When does the Chinese year actually start? Two answers
Published 2026-08-19
There are two boundaries, and in most years they are days or weeks apart. The zodiac animal turns at Chinese New Year, the first day of the first lunar month, which can land anywhere from 21 January to 20 February. The Kua year — the year Eight Mansions (八宅, Ba Zhai) counts your birth from, and the year the annual positions follow — turns at the start of spring (立春, lichun), an astronomical moment that falls on 3, 4 or 5 February.
Both are right. They answer different questions, and someone born between the two dates is one animal by the zodiac and already in the following year for Kua purposes.
The two dates, side by side
Taken from this site’s calendar table, which is where every date on the site comes from:
| Year | Animal turns | Kua year turns | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 29 January | 3 February, 22:10 | animal first, 5 days |
| 2026 | 17 February | 4 February, 04:02 | Kua first, 13 days |
| 2027 | 6 February | 4 February, 09:46 | Kua first, 2 days |
Times are UTC+8, the zone the Chinese calendar is computed in.
2026 is the clearest case. The Kua year rolls over in the small hours of 4 February 2026, but the zodiac animal does not change until 17 February 2026. So a baby born on 10 February 2026 is a Wood Snake — the 2025 animal — while every Eight Mansions calculation for that same baby uses 2026. Not a contradiction, and not something to average out. One number describes the animal year; the other describes which of the eight directions are counted as favourable.
2027 shows the same thing compressed: the Kua year turns on 4 February 2027 and the animal turns two days later, on 6 February 2027, so only 4 and 5 February fall in the gap. The 2027 zodiac page works through that year in detail.
Which boundary answers which question
| You want to know | Boundary that applies |
|---|---|
| Your zodiac animal, and the stem-branch name of a year | Chinese New Year |
| Your Kua number and your four favourable directions | Start of spring |
| Where the Tai Sui and the three Sha sit this year | Start of spring |
| When the festival is, and when the public holidays fall | Chinese New Year |
Neither list is negotiable within its own school, and nothing is gained by forcing one date to serve both.
Neither one is reliably the earlier date
A common shortcut is to treat the start of spring as always falling just before Chinese New Year. Over 1900–2100 that holds in 103 years. In 92 years Chinese New Year comes first, and in 6 years — 1905, 1924, 1943, 1992, 2038 and 2087 — they fall on the same day. The widest gap in the range is 16 days, in 1985.
When Chinese New Year comes first, the overlap flips. Anyone born on 30 January 2025 was already a Wood Snake by the zodiac, but for Kua purposes still belonged to 2024, because spring had not begun.
The start of spring is not 4 February
This is where most free calculators break, and it is checkable. Counting the start of spring for every year from 1900 to 2100:
| Date | Years |
|---|---|
| 3 February | 39 |
| 4 February | 128 |
| 5 February | 34 |
So a calculator that hardcodes 4 February is wrong in 73 of those 201 years. For anyone born in the middle of February that error changes nothing. For a birthday in the first days of February it can push you into the wrong year, which gives a different Kua number and therefore a different set of four directions.
2025 is an example. Spring began on 3 February 2025. A calculator using 4 February treats anyone born on 3 February 2025 as belonging to 2024 rather than 2025 — off by one year, off by one Kua number, and the four directions that come with it are not adjacent to the right ones. They can be the opposite group.
On the boundary day itself, the hour decides
The start of spring is a moment, not a date. In 2021 it fell on 3 February at 22:58. Someone born earlier that same day belongs to the previous year; someone born later that evening does not.
| Born 3 February 2021 | Counted as | Result |
|---|---|---|
| 21:00 | 2020 | Kua 8, West group |
| 23:30 | 2021 | Kua 9, East group |
Under two and a half hours apart, and the entire group changes — the four directions one of them is told to favour are the four the other is told to avoid. This is not a subtlety that averages away. It is the reason the Kua number calculator asks for a time of birth only when the birthday lands on the boundary day for that year, and stays quiet about it otherwise. On any other date the hour makes no difference and asking for it would just invite a guess.
If you were born on 3, 4 or 5 February and do not know your birth time to the hour, you have two candidate Kua numbers rather than one. The honest handling is to run both and know which of the two you are working from.
Why the confusion lasts
Three different things get called “the Chinese year” in English: the lunar calendar year, which starts at Chinese New Year; the solar year used for stem-branch and direction work, which starts at the beginning of spring; and the Gregorian year, which has nothing to do with either. Popular writing collapses the first two, because in a year like 2027 the gap is two days and the error rarely shows. In 2026 it is thirteen days. Almanacs have kept the two apart for centuries; what is new is software that picks one boundary, applies it to everything, and never says which one it used.
What this does not settle
Knowing the right boundary tells you which year to count from. It does not tell you that the resulting direction does anything measurable — Eight Mansions names directions and this site reports what it names, nothing further. See method and assumptions for the boundaries we compute from, the range they are valid over, and where we stop.
Two limits worth stating plainly. These dates are computed for UTC+8, so a birth in another time zone close to the boundary hour needs converting first, and the calculator does not do that for you. And 1900–2100 is the range the calendar table covers — outside it there is no answer here rather than a guessed one.