When China Train Tickets Go on Sale: 12306 Presale Period & Release Times (2026)

The 15-day window, and how to count it

China Railway releases tickets 15 days before departure, and the count includes the departure date itself. In practice that means a ticket for the 15th of a month goes on sale on the 1st, and a ticket for the 30th goes on sale on the 16th. You can book today plus the next 14 days — nothing further out exists in the system yet.

This trips up visitors who plan a trip three or four weeks ahead and conclude the route does not run, or that everything is already sold out. Neither is true. If a search returns nothing for a date more than two weeks away, the tickets simply have not been created yet. Search a date inside the window to confirm the train exists, then come back on the release day.

The window has not always been 15 days, and it is not guaranteed to stay there. It has been longer in the past, and railway authorities adjust it around Spring Festival and the National Day holiday when demand spikes. Before those periods, treat any number you read online — including this one — as something to re-check in the app.

Every station releases at its own time of day

The 15-day rule tells you which day tickets appear. It does not tell you what time. Each departure station has its own on-sale time, staggered through the day so the system is not hit by every route at once — and two stations in the same city can differ from each other.

This is the single most common reason people miss a popular train. They know the release date, log in that morning, find nothing, and assume it sold out in seconds. In fact their station's tickets had not gone on sale yet.

The 12306 app publishes the exact time per station. Open the app, go to My → Travel Services → On-Sale Time (起售时间), and enter your departure station. Do this the day before, not the morning of. For a busy route in peak season, being in the app and logged in a few minutes early — passengers already added to your account — is the difference between a seat and a standby slot.

12306 closes overnight

The official 12306 site states that ticket sales and endorsement services run from 05:00 to 01:00 the next day, and on Tuesdays only until 23:30. Outside those hours the system is down for maintenance and nothing can be booked, changed or refunded.

Two consequences worth planning around. First, no tickets are released in the small hours, so there is no advantage to setting a 03:00 alarm. Second, if your train leaves early in the morning and something goes wrong with the booking the night before, you may not be able to fix it until 05:00 — leave yourself margin rather than resolving a problem at the station counter.

Sold out? Use the standby queue, not the refresh button

When a train shows no seats, 12306 offers a standby option (候补, hòubǔ) rather than a simple waitlist. You submit a standby request, pay upfront, and the system books you automatically if a seat is returned — which happens constantly, because refunds and changes run right up to departure.

Standby beats manual refreshing for a structural reason: returned tickets go to the standby queue first, before they ever reappear in open search results. Someone hammering the refresh button is looking at inventory that the queue has already had first claim on.

You can improve your odds by adding alternative trains and accepting more than one seat class in the same standby request. If nothing comes through by the cutoff, the payment is refunded automatically.

Two other moments are worth knowing about: railways commonly add capacity for busy routes, and additional tickets can appear around a week before departure and again in the last few days as unconfirmed bookings are released. A route that looks hopeless on release day is often not hopeless three days out.

What this means if you are booking from abroad

The presale window is the reason itineraries built far in advance cannot be fully ticketed. You can plan the route, check schedules and see fares, but the actual seats for a trip a month away do not exist yet. Build the plan, then set a reminder for the release date of each leg.

Third-party agents such as Trip.com sell the same inventory and will accept a booking earlier, but they cannot obtain a ticket before railway release either — they queue the request and buy it for you when the window opens, usually for a service fee. That is convenience, not earlier access.

If you are booking on 12306 directly with a foreign passport, have the account verification finished before release day rather than on it. Passport verification is not instant, and being stuck mid-verification when your station's on-sale time passes is a self-inflicted wound.