Reference · 26 August 2026 · 2 min read
Year of the Pig: every year from 1935 to 2043, with the real start date
Generosity that does not keep an account, which is both the gift and the problem.
The part almost every site gets wrong
The Chinese year does not begin on 1 January. It begins at Chinese New Year, which falls somewhere between 21 January and 20 February depending on the moon. So a birthday in January or early February usually belongs to the previous animal.
Someone born on 15 January 1995 is not a Pig. Chinese New Year 1995 was 31 January 1995, so that birthday still falls in the year of the Dog — and every chart that says otherwise is reading the Gregorian year and stopping there.
This matters for 9.5% of all birthdays — every date between 1 January and the New Year that follows it. Counted across 1924–2043, not estimated.
Every year of the Pig, with its exact boundary
Computed from the lunisolar calendar — the same calculation the readings use — rather than copied from a table. Dates are Beijing civil days.
| Year | Sign | From | Until |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1935 | Wood Pig | 4 February 1935 | 23 January 1936 |
| 1947 | Fire Pig | 22 January 1947 | 9 February 1948 |
| 1959 | Earth Pig | 8 February 1959 | 27 January 1960 |
| 1971 | Metal Pig | 27 January 1971 | 14 February 1972 |
| 1983 | Water Pig | 13 February 1983 | 1 February 1984 |
| 1995 | Wood Pig | 31 January 1995 | 18 February 1996 |
| 2007 | Fire Pig | 18 February 2007 | 6 February 2008 |
| 2019 | Earth Pig | 5 February 2019 | 24 January 2020 |
| 2031 | Metal Pig | 23 January 2031 | 10 February 2032 |
| 2043 | Water Pig | 10 February 2043 | 29 January 2044 |
The element is not decorative. The animals run on a twelve-year cycle and the five elements on a ten-year one, so the same pairing — Wood Rat, Fire Horse — only returns every sixty years. That sixty-year cycle is the real unit of the calendar.
Check a birthday
What the Pig is taken to describe
Openness and appetite for life. Its difficulty is a reluctance to believe that anyone is acting in bad faith.
As with everything in this system, read it as a description of a tension rather than a forecast. The Pig sits between the Dog and the Rat in the cycle, and the three are usually easier to tell apart by what they avoid than by what they claim.
Where it sits in a whole chart
The Chinese year is one of three systems we read together, and on its own it is the broadest of them — it describes a year, and a year holds a great many different people. It gets specific when it is set against a Western Sun sign and a Life Path, which move on entirely different cycles. A Pig year is a starting point, not a conclusion.