and keep this handy if you’re expecting a shipment around these dates. Interestingly enough, many suppliers themselves aren’t on top of these dates as they are quoting you shipping lead times (happens more often than you’d think) so I would be proactive to ask if those dates include XYZ holiday as you can find below.
To make things easier for you I’ve included a calendar entry for the dates which you can add automatically to your calendar on your smartphone or computer.
You can signup to get it here.
2019 Chinese Public Holidays
| Holiday | Dates | Total Days |
| New year’s Day | Dec 30 to Jan 1 | 3 |
| Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) | Feb 4 to Feb 10 | 7 |
| Tomb Sweeping Day | April 5 to April 7 | 3 |
| Labor Day | May 1 | 1 |
| Dragon Boat Festival | June 7 to June 9 | 3 |
| Mid Autumn Festival | Sept 13 to Sept 15 | 3 |
| National Day | Oct 1 to Oct 7 | 7 |
Good luck and have a great year ahead!
Gary
