Chinese Calendar

Online Chinese / Gregorian Calendar with Chinese festivals. This Calendar is a lunisolar calendar, incorporating elements of a lunar calendar with those of a solar calendar.

Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) 2026

February 17, 2026 — Year of the Fire Horse

Date
January 1, 2026 New Year
February 17, 2026 Spring Festival (Chinese New Year)
March 3, 2026 Lantern Festival
April 5, 2026 Qingming Festival
May 1, 2026 Labor Day
June 19, 2026 Duan Wu (Dragon Boat)
August 19, 2026 Qixi Festival (Chinese Valent.'s Day)
September 25, 2026 Mid-Autumn Festival
October 1, 2026 National Day
October 18, 2026 Double Ninth Festival

This content is here for information and cultural interest. The beliefs it describes are not necessarily our own.

The Chinese calendar is lunisolar, and that explains everything about it

It follows the moon for its months and the sun for its year, and reconciling the two is where all its apparent oddities come from. A month begins at the new moon and lasts twenty-nine or thirty days, so twelve of them fall short of a solar year by about eleven days. Left alone, the New Year would drift through the seasons, as it does in the Islamic calendar.

It is not left alone: an extra month is inserted every two or three years to catch up. That is why Chinese New Year moves within a window of about a month in the Western calendar, and why it never drifts out of it. The same mechanism explains why a Chinese birthday falls on a different Western date each year.

The calendar still governs the festivals, and it is still what many people consult for a wedding date. This converter turns any Western date into its Chinese equivalent and back, with the animal of the year, the sexagenary cycle of stems and branches, and the solar terms that mark the agricultural seasons.

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