Chinese New Year 2027: plan freelance work around it

February 6, 2027, is Chinese New Year. New Year’s Eve, a mainland statutory holiday since 2025, is Friday, February 5. The Lantern Festival is Saturday, February 20. Mainland days off come from a State Council notice, and the 2027 notice had not been published on October 18, 2026. Plan the last milestone before the break and the first after it.

Those dates are lunar, so they won’t move. The strip below sets them across seven weeks, with Hong Kong’s holidays and the milestone dates we suggest.

The 2027 festival strip

Key: ● fixed lunar date (Hong Kong Observatory, 2027 calendar). ■ Hong Kong general holiday (GovHK, 2027 list). ◇ Our planning advice, not a forecast. No mainland days off are shown; see the note below.

What is fixed, and what is announced

If the strip was all you needed, you have it. The rest of the page explains where each date comes from, and why one set is still missing.

Three things set the official days off in mainland China. You can look up two of them today.

Fixed by the calendar. New Year’s Day, New Year’s Eve and the Lantern Festival follow the lunar calendar. The Hong Kong Observatory’s conversion table for 2027 puts the first day of the first lunar month on February 6 and the 15th day, the Lantern Festival, on February 20.

Set by rule. The national holiday measures name the Spring Festival days that every citizen gets off. Since January 1, 2025, when a State Council revision took effect, there have been four, and New Year’s Eve is one of them.

Two more articles explain why the real break runs longer than four days. Article 6 says a holiday that falls on a Saturday or Sunday is made up on a working day. Article 7, added in the same revision, says holidays may be arranged into a longer break by swapping rest days and drawing on paid annual leave. Except in special cases, it adds, the working stretch before or after a statutory holiday should not normally run past six days in a row.

Announced each year. The State Council General Office then decides, in a notice, which days are actually off and which weekend days become working days to pay for them. The 2026 schedule came out on November 4, 2025, and the 2025 schedule on November 12, 2024. Going back five years, the notices were published between October 25 and December 8. Each one appears on gov.cn, the central government’s website, among the State Council’s latest policy documents.

For a sense of what a notice contains, take the 2026 one. It gave nine days off for the Spring Festival, from Sunday, February 15, to Monday, February 23, 2026, and made Saturday, February 14, and Saturday, February 28, working days. The 2027 days will be whatever the 2027 notice says.

So “how long does China shut down” has a two-part answer. The law gives four days. Each year’s notice turns them into a longer break, paid for with weekend days worked. When one freelancer stops is another matter.

Planning one freelancer’s milestones

Our planning advice follows. It isn’t a forecast of when anyone stops working.

1. Set the last milestone before the break due no later than Friday, January 29, 2027, a week before New Year’s Eve.
2. Leave the week of New Year’s Eve, and the week after it, without a milestone date.
3. Set the first milestone after the break no earlier than the week after the Lantern Festival, from Monday, February 22.
4. Ask the freelancer in writing, by mid-January, which days they will work.
5. If a payment has to land before the break, send it a week earlier than you think you need to. When you count back, count working days only, and remember that the 2027 working days aren’t published yet.

Of the five, the fourth matters most. A written answer turns a national holiday into one person’s calendar, something you can hold the milestones up against. Keep the answer in the project thread, next to the milestones. The handbook chapter on working with a freelancer in China day to day covers the rest of that routine.

A few jobs can’t wait for the other side of the break. If a factory needs checking before goods ship, book the visit for January; checking a factory in China without flying there covers how. If a freelancer is buying for you on 1688, place the order early enough that the seller and the freelancer both have working days left; buying on 1688 without speaking Chinese walks through the steps.

Travel and the Hong Kong side

Two more sets of dates sit around the festival. One is still unannounced. The other affects your contract and invoices.

The travel rush (春运). The national authorities announce an official travel-rush window each year. For 2026, the National Development and Reform Commission and other departments, the Ministry of Transport among them, set it at a national teleconference on January 21, 2026. On October 18, 2026, the 2027 window had not been announced.

On the Hong Kong side, the 2027 general holidays for the new year are Saturday, February 6, Monday, February 8, and Tuesday, February 9. The second day of the new year is a Sunday, so the government gave the fourth day off instead. Those dates count if you hire through ChinaTalentDesk, because our Hong Kong entity signs your contract and invoices each milestone, as How it works shows.

What the break means for a freelancer

Many freelancers travel home for the festival. Some take a longer break than the statutory days. Some take a shorter one. The only reliable answer for your project is the freelancer’s own plan, in writing.

If the job isn’t posted yet, start with the overview, How to hire a freelancer in China without speaking Chinese. Once work starts, Working across time zones with a freelancer in China covers the daily rhythm. The categories show the kinds of work you can post, from sourcing to design.

Post the job now, with milestones set around the break. Start a brief.