Chinese zodiac: your sign from your exact birth date

The twelve animals and their recent years

Each card opens the page of one animal, with every year since 1924, the exact day each began and its element. Each card shows six of that animal's years, the last one before 2038. Remember that each of them starts on a date in late January or February, not on January 1.

January and February: where year tables go wrong

Most zodiac charts list one animal per Gregorian year. They are right for anyone born from March to December, and wrong for a large share of January and February births. In 1985, the lunar new year fell on February 20, 1985, so the first seven weeks of 1985 still belonged to the Rat year of 1984. In 2023 it fell on January 22, 2023, and only the first three weeks were the Tiger's. The finder handles this by reading the exact new year date of every year, and the table of new year dates lists them from 1902 to 2100.

A second rule complicates the picture. Four Pillars astrology, the Chinese art of reading a birth chart, starts the year at Spring Commences, the solar term that falls on February 3, 4 or 5. The Hong Kong Observatory's page What year is it today? notes that fortune-tellers use that term while the Observatory changes the year at the lunar new year. The finder has a switch for both; the sign page explains when they disagree.

Five elements and a sixty-year cycle

Years are named by pairing ten heavenly stems with the twelve earthly branches, as the Observatory's page on stems and branches sets out. The branch gives the animal and the stem the element, so that a Rat year can be a Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal or Water Rat. The full set of combinations takes sixty years; the current cycle began with the Wood Rat of 1984. The last digit of the lunar year is enough to know its element: 0 and 1 Metal, 2 and 3 Water, 4 and 5 Wood, 6 and 7 Fire, 8 and 9 Earth. The elements page lists all sixty names.

2026 and 2027

The lunar year of 2026 is a Fire Horse year, a combination that last occurred in 1966 and that Japanese folklore, under the name Hinoeuma, treated as unlucky for girls, with a measurable effect on births that year; the Fire Horse page gives the figures. The Horse year ends on February 5, 2027. The next day, Saturday February 6, 2027, is Chinese New Year 2027, and it opens the Fire Goat year, described on the 2027 zodiac page.

Traits and compatibility: tradition, not prediction

Chinese folklore attaches a temperament to each animal, the clever Rat, the patient Ox, the brave Tiger, and pairs the signs as good or difficult matches. Those pairings come from the geometry of the twelve branches: signs four years apart form a triad and are favored, signs six years apart face each other and clash. The compatibility tool names the traditional relation for any two birth dates. This site reports these customs because they are part of a living culture; it does not claim that a birth year shapes anyone's character, health or future, and it sells no reading.

The calendar behind the signs

The traditional Chinese calendar is lunisolar. The Observatory's page on the agricultural calendar explains that months begin at the new moon and that a leap month is added seven times in nineteen years to keep pace with the sun, while 24 solar terms mark the seasons. The calendar converter gives the lunar date and the solar term of any day from 1901 to 2100.

Every page of the site