The 24 Chinese Solar Terms: Names, Exact 2026 Dates & What Each One Means

The Chinese calendar cuts the solar year into 24 equal slices called jieqi (节气, solar terms). Each marks the moment the Sun reaches a fixed point on the ecliptic — every 15 degrees of longitude — so the same term falls on almost the same Gregorian date every year. This page lists all 24 terms with their exact 2026 dates and times (computed to the minute), then explains how the system is defined and what each term marks in the agricultural and seasonal year.

What the 24 solar terms are: 15° of solar longitude

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The Earth orbits the Sun once a year. Projected onto the sky, that path is the ecliptic; measured along it from the spring equinox point, the Sun advances 360° in a year. The Chinese tradition marks every 15° of that advance as one solar term — 360 ÷ 15 = 24, which is where the number comes from. Because the terms are fixed by the Sun’s position and have nothing to do with the Moon’s phases, they sit on nearly constant Gregorian dates (wandering only a day or two between years), which is exactly what makes them useful as an agricultural calendar.

Two terms bookend the cultural year: Lichun (立春, Start of Spring) at 315° opens the traditional sequence, and Dahan (大寒, Major Cold) at 300° closes it. Astronomers count from the spring equinox at 0°, so the two conventions meet at Chunfen (春分) — 0° or 360°, depending on which way you round.

The 24 solar terms: full 2026 reference table

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Times below are in UTC, the astronomical instant at which the Sun reaches each term’s longitude; the cultural year itself begins at Start of Spring (立春) in February. The list is ordered by 2026 calendar date for easy lookup. In China Standard Time (UTC+8), add eight hours — a few terms then fall on the following calendar day.

A few of these names describe weather — Minor Snow, Major Snow, White Dew, Frost’s Descent. A few mark pure astronomy — the two solstices and two equinoxes. Most track the agricultural year: when to sow (Grain in Ear), when grain fills (Grain Buds), when heat peaks (Major Heat) and recedes (End of Heat). The pairing is deliberate: each 15° step was set to fall on a recognizable seasonal marker rather than an abstract angle.

How the 24 terms map onto the four seasons

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Four of the 24 terms are the season-openers, and four are the astronomical extremes — together they form the skeleton the other 16 fill in:

• Two solstices — Summer Solstice (夏至, 90°, the longest day) and Winter Solstice (冬至, 270°, the shortest).
• Two equinoxes — Spring Equinox (春分, 0°) and Autumn Equinox (秋分, 180°), when day and night are equal.
• Four season-openers — Start of Spring (立春, 315°), Start of Summer (立夏, 45°), Start of Autumn (立秋, 135°) and Start of Winter (立冬, 225°), the traditional season boundaries.

That is eight fixed anchor points. The remaining sixteen sit two between each pair, so each quarter of the year is cut into six roughly fifteen-day steps — fine enough to track sowing, ripening and harvest separately.

Solar terms and the lunar month: why the two stay in step

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This is the part that confuses readers new to the Chinese calendar. The 24 solar terms follow the Sun; the calendar’s months follow the Moon, beginning on the day of the new moon. The two run at different speeds — a lunar month averages 29.5 days, a solar-term pair about 30.4 days — so they slowly drift apart. The calendar’s leap-month rule exists to realign them: each lunar month is expected to contain one solar term of each kind (a jie 节 at the start and a zhongqi 中气 mid-month). When a lunar month is short enough to contain no zhongqi, it is repeated as a leap month, which pulls the Moon back in line with the Sun.

That is the same mechanism explained in How the Chinese Lunar Calendar Works — the solar terms are the yardstick the leap month is measured against. Bazi chart reading also divides its “months” by the solar terms rather than by lunar new-moon days, so the start of a new month branch can land on a day the lunar calendar still counts as the previous month.

Checking a date against the almanac

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The moments above are computed; for a specific date you want to look up, the Chinese Almanac Calendar tool on this site shows which solar term is in force on any given day, alongside its lunar date and stem-branch pillars — useful for seeing where a date falls relative to a term boundary.

A Western analogy: solstices, equinoxes and cross-quarter days

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Western calendars mark the same two solstices and two equinoxes — the four astronomical extremes — and stop there. The Celtic calendar goes one step further, adding four cross-quarter days halfway between them (Imbolc around Feb 1, Beltane around May 1, Lughnasadh around Aug 1, Samhain around Oct 31), for an eight-fold year. The Chinese 24 solar terms do the same thing at higher resolution: the four solstice and equinox points are all present (at 0°, 90°, 180°, 270°), and the system then subdivides each quarter into six fifteen-degree steps rather than two — turning four anchor points into twenty-four, each tied to a seasonal or agricultural marker rather than a bare angle.

Classical source

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The earliest surviving text to record all 24 solar-term names in their standard sequence is the Huainanzi (《淮南子》), compiled under Liu An in the second century BCE — specifically its “Treatise on Astronomical Patterns” (《天文训》), which lists the terms in order and ties each to the Sun’s motion and its corresponding phenology. That is where the 24-term grid takes its later fixed form. The astronomical technique for computing the exact moments has been refined many times since — the 15° solar-longitude definition is the modern version, and the 2026 moments in the table above are computed from it — but the 24 terms themselves were already set there.

Related: How the Chinese Lunar Calendar Works · Chinese Almanac Calendar tool · back to Foundations