Reference · 26 August 2026 · 2 min read
Year of the Rooster: every year from 1933 to 2041, with the real start date
The one that says the thing everyone was thinking and nobody said.
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 1993 is not a Rooster. Chinese New Year 1993 was 23 January 1993, so that birthday still falls in the year of the Monkey — 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 Rooster, 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1933 | Water Rooster | 26 January 1933 | 13 February 1934 |
| 1945 | Wood Rooster | 13 February 1945 | 1 February 1946 |
| 1957 | Fire Rooster | 31 January 1957 | 17 February 1958 |
| 1969 | Earth Rooster | 17 February 1969 | 5 February 1970 |
| 1981 | Metal Rooster | 5 February 1981 | 24 January 1982 |
| 1993 | Water Rooster | 23 January 1993 | 9 February 1994 |
| 2005 | Wood Rooster | 9 February 2005 | 28 January 2006 |
| 2017 | Fire Rooster | 28 January 2017 | 15 February 2018 |
| 2029 | Earth Rooster | 13 February 2029 | 2 February 2030 |
| 2041 | Metal Rooster | 1 February 2041 | 21 January 2042 |
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 Rooster is taken to describe
Precision and candour. The cost of being reliably honest is that people brace slightly before asking.
As with everything in this system, read it as a description of a tension rather than a forecast. The Rooster sits between the Monkey and the Dog 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 Rooster year is a starting point, not a conclusion.