Lunar New Year Date Calculator

Lunar New Year — also called Spring Festival in many communities — begins on the first day of the first lunar month in the Chinese lunisolar calendar. On the Gregorian calendar it usually falls between January 21 and February 20.

This calculator returns the first day of the lunar year for a chosen Gregorian year using a fixed lookup table for 1990–2030. It does not compute every historical year or every East Asian calendar variant — Vietnam, Korea, and other regions may share the date or differ slightly in festival names.

Example: Lunar New Year 2026 is February 17, 2026. Anyone born before that date in 2026 still counts as the prior zodiac year in the animal calculator above.

The date moves because twelve lunar months run about 354 days, roughly 11 days short of the solar year. Left alone, the new year would drift backwards through the seasons, so the calendar inserts a leap month about every three years — which is why Lunar New Year can jump nearly a month later from one year to the next.

The underlying rule is astronomical rather than arbitrary. The first day of the lunar year is the new moon that falls closest to the start of spring — in practice, the second new moon after the winter solstice in most years. Because it is defined by an observed new moon, the date is calculated for a specific time zone.

That time zone dependence occasionally splits the date across countries. The Chinese calendar is computed for Beijing time while the Vietnamese calendar uses Vietnamese time, so in rare years when a new moon falls close to midnight, Tết and Chinese New Year land on different Gregorian days.

The animal cycle is not identical across the region either. Vietnam substitutes the cat for the rabbit and the buffalo for the ox, and Vietnamese Tết, Korean Seollal, Mongolian Tsagaan Sar, and Tibetan Losar each carry distinct customs, foods, and holiday lengths even when the date coincides.

For planning purposes the festival is a season rather than a day. Public holidays commonly run several days in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Korea, travel demand builds for weeks beforehand, and the season closes with the Lantern Festival on the fifteenth day — check the specific jurisdiction's published holiday calendar before booking.

Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China share the same lunisolar rules in most years but festival public holidays differ by jurisdiction — verify local calendars for travel planning.

Lantern Festival marks the end of the New Year season about fifteen days later — travel peaks often span the whole period, not just day one.