Spring festival

How it works

In Chinese the name is Chunjie. English speakers say Spring Festival or Chinese New Year and mean the same turn of the lunisolar year. The first morning is the new moon that starts lunar month one. The night before is the reunion. Inside China the state gazettes a stretch of public holiday around those days, often with make-up workdays before or after so the leave can sit in a row. That gazette is a labour timetable. It is not the moon. The moon does not care whether the office reopened on the sixth day or the seventh.

On 3 September 2026 the 2026 festival is over. One hundred and fifty-six days remain until 6 February 2027. The animal year that began on 17 February 2026 is the Horse; it runs until that next new moon, when the Goat year starts. A form that only wants 2026 already had the Gregorian year on 1 January. The festival is the other clock.

Chunyun and the leave that is gazetted

Chunyun is the Spring Festival travel rush: the weeks when people go home and then go back. It is a transport season, not a second holiday with its own legal name. Trains, coaches, and tickets strain because the reunion is the point. If you are booking, book the gazetted leave for the year you will move, not a memory of 2026’s swapped Sundays. 2026’s official block included the eve on 16 February and several days after 17 February, with substituted rest days whose exact pairing is that year’s notice. Copying those pairings into 2027 is how a traveller arrives on a make-up workday.

Lock the first lunar day: 6 February 2027. Read China’s holiday notice for 2027 for the actual days off and make-up workdays. Treat chunyun as a ticket problem around those days, not as a separate feast.

Do not use 1 January as a proxy. That morning is the civil new year, a shorter pause. Outside China, Chinatowns and diaspora families keep the festival without a nationwide close. Schools and offices in the United States stay open unless a city or an employer added leave. A parade on a weekend near the new moon is a parade. It does not rewrite the lunar first day. Chunjie is a homecoming with a gazette attached. 1 January is a number rolling over.

Spring Festival is not every spring feast

English also uses “spring festival” for maypoles, cherry-blossom weeks, or a town fair in April. Those events are not Chunjie. They do not start the Horse or Goat year. If a poster in English says Spring Festival in February and shows lanterns and reunion meals, you are on this page. If it says Spring Festival in May and shows a maypole, you are on a different square. The collision is the word spring, which names a season in English and a festival in the Chinese translation.

Lantern Festival on the fifteenth night closes the traditional stretch. In 2027 that night is 20 February. It is usually not another nationwide public holiday. People go back to work and still eat rice balls. National Day on 1 October is the other long Chinese leave in the year, a civil anniversary, not a second Spring Festival. Keep October for October. Keep February for the moon.