What Is My Chinese Zodiac Sign?

Chinese zodiac years: find your birth year

Each animal returns every 12 years. Find your year below, then check the exact start date in the full table further down if your birthday is in January or February.

Years run from Lunar New Year to the day before the next one. Yin and yang alternate year by year; the fixed element belongs to the animal itself (Wikipedia, Chinese zodiac).

Why January and February birthdays need the exact date

The Chinese calendar is lunisolar. Each month starts on the day of a new moon in China, and the year starts with the new moon that opens the first month. That puts Lunar New Year anywhere from January 21 to February 20 in our 1924 to 2044 table, and in 44 of those 121 years it came in January.

A chart that only lists years assigns everyone born in, say, 1990 to the Horse. In fact the Year of the Horse began on January 27, 1990, so January 1990 birthdays up to January 26 were still Snakes. Over the whole table, 9.5% of all calendar days fall before Lunar New Year of their own year: roughly one birthday in ten gets the wrong animal from a year-only chart.

Not everyone counts from Lunar New Year. Some astrologers start the animal year at the start of spring, or lichun, which lands on February 3, 4 or 5. The two methods disagree for birthdays between those dates, by about 7 days in an average year. Calendars, the New Year holiday and most zodiac charts follow Lunar New Year, and so does our calculator, but it tells you when the spring method would give a different animal.

The dates come from the Hong Kong Observatory's calendar tables. We checked all 120 years from 1924 to 2043 against the table on Wikipedia and 80 years against timeanddate.com, and every start date, animal and element matched. We also recomputed the dates from new moons: the rule "the second new moon after the December solstice" agrees with the Observatory in 120 of 121 years. The exception is 2034. A leap month at the end of 2033 pushes Lunar New Year 2034 to February 19, a month later than the simple rule says, which is why our calculator reads the date from the published calendar instead of the rule.

The 12 Chinese zodiac animals

In the tradition each animal comes with a character. The words below are timeanddate.com's list for each one. People born in the same 12-year band differ a great deal, so read them as the old portrait of the animal, not as a description of you.

Goat, Sheep and Ram are one sign: the Chinese word yáng covers all three. Japan uses the Sheep and the Wild Boar, and Vietnam has the Water Buffalo for the Ox and the Cat for the Rabbit (Wikipedia, Chinese zodiac).

Your element: the year's and the animal's

Two different elements get called "your element", which is why sites disagree. The first belongs to the year. Chinese years are counted in a 60-year cycle of ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches, and each pair of stems belongs to one of five elements: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water. So the element changes every two years, and the same animal and element meet only once in 60 years. 1990 was a Metal Horse, 2002 a Water Horse, 2026 a Fire Horse.

The second is the animal's fixed element, which never changes: the Horse is always Fire, the Rat always Water. Most calculators that say "Metal Horse" mean the year element, and so does ours; we show the fixed element next to it.

Yin and yang alternate with the years: even years in the Western calendar are yang, odd years yin, counted from Lunar New Year. These five elements are a different system from the four elements of Western astrology. Our zodiac elements page compares the two.

Counted from Lunar New Year: a birthday before it takes the element of the previous Chinese year.

Chinese zodiac compatibility: trines, secret friends and clashes

The traditional compatibility chart sorts the animals by how they relate. The strongest match is the trine (san he): four groups of three animals that sit four years apart and are said to think alike. Each animal also has one secret friend (liu he), a quieter, steady match. Opposite each animal, six places away on the circle, is its clash (liu chong), the pairing the tradition warns about.

Treat it as folklore that some families still consult about marriage, not a verdict on a couple. Your result in the calculator marks your trine, secret friend and clash on the strip of twelve animals.

Groups from the compatibility grid on Wikipedia (Chinese zodiac), which follows the san he, liu he and liu chong tables of Chinese almanacs.

Lunar New Year dates and animals, 1924 to 2044

The full table: each Chinese year, the day it began and the day it ended. If your birthday falls before the start date in your birth year, your animal is the one in the row above.

Hong Kong Observatory calendar tables; dates are local dates in China (UTC+8).

Chinese sign and Western sign

The two zodiacs are separate systems. The Western sign comes from the Sun's position on your birthday and changes about once a month; the Chinese sign comes from the year and changes once a year. So a Leo born in August 1990 is also a Metal Horse. Your Western sign, with the exact day the sign changes in your birth year, is on zodiac sign dates, and all twelve are described on the zodiac signs page.

Questions about Chinese zodiac signs

Written by The Zodiac Atlas editorial team with the help of AI and edited by a person. Lunar New Year and start-of-spring dates come from the Hong Kong Observatory's Gregorian-Lunar calendar tables; the animal order, elements and compatibility groups follow Wikipedia's Chinese zodiac article. The Chinese zodiac is a cultural tradition, not a science. More in How we work.