2026 and 2027
The Fire Horse year of 2026
A Fire Horse year comes once in sixty years. When the 2026 one begins and ends, how the name is formed, and what happened the last time, in 1966.
Were you born in a Fire Horse year?
Born June 15, 1966
Fire Horse
| Stem-branch | Bing-Wu 丙午, yang |
| Lunar birth date | day 27 of the 4th month, 1966 |
| That lunar year: January 21, 1966 to February 8, 1967 | |
The lunar year from February 17, 2026 to February 5, 2027 is a Fire Horse year, Bing-Wu in the stem-branch cycle: the Bing stem is yang Fire, and the Wu branch, the Horse, is a Fire branch too. Since ten stems and twelve branches realign only every sixty years, the previous Fire Horse began on January 21, 1966 and the next will begin in 2086. In Japan, where the same cycle is called Hinoeuma, an old superstition held that women born in such a year make difficult wives; the Cabinet Office of Japan still mentions it to explain a hole in its population charts. In 1966, the last Fire Horse year, live births in Japan fell to 1,360,974, from 1,823,697 in 1965, a drop of 25%, then rebounded to 1,935,647 in 1967. Those figures come from Japan's vital statistics. The superstition is folklore; the drop was real.
Element of a lunar year
Lunar year 2026
Fire, yang
| Heavenly stem | Bing 丙 |
| Sign | Fire Horse |
| Next year of this element | 2027 |
| Next Fire Horse | 2086 |
Dates read in the HKO tables by Radif Partners · Editorial policy · Method and sources
How the name is formed
Each lunar year has a name made of a heavenly stem and an earthly branch, as the Hong Kong Observatory's page on stems and branches lays out. The stem gives the element and the branch gives the animal. Bing-Wu, the 43rd name of the cycle, joins the Fire stem Bing with the Horse. The two Fire elements together explain why the year is felt to be intense in folklore, and why its reputation was harsh in Japan.
Japan, 1966
The Cabinet Office of Japan, in a chart of births and fertility in its annual report on the aging society, adds this note for 1966: "The old superstition says that women born in the Year of Hinoeuma are not suitable as wives." The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, in its vital statistics report for 2024, still sets the year apart when it describes the long-run trend of births, speaking of the Hinoeuma of 1966 and the unusual movements before and after it.
| Year | Live births in Japan | Per 1,000 people |
|---|---|---|
| 1964 | 1,716,761 | 17.7 |
| 1965 | 1,823,697 | 18.6 |
| 1966 (Hinoeuma) | 1,360,974 | 13.7 |
| 1967 | 1,935,647 | 19.4 |
| 1968 | 1,871,839 | 18.6 |
The dip and the rebound suggest that many births were moved rather than given up: couples timed them before or after the year.
Born in a year of this animal?
Horse and a birth in 1966
Yes, from Jan 21, 1966
| Born Jan 21, 1966 or later | Fire Horse |
| Born before Jan 21, 1966 | Wood Snake |
| Next Horse year | 2038 |
What about 2026?
Japan's birth figures for 2026 will be published by the Ministry in 2027; this page will add them then rather than guess. In the United States the Fire Horse has no such reputation, and the year is marked by the Lunar New Year festivals and by the US Postal Service's Year of the Horse stamp, issued on February 3, 2026.
When the Fire Horse ends
The year ends on February 5, 2027. The next day opens the Fire Goat, Ding-Wei, described on the page on the 2027 zodiac. Four Pillars charts end it two days earlier, at Spring Commences on February 4, 2027.