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Lunar New Year, also called Chinese New Year or Spring Festival, marks the start of the lunar calendar year and is celebrated across East and Southeast Asia and by Chinese and other diaspora communities worldwide. In 2026 the new year falls on February 17, ushering in the Year of the Fire Horse, with the traditional celebration period continuing through the Lantern Festival on March 3.

Few occasions on the global retail calendar compare in raw scale. More than 2 billion people took part in recent celebrations, and global consumer spending tied to the holiday has been estimated at around $1.5 trillion, spanning gifting, travel, food, fashion, and home categories all at once.

The season is also unusually broad in what it touches, from the world's largest annual human migration as families travel home, to a red envelope gifting tradition observed by hundreds of millions of households, to gold and jewelry purchases treated as both gift and investment. The sections below break down what shoppers buy, how spending compares across markets, and how the shopping and travel calendar builds toward the new year itself, using the real 2026 dates as the working example throughout.

What Shoppers Buy Most During Lunar New Year

Red envelopes, known as hongbao, sit at the center of Lunar New Year gifting and are treated as close to mandatory across Chinese and many other East Asian households. Demand for red envelopes themselves typically peaks two to three months before the new year, with bulk packaging commonly priced from around ten cents to thirty cents per piece and sold in packs of six, ten, or thirty six, often decorated with that year's zodiac animal, the Fire Horse in 2026.

Gold and jewelry form a second major category, treated simultaneously as a gift, a personal purchase, and a store of value. Mainland sales of gold jewelry and gold bars have risen by roughly 12 percent year over year in recent seasons, with horse themed jewelry, bold pieces in auspicious colors, and zodiac linked designs seeing particular demand ahead of 2026.

Food and gifting baskets round out the largest categories, with candies, festive treats, dried fruits and nuts, and curated gift baskets among the most commonly purchased items. Traditional clothing such as tang suits, home decor including red lanterns, and revitalizing skincare products themed around the year's zodiac animal all see reliable seasonal spikes as well.

The Scale of Global Lunar New Year Spending

China's own domestic figures illustrate the scale of the holiday best. Retail and catering sales during a recent Lunar New Year holiday period totaled about 1.01 trillion yuan, or roughly $150 billion, an increase of about 8.5 percent over the year before, spanning everything from restaurant dining to gift purchases made in the days around the new year.

Domestic tourism spending has climbed alongside retail sales. During the 2026 holiday period, domestic tourism spending hit a record 803.5 billion yuan, or about $116.3 billion, with 596 million domestic trips taken, roughly 95 million more than the previous year's holiday. Average spending per trip actually eased slightly, from around 169 yuan to about 150 yuan, suggesting that while more people are traveling than ever, individual travelers are tightening their per trip budgets even as total volume climbs.

Put together, these figures show a holiday that is simultaneously a retail event, a travel event, and a gifting event, all concentrated into a single short window each year. Few other global shopping occasions combine that much cross category spending into one relatively compressed calendar period.

Online Shopping and the Ecommerce Shift During Lunar New Year

Ecommerce activity around Lunar New Year has grown substantially, and platforms increasingly treat the holiday as a major annual sales event in its own right rather than a quiet period around the Spring Festival break. One major Chinese platform processed more than 120 million orders in just six days during the 2026 holiday window, with nearly half of those orders originating from county and rural areas rather than major cities.

That same platform reported roughly 1.56 million people aged sixty and above making their very first online purchase during the same window, pointing to how far digital shopping adoption has spread beyond its traditional younger, urban base. More broadly, ecommerce now accounts for close to half of all retail sales in China, and livestreaming commerce across the wider Asia Pacific region is projected to top $1 trillion in annual sales for the first time.

Outside mainland China, Singapore offers a useful regional example of the online shift. Retail sales there rose about 9.4 percent year over year in a recent February tied directly to Lunar New Year spending, reaching close to S$3.9 billion in total retail sales, with online sales making up close to 11 percent of that total.

The Great Migration: Travel and Chunyun

The travel period surrounding Lunar New Year, known as Chunyun, is widely described as the largest annual human migration on the planet. In 2026, Chunyun encompassed an estimated 9.5 billion domestic trips across a roughly forty day window running from early February into mid March, as hundreds of millions of people traveled home for family reunions and then dispersed again afterward.

China's 2026 holiday was also extended to a full nine days, longer than in recent prior years, giving travelers meaningfully more runway to venture further from home than a shorter break would allow. That extra time contributed directly to record tourism spending figures, with inter regional passenger trips during the period exceeding 2.8 billion and travel patterns shifting to include more rural and lesser visited destinations alongside traditional family visits.

Gifting Customs and What Drives Purchases

Red envelope gifting is the most universally recognized Lunar New Year custom, with cash placed inside red paper envelopes and given primarily from older to younger family members, and from employers to staff, as a wish for luck and prosperity in the year ahead. There is no fixed rule for the amount inside, though closer family relationships and higher status roles generally carry an expectation of a larger amount.

Beyond red envelopes, gift baskets built around candies, dried fruits, nuts, and specialty foods are exchanged during family visits throughout the holiday period, alongside symbolic items tied to the year's zodiac animal. In 2026 that means horse themed accessories, bags, and decor carry particular cultural resonance, since gifts referencing the current zodiac year are seen as especially auspicious.

Regional and Diaspora Spending Patterns

Lunar New Year spending extends well beyond mainland China through both regional markets and diaspora communities abroad. Chinese outbound tourists are significant spenders wherever they travel, with visitor spending in the range of $6,000 to $7,000 per person once airfare, lodging, dining, shopping, and entertainment are included, and shopping historically representing roughly 25 to 35 percent of that total spending.

In the United States specifically, Spring Festival period visitor numbers have translated into substantial retail impact. Recent estimates put Chinese New Year period visitor spending at $660 million to $1.4 billion in total, with $165 million to $580 million of that specifically in retail spending, figures that were considerably higher in pre pandemic years when visitor volumes ran two to three times higher than more recent seasons.

Diaspora neighborhoods see the clearest local impact. San Francisco's Chinatown, for example, sees foot traffic climb by roughly 40 percent during the Lunar New Year period, and similar patterns of concentrated local spending show up in Chinese and broader East Asian diaspora neighborhoods across major cities in North America, Europe, and Australia.

The Weeks Leading Up to Lunar New Year

Shopping activity builds over a genuinely long runway before the new year itself, considerably longer than most single day retail events. Red envelope demand, gift shopping, and travel bookings all begin ramping up two to three months ahead of the holiday, well before most shoppers are thinking about the new year in any concrete way.

That early activity accelerates sharply in the final few weeks before the new year, as households finalize reunion dinner plans, purchase new clothing and home decor, and complete gift shopping before family gatherings begin. The days immediately surrounding the new year itself are dominated by travel and family time rather than shopping, with most discretionary purchases already completed by the time celebrations formally begin.

Timing Your Lunar New Year Shopping in 2026

With the new year falling on February 17 and the traditional celebration period running through the Lantern Festival on March 3 in 2026, the practical shopping and gifting window opens well before mid February given how early red envelope and gift shopping typically starts. Travel bookings tied to the Chunyun migration period need to be made earliest of all, since transportation demand during this window is about as intense as travel demand gets anywhere in the world.

Because Lunar New Year's date shifts each year based on the lunar calendar, typically falling sometime between late January and mid February, the specific 2026 dates will not repeat exactly in future years. The underlying pattern should hold regardless, with red envelope and gift shopping beginning months ahead, retail and travel activity peaking in the final weeks before the new year, and celebrations continuing for roughly two weeks afterward through the Lantern Festival.