Gregorian to Ethiopian date converter
Type a Gregorian date and get its Ethiopian equivalent: 1 January 2024 is 22 Tahsas 2016. The result names the month, from Meskerem to Pagumen, and says whether the Ethiopian year is a leap year. Free in your browser.
- Free
- Runs in your browser
- No sign-up
- Your data stays on your device
Run — free
Worked example
- Date
- 2024-01-01
- Gregorian
- 2024-01-01
- Ethiopian year
- 2,016
- Ethiopian month
- 4
- Ethiopian day
- 22
The Ethiopian calendar (also called the Ge'ez or Ethiopic calendar) runs about seven to eight years behind the Gregorian civil calendar and uses thirteen months: twelve of thirty days plus Pagumen of five or six days. Businesses, diaspora communities, churches, schools, and historians constantly need a reliable Gregorian to Ethiopian date converter that does not depend on the browser clock or a remote service. Enkutatash (Meskerem 1) falls on 11 September Gregorian, or 12 September in the year before a Gregorian leap year; the same arithmetic places Genna, Timket, and ordinary civil dates without tables.
How the Ethiopian calendar relates to the Gregorian date
The Ethiopian calendar is a solar calendar with twelve equal months of thirty days followed by a short thirteenth month called Pagumen. In ordinary years Pagumen has five days; in Ethiopian leap years it has six. An Ethiopian year is a leap year when the year number modulo four equals three, which keeps the calendar aligned with the same four-year rhythm that underlies the Alexandrian and Coptic systems.
The Ethiopian New Year, Enkutatash, is Meskerem 1. On the Gregorian side that day is 11 September except in the Gregorian year that precedes a Gregorian leap year, when New Year falls on 12 September because the preceding Ethiopian year carried a six-day Pagumen. From New Year through 31 December the Ethiopian year is typically Gregorian year minus seven; from 1 January until the day before the next Enkutatash it is Gregorian year minus eight.
Those rule-of-thumb offsets are consequences of the day count, not separate lookup tables. This converter does not apply ad-hoc September offsets by hand: it maps the Gregorian triple year-month-day to a Julian Day Number with the standard civil formula, then maps that JDN into Ethiopian year, month, and day using the Amete Mihret epoch (Meskerem 1 of year 0 at JDN 1723856) and four-year cycles of 1461 days.
The result matches published anchors such as the Ethiopian millennium on 12 September 2007 Gregorian equalling Meskerem 1 of 2000 Ethiopian, and Meskerem 1 of 2018 equalling 11 September 2025. Month names in the response use common English transliterations: Meskerem, Tikimt, Hidar, Tahsas, Tir, Yekatit, Megabit, Miazia, Ginbot, Sene, Hamle, Nehasse, and Pagumen.
What to enter, what you get and what is refused
Only the calendar date is used; there is no time-of-day component and no dependence on the server clock or the client's local time zone—the conversion is computed as if the civil date were interpreted in UTC day boundaries from the digits you supply. The string must match four digits, hyphen, two digits, hyphen, two digits. The month must be 1–12 and the day must be valid for that month in the proleptic Gregorian calendar, including 29 February only in Gregorian leap years.
Example: 2024-01-01 converts to Tahsas 22 of Ethiopian year 2016 because Enkutatash for that cycle fell on 12 September 2023. Example: 2025-09-11 converts to Meskerem 1 of 2018.
Where a Gregorian to Ethiopian converter earns its keep
Church calendars, wedding planners, and diaspora event sites need Meskerem, Tahsas, and Pagumen dates next to Western invitations without maintaining a private copy of leap tables. HR and payroll tools that serve Ethiopian employees map leave, holidays, and local New Year against ISO hire dates stored in global systems. Historians and genealogists converting baptismal or land records need a deterministic oracle rather than a spreadsheet formula that drifts when someone changes the regional Date settings.
Keep requests to a single date string, cache results if you convert the same holidays repeatedly, and you get reproducible Ethiopian dates for LMS plugins, edge workers, and content sites that rank for gregorian to ethiopian date converter without standing up your own JDN stack.
What you can do with it
Dual-calendar invitations and church events
Print Enkutatash, Genna, and Timket dates beside Gregorian party or liturgy invitations so diaspora guests see both systems at once.
HR, payroll, and holiday calendars
Map ISO employment records to Ethiopian public holidays and New Year without embedding leap-year tables in every microservice.
FAQ
When is Ethiopian New Year (Enkutatash) on the Gregorian calendar?
