Chinese lunar calendar converter

How to use

• Gregorian → Lunar: pick a date to see its lunar month and day, the Chinese zodiac year, whether the month is long (30 days) or short (29 days), and which month is the leap month that year.
• Lunar → Gregorian: enter the lunar year (named after the Western year in which its Chinese New Year falls), then the month and day. In a year with a leap month, it appears in the month list.
• Lunar birthday: enter your Western or lunar birthday to get the date of your next lunar birthday, how many days are left, and the dates for the next 10 years — handy for booking a family meal or sending a card to grandparents abroad in good time.

How it works

The Chinese calendar is lunisolar:

• Months follow the moon. Each month starts on the day of the new moon and has 29 or 30 days. There is no fixed pattern; months are worked out from the actual positions of the moon and sun.
• Years follow the sun. Twelve lunar months are about 11 days shorter than a solar year, so roughly every third year gets a 13th (leap) month and has 383 to 385 days.
• Zodiac years change on Chinese New Year and repeat every 60 years.

Rather than using an approximation, the converter looks dates up in the Hong Kong Observatory conversion tables for 1901 to 2100, calculated at UTC+8. A few built-in calendar libraries are a day out in some years (for example 1954, 2027 and 2030); this converter follows the Observatory.

Examples

Lunar birthday for someone born on 23/07/1988 (Month 6, Day 10):

In 2026 the lunar birthday happens to land on the same day as the Western one; in other years it moves up to about two weeks either way. To find your Chinese zodiac sign, including the January–February cut-off, use the Chinese zodiac calculator.