Guides / Process

How Tet Reshapes the Vietnamese Production Calendar, and How to Plan for It

September 6, 2026

Tet, the Lunar New Year, is the single largest fixed feature of the Vietnamese production calendar. It moves each year and it affects far more than the week marked on the calendar. Buyers who plan around the official holiday dates alone regularly miss a season.

The shape of the disruption

Think of it as three phases rather than one shutdown.

The wind-down, two to four weeks before. Factories push to finish committed orders. Capacity is full and new work gets pushed out. Workers from distant provinces start leaving early, so lines thin before they stop. This is when quality slips most, because the pressure is highest and the people are fewest.

The holiday itself, about a week. Almost nothing moves. Offices close, logistics slow, customs runs skeleton hours.

The return, two to three weeks after. Workers come back over a period rather than on one day, and some do not come back at all. Lines run with new people, which means slower output and a higher defect rate until the new workers are trained.

Added together, a buyer should treat roughly six weeks around Tet as reduced capacity, not one.

What this does to your dates

Three effects, in order of how often they hurt.

Lead times quoted before Tet do not survive it. A twelve week lead time quoted in December is not twelve working weeks if Tet sits inside it. Ask explicitly whether the quoted lead time accounts for the holiday.

Component suppliers close too. Your factory returning on schedule means nothing if the carton printer is still shut. On an assembled product, the binding constraint at Tet is almost always a bought-in part.

Quality dips at the edges. The last lot before and the first lot after are produced under the worst conditions of the year. If you have one inspection to spend, spend it there.

Four planning moves

Move the order, not the date. Place orders that need to ship in the first quarter before the wind-down begins, not during it. Work backwards from your in-store date, add the six week reduced capacity window, and you get the real order date.

Buy the long-lead components early. Tooling, custom components and printed packaging have the longest chains and the most upstream suppliers. Releasing those before the wind-down protects the assembly schedule even if assembly itself slips.

Do not schedule a pilot run into the window. Sampling needs the experienced operators and the engineers, who are exactly the people least available. A pilot run two weeks before Tet usually becomes a pilot run three weeks after.

Add inspection on the first lot after. New workers on the line is a known condition, not a surprise. A during-production check on the first post-holiday lot catches the predictable problems while they are cheap. See AQL inspection levels explained.

What to ask the factory

Four questions, asked in writing, in the autumn:

1. What are your exact closure dates this year, and when do you expect full output to return?
2. Does the lead time you quoted include the holiday, or is it working weeks?
3. Which of my components are bought in, and what are those suppliers’ closure dates?
4. What is the last date you can accept my order for delivery before the holiday?

The fourth question is the useful one. Factories know their cut-off precisely, and they rarely volunteer it.

It is not a problem to be solved

Tet is a fixed feature of manufacturing in Vietnam, in the way that a monsoon is a fixed feature of a shipping lane. Factories are not being difficult, and pressure does not move it. The buyers who handle it well treat it as a planning input twelve months a year rather than a crisis every January.

The other side of this is that the quiet period right after the return is often a good time to start a new project. Capacity has freed up, the year’s orders have not landed yet, and engineering attention is available.

The other fixed dates in the year

Tet is the largest disruption and it is not the only one. A realistic Vietnamese production calendar also includes:

• Reunification Day and International Workers’ Day at the end of April, which run together into a multi-day break.
• National Day at the start of September, usually a two day public holiday.
• Hung Kings Commemoration Day in spring, a single public day.
• The pre-Christmas export peak, which is not a Vietnamese holiday at all but fills factories and ports from roughly September as Western buyers pull goods forward.

None of these are Tet-sized. Together they mean that a schedule assuming fifty-two productive weeks is wrong by a noticeable margin, and that the last quarter has capacity pressure of its own even though nobody is on holiday.

After Tet is a good time to start

The weeks following the return are the least appreciated window in the Vietnamese calendar. Order books for the year are not yet full, engineering staff have capacity, and factories are actively looking for work to fill the first half.

For a new project that means faster quoting, more attention on sampling and often more willingness to take a modest first order. If your product does not have to ship in the first quarter, starting the conversation in the weeks before Tet and running the sampling immediately after is a genuinely good plan rather than a compromise.

The mirror image is the worst window: starting a new project in the wind-down. Everyone is finishing committed orders, nobody wants a new enquiry, and the quotes you do get will be defensive.

What to agree with the factory in writing

Verbal reassurance about the holiday is worth very little, because the person reassuring you does not control when workers return. Three things are worth having in writing before the window:

The order cut-off date. The last date the factory will accept your order for pre-holiday delivery. Factories know this precisely and rarely volunteer it.

The ship date commitment, with the holiday named. A delivery date that explicitly states it accounts for the closure, rather than a date that will be revised in January.

A pre-holiday status point. A short written update two weeks before the wind-down covering material arrival, production status and any risk. If something is going to slip, that is when it becomes visible while there is still time to respond, by splitting the shipment or moving part of it to air.

Staffing after the return is the real quality risk

The part buyers underestimate is not the closure, it is the staffing after it. Some workers do not return, and replacements are trained on live production.

For you that means the first post-holiday lot is made by the least experienced line of the year. Two responses cost little: schedule a during-production inspection on that lot specifically, and avoid making it a first article or a new product introduction. Run something the line already knows while the new people learn, and start the new product a few weeks later.

Factories generally agree with this readily, because they know the risk better than anyone and are rarely asked to plan around it.

Send your project brief with your target in-store date and we will match you with manufacturers that can commit to it against a realistic calendar. For the wider timeline, see how long a Vietnam order actually takes.

Frequently asked questions

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