Meskerem 1 falls on 11 September, or on 12 September in the Gregorian year before a Gregorian leap year (after a six-day Pagumen). The converter applies that automatically via day-count arithmetic.
How many months does the Ethiopian calendar have?
Thirteen: twelve months of 30 days (Meskerem through Nehasse) plus Pagumen of 5 days, or 6 days in Ethiopian leap years (year mod 4 equals 3).
Why is the Ethiopian year 7 or 8 years behind?
From New Year through December the gap is usually seven years; from January until the next Enkutatash it is eight. Both are consequences of the shared solar day count, not separate clocks.
How do Ethiopian leap years work?
An Ethiopian year is a leap year when dividing its number by four leaves a remainder of three. In that year the short thirteenth month, Pagumen, has six days instead of five.
When was the Ethiopian millennium?
Meskerem 1 of the year 2000 in the Ethiopian calendar fell on 12 September 2007 in the Gregorian calendar. The converter matches that anchor and others, such as Meskerem 1 of 2018 on 11 September 2025.
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/gregorian-to-ethiopian \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KIT_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"date":"2024-01-01"}'const res = await fetch("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/date/gregorian-to-ethiopian", {
method: "POST",
headers: {
"Authorization": `Bearer ${process.env.KIT_KEY}`,
"Content-Type": "application/json"
},
body: JSON.stringify({
"date": "2024-01-01"
})
});
const { task_id } = await res.json();import os, requests
res = requests.post(
"https://api.kit.forhosting.com/date/gregorian-to-ethiopian",
headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['KIT_KEY']}"},
json={
"date": "2024-01-01"
},
)
task_id = res.json()["task_id"]<?php
$res = file_get_contents("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/date/gregorian-to-ethiopian", false, stream_context_create([
"http" => [
"method" => "POST",
"header" => "Authorization: Bearer " . getenv("KIT_KEY") . "\r\nContent-Type: application/json",
"content" => '{"date":"2024-01-01"}',
],
]));
$task = json_decode($res, true);body := bytes.NewBufferString(`{"date":"2024-01-01"}`)
req, _ := http.NewRequest("POST", "https://api.kit.forhosting.com/date/gregorian-to-ethiopian", body)
req.Header.Set("Authorization", "Bearer "+os.Getenv("KIT_KEY"))
req.Header.Set("Content-Type", "application/json")
res, _ := http.DefaultClient.Do(req)Example request
{
"date": "2024-01-01"
}Example response
{
"task_id": "tsk_a1b2c3d4e5f6a1b2c3d4e5f6",
"type": "date.gregorian_to_ethiopian",
"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.
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
This capability accepts an explicit Gregorian ISO date, converts it with pure Julian Day Number arithmetic evaluated as a calendar date in UTC terms, and returns the Ethiopian year, month index, day of month, English month name, a compact ethiopian_date string, whether the Ethiopian year is a leap year, and the intermediate JDN. The free browser path and the paid API share one deterministic module so widgets and automation never disagree.
Input contract, response fields, and validation errors
Send a JSON body with a single required field date: a Gregorian calendar date as an ISO-8601 calendar string YYYY-MM-DD. Missing date, wrong type, malformed strings, month 00 or 13, and impossible days such as 2023-02-29 or 2024-04-31 fail with invalid_input and are not billed. On success the body echoes gregorian as the normalised ISO string; ethiopian_year, ethiopian_month (1–13), and ethiopian_day; month_name as the English month label; ethiopian_date as year-month-day zero-padded for easy display and sorting within the Ethiopian system; is_ethiopian_leap_year as a boolean for the Ethiopian year that contains the date; and jdn as the integer Julian Day Number used internally.
Where a Gregorian to Ethiopian converter earns its keep
Mobile apps that show dual calendars can call this parse endpoint once per displayed day instead of shipping a full calendar library.
Integration use cases
Education, media, and dual-calendar apps
Power classroom demos and mobile dual calendars with a deterministic API that matches the free browser converter on every date.
Technical questions
How do I convert a Gregorian date to the Ethiopian calendar?
POST a JSON body with date as YYYY-MM-DD. The API returns ethiopian_year, ethiopian_month (1–13), ethiopian_day, month_name, ethiopian_date, is_ethiopian_leap_year, and the intermediate jdn.
What does the Gregorian to Ethiopian date converter cost?
The browser tool is free. API requests use prepaid KIT balance at $0.002 per successful call; invalid input is not billed.