Chinese zodiac sign calculator
2024 is the Year of the Dragon, yet someone born on 9 February 2024 is still a Rabbit, because the animal changes at Chinese New Year, not on 1 January. Enter a year, or a full date, to get the right sign. Free in your browser.
- Free
- Runs in your browser
- No sign-up
- Your data stays on your device
Run — free
Worked example
- Year
- 2,024
- Animal
- Dragon
- Animal index
- 4
- Cycle position
- 5
- Zodiac year
- 2,024
This Chinese zodiac sign calculator takes a Gregorian calendar year and returns the traditional twelve-animal sign associated with that year in the Chinese lunisolar cycle: Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, or Pig. When you only supply a year, the mapping follows the standard civil label people use when they say “2024 is the Year of the Dragon,” via the closed formula index equals year minus four, modulo twelve. When life gets interesting near late January or early February, you can also pass a month and day so the engine applies the Chinese New Year cutoff: dates before that year’s lunar New Year belong to the previous animal. Small checks you may already know include year 2020 as Rat, year 2024 as Dragon, and 9 February 2024 as Rabbit while 10 February 2024 is Dragon.
What the animal means and what you get
The Chinese zodiac is a twelve-year cycle of animals that labels each year in the traditional East Asian lunisolar calendar. In everyday speech people attach one animal to a civil Gregorian year—2025 is the Year of the Snake—while careful cultural and genealogy work also respects that the animal actually changes at Chinese New Year, which falls between late January and mid February, not on the first of January. This calculator accepts a required integer year from one through nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine and optional Gregorian month and day fields.
Western sun signs, hourly Chinese earthly branches, and five-element stem-branch charts are intentionally out of scope. If you need Easter dates, ISO week numbers, or generic date math, use those dedicated tools; this page answers only the Chinese zodiac animal for a validated year and optional cutoff date.
Where Chinese zodiac lookups fit in culture, product, and software
Editors and marketers writing seasonal copy need a stable mapping from year to animal so headlines and asset names stay consistent across campaigns. Genealogy and cultural-education products want the optional date path so a birthday near Chinese New Year does not silently inherit the wrong sign. Developers call the same contract from scripts to seed localization tables, to generate deterministic test vectors for profile badges, or to satisfy product requirements that demand a documented formula rather than a hard-coded list that goes stale.
Teachers use the tool to show how a twelve-year modular cycle and a movable lunar New Year interact, and to demonstrate boundary dates in January and February without relying on opaque calculator apps that disagree with each other. Event planners and hospitality teams building lunar-new-year promotions can confirm which animal applies on a specific civil day before printing materials. Pair it with other free deterministic date helpers when you are assembling a small lab of calendar utilities for teaching, compliance, or product features.
What you can do with it
Year-of-the-animal labels
Map any civil year to Rat through Pig for articles, campaign names, and UI badges using the standard modular cycle.
Birthdays near lunar New Year
Pass month and day so dates before Chinese New Year resolve to the previous animal instead of the civil-year label.
FAQ
What does the Chinese zodiac sign calculator cost?
It is free in your browser on this page.
How is the animal chosen from a year alone?
For example, 2020 is Rat and 2024 is Dragon.
What happens if I also send month and day?
The engine computes Chinese New Year for that year. Dates strictly before CNY use the previous zodiac year; CNY day and later keep the civil year animal.
What if the year is not an integer?
Year must be an integer from 1 to 9999.
Does this return Western astrology signs?
No. It only returns the Chinese twelve-animal zodiac for a year (and optional lunar New Year cutoff date).
Related tools
For developers — API access
Everything on this page is available programmatically. This section is for teams who want to wire it into their own systems; everyone else can just use the tool above.
API endpoint
Prefer to automate it? One authenticated POST creates the task; the result comes back by webhook or a signed link. The same capability also runs here on the web, by email and from Telegram — and soon from our app too.
