How to use the calculator
Enter a date of birth between 1900 and 2100 and select Find my sign. By default the year boundary is Chinese New Year, which is how the popular Chinese zodiac assigns animals. The result shows your animal, the full year name such as Fire Horse, yin or yang, the year in Chinese characters and the exact dates your Chinese year covered.
A Chinese zodiac year does not start on January 1. Chinese New Year moves between January 21 and February 20, so anyone born in January or February may belong to the previous animal. If your birthday is within a week of a year boundary, the calculator says so. These are the dates that tables based on the calendar year most often get wrong.
Chinese New Year or Li Chun
In the popular zodiac an animal year begins on the first day of the first lunar month: Chinese New Year. Some BaZi (Four Pillars) schools count the year from Li Chun, the Start of Spring, the moment the Sun reaches an ecliptic longitude of 315°. Li Chun falls on February 3, 4 or 5, so it can come before or after Chinese New Year.
Switch to Li Chun to see which year a date belongs to in that system. The Li Chun boundary is a moment, not a whole day. If you were born on Li Chun day, the calculator shows the exact time in Kyiv time and asks whether you were born before or after it. If you were born in another time zone, convert your birth time to Kyiv time first.
Element and yin-yang
The element comes from the Heavenly Stem of the Chinese year. Take the remainder of (year − 4) divided by 10: stems 0–1 are Wood, 2–3 Fire, 4–5 Earth, 6–7 Metal and 8–9 Water. Even stems are yang, odd stems yin. The year used is the Chinese year, so a person born before Chinese New Year takes the previous calendar year.
For example, 2026 gives stem 2: Fire, yang. The Horse year that began on February 17, 2026 is therefore a Fire Horse year, while someone born on February 10, 2026 belongs to the Wood Snake year of 2025.
Compatibility in the results
The calculator follows the same traditional scheme as our Chinese zodiac guide: triads (三合), four groups of three animals; secret friends (六合), six harmonious pairs; and clashes (六冲), six opposite pairs. This is cultural symbolism, not a prediction about a real relationship.
Where the dates come from
Chinese New Year dates and Li Chun moments for 1900–2100 were calculated with the Swiss Ephemeris astronomical library, using the rules of the modern Chinese calendar: the month containing the winter solstice is the eleventh month, the first month without a major solar term becomes the leap month, and calculations use UTC+8. Before 1929 the Chinese calendar was computed for the Beijing meridian, so Beijing local time is used for those years. This changes, for example, the date of the 1916 New Year.
Every Chinese New Year and Li Chun date was checked against the Hong Kong Observatory tables (1901–2100) and against an independent Chinese calendar software library (1899–2101). No date differs. Li Chun times are shown to the minute.