BaZi & Chinese Zodiac Calculator

One birthday in — your zodiac sign and your full four-pillar chart out. Everything is calculated in your browser; your birthday never leaves this page unless you buy a report.

Your birth details

Gender

What is a BaZi calculator?

A BaZi calculator turns your birth date and time into the four pillars of destiny: the heavenly stem and earthly branch of your birth year, month, day and hour. Those eight characters are the skeleton of a Chinese birth chart. From them, the classical system derives your day master, the balance of the five elements, the ten gods that describe how each pillar relates to you, and the luck pillars that mark out ten-year stretches of life.

The hard part is not the arithmetic but the calendar. A correct chart uses the solar terms: the year pillar changes at Lichun, the Beginning of Spring, not at January 1st or Chinese New Year, and each month pillar changes at its own solar term. This calculator uses the full solar-term table, so a birth date near a boundary lands on the right pillar instead of the nearest guess.

What this free BaZi chart generator includes

  • Four pillars — year, month, day and hour, each a heavenly stem over an earthly branch.
  • Your Chinese zodiac sign — the animal of the year branch, decided at Lichun like every classical chart.
  • Day master and ten gods — which element you are, and the ten classical relations of every other stem to you.
  • Day pillar — your exact spot in the 60-pillar sexagenary cycle, from Jia Zi (甲子) to Gui Hai (癸亥): read your day pillar
  • Five elements count — how Metal, Wood, Water, Fire and Earth distribute across your eight characters.
  • Luck pillars (Da Yun) — the sequence of ten-year periods, with the starting age derived from your birth date and gender.
  • This year's glance — the current year's pillar against your day master, so the chart answers a live question, not a timeless one.

Everything above is computed in your browser the moment you press Generate. The birthday never leaves this page unless you buy a report, and the same numbers go to every part of the chart, so there is one source of truth rather than a chart that changes between tabs. If your reading led you here, the companionI Ching hexagram chart lists all sixty-four hexagrams with their trigram pairs and one-line meanings, and every entry links to the full classical text.

How to read your BaZi chart

Start at the day stem: that is your day master, the element the whole chart is read against. Next look at the five elements count — an element with no support or an element flooding the chart both say something. Then move outward in time: the luck pillars give the decade, and the yearly pillar gives this year's weather. Our step-by-step BaZi guide walks through an example chart with the same layout this page produces.

What is my Chinese zodiac?

Your Chinese zodiac sign is the animal of your birth year’s earthly branch — one of twelve: Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, Pig. In the classical system the year does not begin at January 1st or even at Chinese New Year: the zodiac year changes at Lichun, the Beginning of Spring, usually on February 4th.

The zodiac sign is only one character of your full chart. A BaZi (八字, “eight characters”) chart records the heavenly stem and earthly branch of your birth year, month, day and hour — eight characters in total. The zodiac is the animal of the year branch, one of those eight.

That is why this page asks for your birth date only once: the zodiac and the full chart come from the same input, and both are calculated here in your browser with the same deterministic engine. Want the year-by-year table instead? The Chinese zodiac years chart lists every animal with its stem-branch pair from 1936 to 2031.

BaZi FAQ

Why does the calculator ask for my gender?
The direction of the luck pillars, the ten-year cycles, runs forward for some birth-year combinations and backward for others, and the classical rule is decided by gender together with the year stem's polarity. Gender affects only the cycle order, not the four pillars themselves.
What if I don't know my birth hour?
Check “I don't know my birth hour” and the chart builds from three pillars instead of four. The year, month and day pillars are all still exact. Only the hour pillar and the parts of the reading that depend on it are left out, which is the honest way to handle a missing hour.
Is the zodiac sign the same as the BaZi chart?
No. The zodiac is one character of eight: the animal of your birth year's branch. Two people born in the same zodiac year can have completely different charts, because the month, day and hour pillars belong to them alone.
Where does the calculation happen?
In your browser, with the solar-term calendar and the pillar math running as local code. Nothing is sent to a server to be calculated, and closing the tab leaves no chart behind.
Can I use this as a Chinese zodiac calculator for year, month, day and hour?
Yes. Enter your birth year, month, day and hour and the page shows your zodiac animal (year branch) together with the other seven characters the zodiac alone leaves out: the month, day and hour pillars. The zodiac boundary follows Lichun, the same one the classical calendar uses.
Is this a Chinese birthday calculator?
It reads a birth date the way the Chinese calendar does: the same birthday maps to four pillars built from the solar-term calendar, not to a single sign. You get the pillars, the day master and the luck cycles that a plain birthday conversion cannot show.