Chinese Zodiac Calculator

Your Chinese zodiac animal, from the real Lunar New Year

This Chinese zodiac calculator finds your animal sign and element from your full birth date. That matters because the Chinese zodiac year does not start on 1 January: it starts at Lunar New Year, which moves between 21 January and 20 February. Someone born on 15 January 1990 is an Earth Snake, not a Metal Horse, because the Year of the Horse only began on 27 January. Tables that list animals by Gregorian year get every January and early-February birthday wrong — this one uses the actual date of Lunar New Year for every year from 1900 to 2100.

You also get the year’s heavenly stem and earthly branch (the sexagenary name such as 甲辰), yin or yang, the animal’s fixed element, the traditional personality traits, a compatibility checker and a searchable table of every Lunar New Year date and animal in the 201 years covered.

Like Western star signs, the animal traits and compatibility rules are folklore — fun for birthdays, cards and conversation, not predictions.

How to use the Chinese Zodiac Calculator

1. Enter your Birth date. The wheel turns to your animal and the result shows the element and the exact span of your zodiac year.
2. Leave Year starts on at Lunar New Year (the popular convention), or choose Start of spring if you follow Four Pillars (BaZi) astrology, where the year begins at the solar term Lichun around 4 February.
3. Read the note under the result: it tells you whether your birthday fell before or after the new year.
4. In Compatibility, your animal is pre-selected as the first sign; choose a second sign to see the traditional relationship.
5. Use the Lunar New Year dates table to look up any year, filter by animal or type a year to jump to it.

Chinese Zodiac Calculator features

Where the Lunar New Year dates come from

Lunar New Year is the first day of the first month of the Chinese lunisolar calendar: the day (in Beijing time) of the new moon that begins the month containing the solar term Yushui, when the Sun reaches 330° of longitude — usually the second new moon after the winter solstice. The dates in this tool were generated with the open-source lunar-javascript library (MIT licence), which implements the calendar rules of the Chinese national standard GB/T 33661-2017, and checked against an independent calculation of new moons and solar longitudes from Jean Meeus’ Astronomical Algorithms.

The two methods agree for 197 of the 201 years. The four exceptions — 1916, 1985, 2034 and 2053 — are well-known awkward cases where a simplified rule fails (an old local-time convention in 1916, and leap-month edge cases later, including the much-discussed “2033 problem”); the table follows the official calendar, giving for example 20 February 1985 and 19 February 2034. The Start of spring dates agree with the independent calculation for all 201 years.

The twelve animals and the sixty-year cycle

Each year combines one of ten heavenly stems with one of twelve earthly branches, giving a 60-year cycle. The branch sets the animal, and the stem sets the element — two consecutive years share each of wood, fire, earth, metal and water, the first yang and the second yin. So 2024 was Wood Dragon (甲辰) and 2025 Wood Snake (乙巳); the next Wood Dragon year is 2084.