BaZi calculator

Enter your birth date below. You will get the ten-year periods your life divides into, and a description of the one you are in now.

What this calculates

BaZi — literally "eight characters" — describes a birth moment as four pairs of symbols: one for the year, one for the month, one for the day, one for the hour. Those eight characters are the chart.

The part most people come for is not the chart itself but what sits on top of it: the luck cycles, ten-year periods that run in sequence from the month pillar. Each one has a different character. You are inside one right now, and it will end.

Why the birth time is optional here

Western natal charts need a birth time — without it the rising sign is unknown and roughly half the reading disappears. The ten-year cycles are derived from the month pillar, so they are exact whether or not you know the hour. Leaving the time as "I don't know" costs you the hour pillar and nothing else.

How the dates are worked out

The year does not turn over on 1 January. It turns at the solar term lichun, in early February, so a birth in late January belongs to the previous year of the cycle. Month boundaries follow the twelve major solar terms, which are astronomical events rather than calendar dates — this calculator solves for them directly instead of reading a lookup table, and applies the historical time zone and daylight saving rules in force at your birth place on that date.