Lunar New Year Across Asia: Why the Date Moves and How Long Offices Close
Lunar New Year shuts down supply chains and offices across East and South-East Asia, but the date moves every year and the length of the break varies by country.
A purchase order sent to a factory in Guangdong in mid-January can sit untouched for three weeks. A pull request waiting for review from a team in Ho Chi Minh City can stall for a similar stretch. A sales call booked with a client in Seoul lands on a public holiday nobody on your side noticed. All three are the same event: Lunar New Year, the largest scheduled shutdown in much of East and South-East Asia. The trouble for planners is that its date shifts every year, and each country gives it a different amount of time off.
Why the date moves
Lunar New Year follows a lunisolar calendar. Each month begins at a new moon, and in most years the new year starts on the second new moon after the winter solstice. Twelve lunar months come to roughly 354 days, about eleven days short of a solar year. To stop the calendar drifting away from the seasons, a leap month is added about seven times in every nineteen years.
The practical result is that New Year's Day always falls somewhere between 21 January and 20 February, but rarely on the same Gregorian date twice in a row. In 2025 it fell on 29 January; in 2026 it fell on 17 February, nearly three weeks later. A plan that worked last year can be off by a fortnight this year.
There is a second, smaller source of variation. The new moon is calculated for a specific time zone. Vietnam computes its calendar for UTC+7 while China uses UTC+8, so in rare years the Vietnamese Tết and the Chinese Spring Festival have started on different days. Treat each country's calendar as its own source rather than copying one country's date across the region.
How long the break lasts
The official holiday and the real slowdown are two different things. Here is the official side, in broad terms. Exact days are set or confirmed by each government, often months in advance, but always check the current year's announcement.
| Country or territory | Name | Official break (typical pattern) | Watch for |
|---|---|---|---|
| China (mainland) | Spring Festival | Statutory days stretched into a longer break by moving working days onto weekends | Make-up working days on Saturdays or Sundays around the break |
| South Korea | Seollal | Three days: the day before, the day itself and the day after | A substitute holiday when one of the three days overlaps a Sunday or another holiday |
| Vietnam | Tết Nguyên Đán | A multi-day public sector break, set each year | Many private employers close for longer |
| Hong Kong | Lunar New Year | Three days, with a further day when one of them falls on a Sunday | Retail often stays open while offices close |
| Singapore and Malaysia | Chinese New Year | Two days | A day in lieu if a holiday falls on a Sunday; rules vary by Malaysian state |
China's regulations were amended with effect from 2025 to add Spring Festival Eve to the statutory allocation, which now covers the eve and the first three days of the new year. The State Council then publishes an annual notice that combines those days with weekends and swapped working days to produce the actual break. That notice usually appears late in the preceding year, so you cannot know the precise closure dates for a given Spring Festival until then.
The real closure is longer than the official one
For anyone working with manufacturing or logistics, the official calendar understates the disruption. Many factory workers travel long distances home, so production often winds down before the public holiday starts and takes time to ramp back up after it ends. Freight forwarders tend to see a rush of shipments beforehand and a backlog afterwards. Office staff commonly attach annual leave to either side of the break.
None of this follows a fixed formula, and it varies by employer, sector and region. The safe working assumption is that a supplier's effective capacity is reduced for longer than the gazetted holiday, and that you should ask each partner directly for their own closure and restart dates.
Worked example: February 2026 in Seoul
South Korea is the cleanest case because Seollal has a simple rule. In 2026 Lunar New Year fell on Tuesday 17 February, so Seollal covered Monday 16, Tuesday 17 and Wednesday 18 February.
- February 2026 began on a Sunday and had exactly four full weeks, so it contained 20 weekdays.
- Subtract the three Seollal weekdays: 20 − 3 = 17 working days in the month.
- The week of 16 February had only two working days, Thursday 19 and Friday 20.
Now suppose a Seoul team was asked on Friday 13 February for a task needing five working days, starting the following Monday. Without the holiday, the five days would run Monday 16 to Friday 20 February. With Seollal, the count goes Thursday 19 (1), Friday 20 (2), Monday 23 (3), Tuesday 24 (4), Wednesday 25 (5). Delivery moves from Friday 20 to Wednesday 25 February, three working days later even though the holiday was only three days long, because the work also had to cross a weekend.
For China the arithmetic has an extra twist: a make-up working day on a Saturday or Sunday adds a working day back into the count, so the elapsed delay can be shorter than the headline break suggests. A calculator that knows each country's calendar, such as the add business days tool, saves you from doing this by hand.
Comparing countries in the same window
If a project depends on teams in several of these places, look at the union of their closures, not each one separately. A week in which Seoul is closed Monday to Wednesday and a mainland Chinese partner is closed all week leaves you Thursday and Friday with Korea and nothing with China. Put the calendars for South Korea and China side by side once the year's dates are confirmed, and count the shared working days with the business days calculator.
Also remember the knock-on effects outside Asia. Teams elsewhere with family ties to the region often request leave for the same period, and customer support queues covering Asian markets can swell just after the break when everyone returns.
What to do before the next Lunar New Year
- Note the expected Lunar New Year date as soon as you plan the year, then replace it with each government's confirmed schedule when published.
- Ask every supplier and partner for their own last working day and first day back, not just the public holiday dates.
- Pull shipment and approval deadlines forward so nothing critical lands in the two weeks around the holiday.
- For China, add any weekend make-up working days to your calendar so scheduled reports and handovers line up.
- Recount deadlines in working days for each country involved rather than assuming a single regional closure.