Call it from your stack
curl -X POST https://api.kit.forhosting.com/date/chinese-zodiac \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KIT_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"year":2024}'const res = await fetch("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/date/chinese-zodiac", {
method: "POST",
headers: {
"Authorization": `Bearer ${process.env.KIT_KEY}`,
"Content-Type": "application/json"
},
body: JSON.stringify({
"year": 2024
})
});
const { task_id } = await res.json();import os, requests
res = requests.post(
"https://api.kit.forhosting.com/date/chinese-zodiac",
headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['KIT_KEY']}"},
json={
"year": 2024
},
)
task_id = res.json()["task_id"]<?php
$res = file_get_contents("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/date/chinese-zodiac", false, stream_context_create([
"http" => [
"method" => "POST",
"header" => "Authorization: Bearer " . getenv("KIT_KEY") . "\r\nContent-Type: application/json",
"content" => '{"year":2024}',
],
]));
$task = json_decode($res, true);body := bytes.NewBufferString(`{"year":2024}`)
req, _ := http.NewRequest("POST", "https://api.kit.forhosting.com/date/chinese-zodiac", body)
req.Header.Set("Authorization", "Bearer "+os.Getenv("KIT_KEY"))
req.Header.Set("Content-Type", "application/json")
res, _ := http.DefaultClient.Do(req)Example request
{
"year": 2024
}Example response
{
"task_id": "tsk_a1b2c3d4e5f6a1b2c3d4e5f6",
"type": "date.chinese_zodiac",
"status": "queued",
"_links": {
"result": "/tasks/tsk_…/result"
}
}The API is asynchronous: the call returns a task_id immediately and the result arrives by webhook. Polling is capped at 1 req/s per task.
Pricing
Published price — no tokens, no invented credits. A failed task is never charged.
Limits
year_min | 1 |
year_max | 9999 |
Errors
| HTTP | Code | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
401 | unauthorized | Missing or invalid API key. |
402 | insufficient_balance | Your balance doesn't cover the task price. |
404 | unknown_type | That task type doesn't exist. |
429 | rate_limited | Too many requests. Use the webhook instead of polling. |
Technical notes
What the Chinese zodiac animal means and what the response contains
It returns the normalized year, the animal name, a zero-based animal_index in the fixed order Rat through Pig, a one-based cycle_position, the resolved zodiac_year (which may be year minus one when the date is before Chinese New Year), a before_new_year flag, the method tag chinese_zodiac, and a short formula reminder. When a date is supplied it also echoes month, day, a YYYY-MM-DD date string, and the computed chinese_new_year fields for that civil year. There is no remote ephemeris download and no random folklore sampling: either the inputs validate and the animal is fully determined, or the request fails with invalid_input. Rejected cases include a missing year, non-integer year tokens, years outside the documented range, a month without a day or the reverse, and impossible calendar days such as 31 April.
How year, month, and day are read and how the cutoff stays reproducible
Numeric strings with optional leading plus or minus signs are accepted when they parse as integers; decimal points, scientific notation, hex prefixes, and empty strings are rejected with a clear message so a bad cell does not become the wrong animal. After parsing, the year must lie between one and nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine inclusive to match other calendar helpers in the catalog. The preferred field is year, but aliases y, capital Y, and yr are accepted so spreadsheets, query strings, and typed forms can reuse the same contract without renaming columns. Optional month and day must arrive together: aliases m, capital M, and mon for month, and d, capital D, and dom for day, each as integers in the obvious ranges, with day checked against the real length of that month including Gregorian leap February. When only the year is present, zodiac_year equals year and the animal follows index equals year minus four modulo twelve with Rat at zero. If the input date is strictly before that New Year day, before_new_year is true and zodiac_year becomes year minus one; on New Year day and after, the civil year keeps its animal. Pair the free browser run on this page with the priced API when you need the identical animal inside an automated pipeline without re-implementing lunisolar cutoffs yourself.
Where Chinese zodiac lookups fit in culture, product, and software
On this page the work runs entirely in your browser; through the API each successful lookup costs $0.002, failed validation is not charged, and nothing is stored after the response returns. That split — free interactive exploration and a priced, identical API — matches the rest of the KIT tier-A catalog and lets you move from a one-off trivia check to a multi-year cultural calendar without changing the mathematical result.
Integration use cases
Deterministic cultural fixtures
Generate reproducible animal and chinese_new_year fields for unit tests, localization packs, and CI assertions.