Chinese lunisolar calendar converter

Lunisolar vs lunar vs solar, why CNY moves around

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.

Your animal, element, and polarity, what each contributes

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.

Why 2026 has a leap month (and what that means)

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.

Try the 2026 arithmetic yourself

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.

Midnight in Shanghai decides the date

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.

Festival cheat sheet

Seven major festivals sit on fixed lunar dates, which is exactly why their Gregorian dates wander from year to year:

Where the month lengths come from

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.

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