Chinese Zodiac Signs by Year: Full Table (1924–2032)

Each Gregorian year maps to one of twelve Chinese zodiac animals (生肖, shēngxiào), cycling in a fixed twelve-year order. Look up any birth year from 1924 to 2032 in the table below to find its animal, its earthly branch, its full stem-branch year pillar, and its element. A person born in 2024 is a Dragon, 2025 a Snake, 2026 a Horse — but the animal alone is only half the sign: the same animal returns every twelve years paired with a different element, so the full combination repeats only every sixty years.

The 12 zodiac animals and their earthly branches

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The twelve animals are not an arbitrary list. Each is pinned to one of the twelve earthly branches (地支) — the same branches this site uses to label years, months, days, and hours across Bazi and the almanac. The branch is the animal; the animal is just the popular face of the branch. The order below is the fixed cycle, stable for the better part of two thousand years:

The “branch element” column above (Rat = Water, Dragon = Earth, Horse = Fire…) is the branch’s own fixed element — a property of the branch that repeats every twelve years alongside the animal. It is not the same as the “element” column in the year table below, which comes from the year’s heavenly stem and changes every ten years. Both are real and both are used in Chinese metaphysics; this page keeps them separate to avoid the common mix-up where “Wood Dragon” (2024 — a stem-element statement about that year) is read as saying the Dragon’s own element is Wood (it is Earth).

Chinese zodiac signs by year: full table 1924–2032

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The table covers nine full twelve-year cycles, 109 years. Each row gives the year, its animal, its earthly branch (the branch determines the animal), the full stem-branch year pillar (干支, the unit the Bazi Calculator and the Chinese Almanac Calendar on this site work in), and the year element derived from that pillar’s stem.

Element = the year’s heavenly-stem element (天干五行), the one that combines with the animal in names like “Wood Dragon” (2024). It is distinct from the branch’s own fixed element shown in the first table. Because the animal cycles every 12 years and the stem element every 10, the two together repeat every 60 years — the length of one full stem-branch cycle (六十甲子). So 1924 and 1984 are both Wood Rats; 1960 and 2020 are both Metal Rats; but 1936 and 1996 are Fire Rats, a different sign within the same animal.

When the zodiac year actually begins

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The animal does not change over at midnight on January 1st. In the traditional stem-branch system that Bazi uses, the year pillar turns at the solar term Lichun (立春, Start of Spring) — the moment the Sun reaches 315° of ecliptic longitude, which falls on February 3, 4, or 5. The popular and cultural convention uses Chinese New Year (the first new moon of the lunisolar year, which lands between January 21 and February 21). The two are usually a few days to a couple of weeks apart, and neither coincides with the Gregorian calendar boundary.

The practical consequence is that anyone born in January or the first few days of February belongs to the previous year’s sign, not the one printed on their birth certificate. A person born on January 15, 2026 is a Snake (the 2025 sign), not a Horse — because both the Lichun boundary (Feb 4) and Chinese New Year of 2026 (Feb 17) fall after their birthday. For an exact call on a specific date near either boundary, look the date up in the Chinese Almanac Calendar: it shows the stem-branch pillar in force on that specific day, which is the authoritative answer.

How this connects to the Chinese calendar

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The zodiac is a 12-spoke view of a larger machine. The same earthly branches that name the twelve animals also label the twelve months (by solar term, not by new moon), the twelve two-hour shichen (时辰) of the day, and the branch of the daily and hourly pillars in a Bazi chart. The year branch looked up here is only the first of four pillars a Bazi reading works with; the month branch is set by the solar terms laid out in The 24 Solar Terms, and the calendar that anchors the new-year date is explained in How the Chinese Lunar Calendar Works.

For a specific birth moment, the Bazi Calculator computes all four pillars at once from the exact time, and the Chinese Almanac Calendar shows any day’s branch and lunar date together — useful when a date sits near a boundary.

A Western reader’s analogy

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The Western zodiac has twelve signs too, but they are tied to the month of birth — the Sun’s ecliptic position through the year — while the Chinese zodiac is tied to the year. A Western sign covers about thirty days; a Chinese animal covers about three hundred and sixty-five. The two also differ in what they carry: a Western sign is a single constellation label, while a Chinese year sign is a stem-branch pair that bundles an animal, a stem, an element, and a polarity (yang or yin) into one sixty-part cycle. So where Western astrology subdivides the year, the Chinese system subdivides the century — and pairs each year with a layered sign rather than a single one.

Classical source

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The earliest surviving physical record of the twelve-branch–animal match is not a book but a tomb. The Shuihudi Qin bamboo slips (睡虎地秦简) — a cache of administrative and divination texts buried with a Qin official around 217 BCE and excavated in 1975 in Yunmeng, Hubei — include an almanac called the Rishu (《日书》, “Day Book”). Its thief-divination section pairs each of the twelve branches with an animal, the first known physical attestation of the branch-to-animal correspondence the zodiac still uses. The full twelve-animal set, systematized as a matched sequence rather than a divination tool, is then recorded in Wang Chong’s Lunheng (《论衡》, first century CE) — the earliest extant text to lay the twelve animals against the twelve branches in their standard form. The animals themselves predate both: they circulated as folk categories long before any text fixed them. But those two are where the written record of the match begins.

Further reading: How the Chinese Lunar Calendar Works · The 24 Solar Terms · Back to the Foundations section.