In numbers: China’s Spring Festival travel rush in 2025 set to reach historic heights

On January 14, 2025, China’s largest annual migration, “chunyun,” began, marking the start of the Spring Festival travel rush, which takes place 15 days before the Spring Festival, or the Chinese Lunar New Year.

This year’s travel rush is the first since UNESCO inscribed the Spring Festival on its intangible cultural heritage list in December 2024.

Over the 40-day travel period, from January 14 to February 22, a record-breaking nine billion passenger trips are expected, with both rail and air travel reaching new highs.

The forecasted travel breakdown includes 7.2 billion road trips, over 90 million civil aviation trips, and more than 510 million railway passenger trips, averaging 12.75 million trips daily— a 5.5 percent increase from last year.

These figures highlight the scale of China’s 2025 Spring Festival travel rush.