Chinese Zodiac Calculator the Chinese astrology calculator, from one birth date

Your sign. The Chinese zodiac is the year line of the Chinese calendar, read out loud. Every year has a two-character name, a heavenly stem over an earthly branch, and the branch has carried an animal since at least the second century BC. The animal is the part everyone knows. The calculator's first job is the part the placemats get wrong: the year does not begin on January 1 but at Chinese New Year, the second new moon after the winter solstice, anywhere from January 21 to February 20, so a January birthday almost always belongs to the animal before. The leaf holds the exact date for every year, which is why its January answers can be trusted.

Your vintage. The stem over the branch is one of five elements, so every animal comes in five vintages, one every twelve years: the Wood Horse, the Fire Horse, the Earth Horse, the Metal Horse, the Water Horse. The tradition reads them as five wines from one grape. The Fire Horse is the legend, the sign's own element squared, and in 1966 the belief that a Fire Horse daughter would burn through a husband cut Japan's birth rate by a quarter for a year, a crater still visible in the census. The leaf gives you your vintage's line from your sign's own page, where all five are told in full.

This year, and next. A year has a branch too, so every sign stands in a fixed relation to it, and the almanacs have named those relations for a thousand years: your own year, the clash directly across the wheel, the six harmonies, the trine allies four places away, the harm and the punishment sets. The leaf reads your sign against 2026 and 2027 in exactly those terms, off the same tables as our 2026 page, and says plainly when the tables record nothing, which for most signs in most years is the honest answer. What the tradition means by offending the year deity, and what it actually prescribes, is on the Tai Sui page.

Who you match. Compatibility in the Chinese zodiac is geometry, not vibes. Signs four places apart on the wheel share a trine and pull the same way; every sign has one secret friend in the six harmonies; the sign directly opposite is the famous clash. The leaf names yours, and each pairing links to its own page on the compatibility checker, where the mechanism behind every verdict is spelled out.

Where to face. The same birth year, turned at Lichun rather than at New Year, gives you a kua number from one to nine and sorts you into the East or West group of the Eight Mansions school of feng shui, with four directions that feed you and four that drain you. That is what the male and female toggle is for: the formula differs by sex. The leaf gives the number and your four good directions in order of strength; the kua calculator gives all eight, the formula in the open, and what to do with them in a room.

Your other animals, and the name. Give the leaf a birth time and it adds the animals of your birth month and birth hour, the ones popular astrology calls your inner and secret animals, read to the minute off the solar terms and the twelve double hours. And it prints the almanac's own name for your year: one of sixty names, jiazi to guihai, and the poetic "received sound" the Ming almanacs gave each pair, metal in the sea, fire on the mountaintop. The sexagenary cycle page lists all sixty.

Your Zi Wei palace. Zi Wei Dou Shu, the other great Chinese chart, does not start from the year at all. It starts from your lunar month and your birth hour, counts forward from the Tiger palace by the month and back by the hour, and the palace it lands on is your Life Palace, the one that shapes the whole chart; count the other way and you have the Body Palace. Give the leaf a time and it names both, then hands the same birthday to the Zi Wei calculator, which places the fourteen stars around them.

Your lunar birthday, and your Chinese age. Your birthday has a second address, the day and month of the lunar calendar it fell on, which is the one a Chinese grandmother keeps and the one that moves on the Western calendar every year; the leaf gives it and says where it falls this year. And by the traditional count you were one at birth and a year older every New Year, so your Chinese age runs one or two ahead of the number on your passport. The leaf gives that too, with the date it next ticks over; the age calculator explains the count.

Your elements. Three different things get called your element, and readings mix them up constantly. The year's stem gives one (the Metal in Metal Horse); the sign's own branch has a fixed one (the Horse is a Fire sign, every year); and the year's sound, its nayin, has a third. The leaf prints all three and says which is which; the zodiac elements page keeps them apart, and the five elements page is the system they come from.

What is not on the leaf. The day. Your birth day has a stem and a branch of its own, and in a real reading the day stem, not the year animal, is the character that stands for you. The leaf cannot reach it; the chart can. The button at the foot of the leaf hands your birthday to the bazi calculator, which casts all four pillars, names your day master and draws eighty years of them as a life chart, free.

Two people born a day apart in early 2026 can have two different animals, and both can be right. The zodiac turns the year at Chinese New Year, February 17, 2026 in 2026. The astrologers casting a bazi chart or a kua number turn it at Lichun, the start of spring on the solar calendar, February 4, 2026 this year and carried on the leaf to the minute. In 116 of the 120 years in the table below the two dates differ, and every birthday caught between them has one animal by the popular rule and another by the astrologers'. Someone born on February 5, 2026 is a Snake by Chinese New Year and a Horse by Lichun. The leaf names both, the popular one first; the Lichun page explains why two rules exist, and the year-boundaries dataset has both dates for every year, free to download.