Persian age: the Solar Hijri (Jalali) calendar

The Solar Hijri year now running is 1405 AP. It began at Nowruz on and ends on . 1406 AP begins at the next Nowruz, on .

The Solar Hijri calendar is a solar calendar, so an age counted in it comes out to very nearly the same number of years as a Gregorian one. What differs is where the year starts and where the months fall — and the way its leap years are decided, which is by looking at the sky rather than by applying a rule.

If you do not know the time, noon changes only the hours. The place sets the time zone your birth instant is read in, which is what the figures below are computed from.

The calculation runs entirely in your browser: nothing is sent anywhere, nothing is stored, and no cookie is set.

Your Solar Hijri age and next Nowruz

Computed as of 29 September 2026. Where this calendar cannot answer for a date, it says so and gives the reason rather than extrapolating.

Worked example for a birth on 1 January 2000 (London): Solar Hijri — A solar calendar whose year begins at the vernal equinox.
Solar Hijri date of birth 11 Dey 1378 AP
Solar Hijri age 26 years, 8 months, 27 days A solar year, so this tracks the Gregorian count.
Next Nowruz 21 March 2027 — 1406 AP begins 173 days away.

See the same birth date in all nine calendars — Gregorian to the second, the other East Asian counts, Hijri, Hebrew, Solar Hijri and the planets.

The year begins at the equinox

The Gregorian calendar approximates the solar year with a leap rule: three leap years in every four, minus three in every four hundred. It is a very good approximation and it is still an approximation, which is why the equinox wanders across 19, 20 and 21 March.

Iran’s official Solar Hijri calendar does not approximate. Its year begins at the midnight closest to the vernal equinox: if the equinox falls before noon in Tehran, that day is 1 Farvardin; if after, the next day is. A year is therefore 365 or 366 days long according to where the equinox lands, with no formula deciding in advance. Leap years come four or five years apart in a pattern that roughly repeats over 33 years, and the pattern is a consequence of the astronomy rather than a rule the calendar is built on.

The dates on this page, though, come from ICU — the internationalisation library behind JavaScript’s Intl — and ICU does approximate. It takes that 33-year pattern as a rule and patches it with a list of exceptions. For the years people usually ask about the two are expected to agree, but this site has not yet checked them year by year; the section on where these dates come from says what that means.

Nowruz — 1 Farvardin, the first day of the Solar Hijri year — for every year from 1400 to 1425 AP, with the length of the year it begins.
Solar Hijri year Nowruz falls on Length of that year
1400 AP 365 days
1401 AP 365 days
1402 AP 365 days
1403 AP 366 days — a leap year
1404 AP 365 days
1405 AP 365 days
1406 AP 365 days
1407 AP 365 days
1408 AP 366 days — a leap year
1409 AP 365 days
1410 AP 365 days
1411 AP 365 days
1412 AP 366 days — a leap year
1413 AP 365 days
1414 AP 365 days
1415 AP 365 days
1416 AP 366 days — a leap year
1417 AP 365 days
1418 AP 365 days
1419 AP 365 days
1420 AP 366 days — a leap year
1421 AP 365 days
1422 AP 365 days
1423 AP 365 days
1424 AP 366 days — a leap year
1425 AP 365 days

The twelve months

The first six months have 31 days, the next five have 30, and Esfand has 29 in a common year and 30 in a leap one. That shape follows the seasons: the Earth moves more slowly through its orbit in the northern spring and summer, so those months are genuinely longer.

It also means that a birthday on the 31st of a month is perfectly ordinary in the first half of the year and impossible in the second, which is the kind of detail a calculator that borrows a flat 30 days gets wrong for most of the year.

The months of the Solar Hijri year, with the lengths they take in 1404 AP, a common year.
Month Persian Length Season
1. Farvardin فروردین 31 days Spring
2. Ordibehesht اردیبهشت 31 days Spring
3. Khordad خرداد 31 days Spring
4. Tir تیر 31 days Summer
5. Mordad مرداد 31 days Summer
6. Shahrivar شهریور 31 days Summer
7. Mehr مهر 30 days Autumn
8. Aban آبان 30 days Autumn
9. Azar آذر 30 days Autumn
10. Dey دی 30 days Winter
11. Bahman بهمن 30 days Winter
12. Esfand اسفند 29 days (30 in a leap year) Winter

Where these dates come from

An arithmetic approximation of the Solar Hijri (Jalali) calendar, as implemented in ICU and reached through Intl.DateTimeFormat: leap years follow a 33-year cycle, with a fixed list of corrections from 1502 AP (2123 CE) onward.

Iran’s official calendar is astronomical: the year begins on the day of the vernal equinox if the equinox falls before noon in Tehran, and on the following day if it falls after. ICU does not compute the equinox; it approximates the result by arithmetic. This site has not yet compared the two year by year, so in a year whose equinox falls close to noon in Tehran, a date here may be a day away from the official calendar.

To check the method: ICU persncal.cpp, release-78.3 — the arithmetic ICU uses; M. Heydari-Malayeri, “A concise review of the Iranian calendar” (2004) — the official rule; ICU User Guide — Calendar Services.

Solar Hijri converters come in two families: those that compute the equinox, as Iran’s official calendar does, and those that decide leap years by arithmetic — a 33-year cycle, in several variants. ICU, and so this site, is in the second family. Where a date here disagrees with one from another converter, a difference of family is the likeliest reason, and the official calendar is the one to trust.

Outside 1800–2200 CE this site declines to convert. Prose last reviewed 2026-09-29.

Worked examples

Ages as they stand on 29 September 2026 in Tehran, computed when this page was built. The Gregorian column is alongside for comparison: both calendars are solar, so the two ages agree in years and part company only in the months and days, which are measured against different month boundaries.

Solar Hijri and Gregorian ages on 29 September 2026, Asia/Tehran, for four birthdates.
Birthdate Solar Hijri birth date Solar Hijri age Gregorian age Next Nowruz
Born 15 May 1990 — an ordinary date in both calendars 25 Ordibehesht 1369 AP (اردیبهشت) 36 y 4 m 13 d 36 y 4 m 14 d — 1406 AP begins
Born 20 April 2021 — born on 31 Farvardin, a day no 30-day month has 31 Farvardin 1400 AP (فروردین) 5 y 5 m 7 d 5 y 5 m 9 d — 1406 AP begins
Born 21 March 1979 — born on Nowruz 1 Farvardin 1358 AP (فروردین) 47 y 6 m 6 d 47 y 6 m 8 d — 1406 AP begins
Born 20 March 2025 — born on 30 Esfand, a date only a leap year has 30 Esfand 1403 AP (اسفند) 1 y 6 m 8 d 1 y 6 m 9 d — 1406 AP begins

The era, and the two Hijri calendars

Solar Hijri years are counted AP, anno Persico, from the same event as the Hijri calendar — the migration from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE — but in solar years rather than lunar ones. The two era numbers therefore separate rather than track each other: 1405 AP and 1447 AH are the same stretch of time, and the gap widens by about one year every thirty-three.

The Solar Hijri calendar is the official calendar of Iran, and was for many years the official calendar of Afghanistan. Its month names are Persian and predate Islam; the era is Islamic; the year is astronomical. It is a calendar that is easy to describe wrongly by picking one of those three facts and leaving out the others.