Chinese calendar
Convert Gregorian dates to Chinese lunar months, check zodiac animals and elements, and plan around Lunar New Year, Mid-Autumn, Qingming, Duanwu, and other festival dates.
Lunar month 6, day 22
A purely lunar calendar follows moon phases and drifts through the seasons. A purely solar calendar follows the sun and ignores lunar months. The Chinese calendar is lunisolar: each month starts near a new moon, while leap months keep the year aligned with the seasonal solar terms. That is why Lunar New Year usually falls between late January and late February instead of on a fixed Gregorian date.
The year name combines a heavenly stem and an earthly branch. The branch gives the familiar zodiac animal, while the stem gives wood, fire, earth, metal, or water and a yin or yang polarity. The full sexagenary name repeats every 60 years, so two dragon years can differ by element and polarity.
Leap months are inserted when the lunar month sequence would otherwise slip away from the solar terms. In the 1900-2100 table used here, the leap month adjacent to 2026 is leap sixth month in Chinese year 2025, while Chinese year 2026 itself has twelve lunar months. The practical effect is simple: some lunar month numbers repeat in leap years, and festival dates still use the regular month unless a tradition explicitly says otherwise.
Subtract 4 from the Gregorian year and take the remainder after dividing by 60: for 2026 that gives 42. The remainder of 42 divided by 10 is 2, the stem bing, which pairs with fire and yang. The remainder of 42 divided by 12 is 6, the branch wu, the horse. Put together, the lunar year that begins on 17 February 2026 is bingwu, a yang fire horse year. Dates in January and early February 2026 still belong to yisi, the yin wood snake year that began in 2025, and the converter performs that boundary check for you automatically.
Conversions here evaluate the civil date in the Asia/Shanghai time zone, UTC+8 with no daylight saving. The lunar day therefore flips at 16:00 UTC, which is midday or earlier across the Americas. If you check the converter during an evening in New York or Sao Paulo, the lunar date shown can already be tomorrow's from your local point of view. For birthday or anniversary lookups, enter the date as it was observed locally rather than trusting the live reading.
Seven major festivals sit on fixed lunar dates, which is exactly why their Gregorian dates wander from year to year:
| Festival | Chinese name | Lunar date |
|---|---|---|
| Lunar New Year | ๆฅ่ | Month 1, day 1 |
| Lantern Festival | ๅ ๅฎต่ | Month 1, day 15 |
| Dragon Boat Festival | ็ซฏๅ่ | Month 5, day 5 |
| Qixi Festival | ไธๅค่ | Month 7, day 7 |
| Zhongyuan Festival | ไธญๅ ่ | Month 7, day 15 |
| Mid-Autumn Festival | ไธญ็ง่ | Month 8, day 15 |
| Double Ninth Festival | ้้ณ่ | Month 9, day 9 |
Each lunar year's month lengths and leap-month position come from a published almanac table covering 1900 to 2100, widely reproduced from Hong Kong Observatory data. The first supported day is 31 January 1900, the Lunar New Year of that year. Ask for a date outside the table and the tool reports the limit rather than extrapolating, because lunisolar month boundaries cannot be recovered reliably from a simple formula.
It depends on that year's Lunar New Year date, which lands anywhere from late January to late February. Someone born before it takes the previous year's animal, so always convert the exact birth date instead of relying on the year alone.
No. Solar terms mark the sun's position along the ecliptic in 15-degree steps, which is why Qingming stays near 4 or 5 April every year while lunar festivals drift across weeks.
Festivals stay in the regular month. When a year repeats a month, the leap copy carries no festival unless a specific local tradition says otherwise, so Mid-Autumn remains on day 15 of the regular eighth month.
It pairs 10 heavenly stems with 12 earthly branches to produce 60 named years. The same stem and branch combination returns only after 60 years, which is why a 60th birthday carries special weight in several East Asian traditions.