Lunar New Year dates, 1901–2099

The first day of the Chinese lunisolar year, in Gregorian dates, for every year the Hong Kong Observatory publishes. This is the boundary that decides someone's zodiac animal — not 1 January.

How to read this table

The Chinese year begins on the second new moon after the winter solstice, which puts Lunar New Year somewhere between 21 January and 21 February. Everything cultural that keys off the year — the zodiac animal, the sexagenary name, the year someone's 虚岁 increments — turns on that date and not on 1 January.

So a birth on 3 February 2024 belongs to the lunar year 2023: that person is a Water Rabbit, born a week before the Wood Dragon began on 10 February 2024. Getting this wrong is the single most common error in zodiac lookups, and it affects anyone born in January or the first days of February.

The sexagenary year

Each year takes one of ten heavenly stems and one of twelve earthly branches. Because the two lists advance together, only sixty of the hundred and twenty possible pairings occur, and the cycle repeats every sixty years — which is why 1924, 1984 and 2044 are all 甲子. The element in the zodiac column comes from the stem; the animal comes from the branch.

Leap months

Twelve lunar months fall about eleven days short of a solar year, so roughly every third year gains a thirteenth month. It repeats the number of the month before it — a leap month after month 2 is a second month 2, not a month 13 — and a year that has one runs 13 months instead of twelve. Of the 199 years in this table, 73 have a leap month.

Other lunisolar calendars

Korea and Vietnam use lunisolar calendars of the same construction, but compute their months against their own meridians — Vietnam on 105° East rather than 120° — so Tết and Seollal can fall a day either side of the dates above, and in rare years a whole month apart.

Vietnam's calendar is published on this site from its own tables rather than derived from these: Tết Nguyên Đán dates gives every year from 1901 to 2099 alongside the Chinese date, and names the seven years the two disagree. No equivalent Korean dataset is published here, so nothing on this site claims a Seollal date that differs from the ones above.