Chinese zodiac years table, 1924 to 2031.

How to read the table

Each row is one Chinese year, labelled by the Gregorian year it starts in. The animal comes from the year's earthly branch and the element and polarity from its heavenly stem; the stem and branch together, in the Observatory's own romanisation, name the year's place in the sixty-year cycle. The last two columns are the first and the last day of the year. A birth date between them belongs to that row.

The rows that matter most are the ones near a boundary. Someone born on 1 February 1984 is not a Rat: the Wood Rat year did not begin until 2 February, so that birthday falls in the last day of the Water Pig year that started in 1983. Thirty-nine of these 108 years begin in January and the other sixty-nine in February, so for anybody born in the first seven weeks of a year, the Gregorian year alone is not enough to know the animal.

Where these dates come from

Every date in this table is the first day of the first lunar month in the Hong Kong Observatory's Gregorian–Lunar conversion table for that year. The Observatory publishes one plain-text table per year, giving every day of the Gregorian year its lunar date and marking the solar terms; its index of tables runs from 1901 to 2100. The weekday in the Begins column is the one printed beside that date, and the animal and stem-branch are taken from the table's own title line. The Observatory writes "Mouse" for the first animal, which this site calls the Rat.

The dates were then checked a second way. This site's Chinese zodiac calculator does not look the new year up; it computes it from the December solstice and the new moons that follow, at China's UTC+8, with the leap month placed where the major solar terms put it. For all 108 years here it arrives at the same day as the Observatory's table. The table is the authority: if the two ever disagreed, the calculator would be the thing to fix.

Why the date moves by up to a month

The Chinese year is counted in lunar months of 29 or 30 days, twelve of them in an ordinary year and thirteen in a leap year, so a year runs either about 354 days or about 384. In this table the shortest year is 353 days (1965) and the longest 385 (1925, 1944 and 2006). Because twelve lunar months fall about eleven days short of a solar year, the new year slides earlier by eleven days or so each ordinary year, then jumps back by about nineteen when a leap month is inserted. Across these 108 years the earliest new year is 21 January 1966 and the latest 20 February 1985.

A different boundary is sometimes used. Four-pillars charts change the animal at lìchūn, the solar term that opens spring on 3, 4 or 5 February, rather than at the new year. Ordinary use — the calendars, the posters, the red envelopes and the question "what year are you?" — follows the lunar new year in this table.

Download the table

The same 108 rows are available as a CSV file: lunar-new-year.csv. Its columns are year, animal, element, polarity, stem_branch, starts and ends, with dates written as YYYY-MM-DD. You may reuse it under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence; please credit Paired Stars and the Hong Kong Observatory's calendar tables as the source of the dates.

What a birth year's animal is worth

The animal is a calendar label, and a precise one: this table can tell you exactly which year a birthday belongs to. It cannot tell you anything about the person. No study has found that people born in one animal year differ from people born in the next, and a description that seems to fit regardless is the Barnum effect. Read the table as a calendar, and the twelve animals as the vocabulary that goes with it.