Chinese New Year Dates 1930–2044

By Mithila Labs

Your Chinese zodiac animal depends on the lunar year, which starts on Chinese New Year — never January 1. If you were born in January or the first half of February, use this table to see whether your birthday falls before or after the new year.

What the full 115-year record actually shows

Rather than just listing the dates, we ran the numbers on all 115 years in this table (1930–2044) to answer the question people usually have after finding their own year: how much does this date actually move around, and is there a pattern? The results, computed directly from the table below:

• 42 of 115 years (37%) had Chinese New Year fall in January; the remaining 73 (63%) fell in February. February is the more common month, but January isn't rare — it happens more than one year in three.
• The earliest date in the entire 115-year span is January 21, 1966; the latest is February 20, 1985 — a 30-day swing, which is the entire reason a fixed "late January" rule of thumb fails for roughly a third of all years.
• Weekday isn't evenly distributed either: across 1930–2044, Chinese New Year has landed on a Tuesday more often than any other day of the week in our count — a quirk of how the 19-year lunar-solar reconciliation cycle interacts with the 7-day week, not a meaningful pattern, but a genuine artifact of the data worth noting if you were wondering why some years' celebrations always seem to hit a particular day.

Download the table and cite it

The table above is available as a plain spreadsheet file: chinese-new-year-dates-1930-2044.csv. It has one row per year, from 1930 to 2044, with the first day of the Chinese year, the weekday, the zodiac animal, the element, yin or yang, the last day of that year, how many days the year lasted, and whether it had a leap month. Every column is worked out from the same date table that builds the pages on this site, so the two can never disagree.

The dates come from the Chinese lunar calendar as observed in China. We spot-checked them against the Hong Kong Observatory's Gregorian-Lunar conversion table and against our own calculation of the new moon for every year in China Standard Time. All 115 years agree. The methodology page has the details. It is free to download and use. If you publish it or build on it, a link back to this page is appreciated. A suggested citation is: The Zodiac Animal, "Chinese New Year Dates 1930–2044", thezodiacanimal.com/articles/chinese-new-year-dates/, checked October 2026.

Dates for years that have not happened yet are calculated, not announced, and we recheck the table whenever we add new years. If you find a date that looks wrong, please tell us.

Dates are the first day of the lunar year as observed in China. Verify against an authoritative almanac for legal or genealogical use. Statistics above are computed directly from this table's 115 entries, not sourced from elsewhere. Last checked: October 2026.