About the lunar calendar converter
Most of the world runs on the solar (Gregorian) calendar, but birthdays, memorial days and the biggest holidays of the year are still counted on the lunar calendar in Korea, China, Vietnam and much of the region. The two calendars drift against each other, so a lunar date lands on a different solar date every year — which is exactly why people go looking for a converter.
This tool converts either way: give it a solar date and it tells you the lunar one, or give it a lunar date and it tells you which day that falls on. It also answers the question most people actually came for — *when is this date, in the coming years?* — with a table of the next twelve.
Everything happens in your browser. No date you type is sent anywhere.
How to use it
- Pick the calendar: Korea (음력) or China (农历).
- Choose the direction — Solar → Lunar or Lunar → Solar.
- Type the date. The result updates as you type.
- If the lunar year has a leap month, a Leap month checkbox appears — tick it when your date is in the repeated month.
The page opens on today's date already converted, so a quick "what is today in the lunar calendar?" takes no clicks at all.
What you get back
- The converted date, with the day of the week.
- The zodiac animal of the lunar year — rat, ox, tiger and the rest.
- The sexagenary (ganzhi) year in hanja, such as 甲辰 for 2024.
- How many days that lunar month has — 29 or 30 — and whether it is a leap month.
- The same lunar date for the next twelve lunar years, so you can put a lunar birthday straight into your solar calendar.
Why Korea and China are separate options
The lunar calendar is astronomical: a month begins on the day of the new moon, and the extra leap month is inserted to keep the months in step with the seasons. "The day of the new moon" depends on which time zone you are standing in. Korea uses KST (UTC+9), China uses UTC+8, so when a new moon falls in that one-hour window the two calendars start the month on different days — and once in a while they place a leap month in a different position altogether.
That is not a rounding error, it is two official calendars. This tool keeps them apart:
- Korea follows the tables published by KASI, the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute — the same source Korean calendars and civil records use.
- China follows the standard 农历 as computed for UTC+8.
Vietnamese âm lịch (UTC+7) can also differ by a day from both; if you need Vietnamese dates specifically, treat the Chinese result as a close but not authoritative answer.
Leap months, and why a date can go missing
A lunar year of twelve months is about eleven days shorter than a solar year. To stop the new year sliding into summer, an extra month — a leap month — is added roughly every three years. It repeats the number of the month before it: after the 2nd month comes a *leap* 2nd month, so 2023 had two second months.
Two consequences worth knowing:
- A lunar year can have 13 months and run 383–385 days.
- The 30th does not exist in every month. Lunar months are 29 or 30 days long, so someone born on the 30th of a month has no exact birthday in a year where that month is short. In the years table this tool falls back to the last day of the month and marks the row — the same convention families normally use.
Holidays this answers
Because the major holidays are fixed on the lunar calendar, converting the lunar date forward tells you the solar date in any year:
- Seollal / Chinese New Year — 1st month, 1st day
- Jeongwol Daeboreum / Lantern Festival — 1st month, 15th day
- Dano / Dragon Boat Festival — 5th month, 5th day
- Chuseok / Mid-Autumn Festival — 8th month, 15th day
- Double Ninth (Chongyang) — 9th month, 9th day
- Laba — 12th month, 8th day
Set the direction to Lunar → Solar, type the lunar date, and the years table gives you the next twelve years at once.
Good to know
- Coverage runs from 1900 to 2049 for Korea and 1901 to 2098 for China. Both are limited by how far the official tables go; anything outside that range is refused rather than guessed.
- Dates before 1896 in Korea and 1912 in China are complicated by the calendar reforms of those years, which is why the tool does not go further back.
- The converter uses a compact lookup table built from the official data, not an approximation — the answers match the printed calendars day for day.
- The zodiac animal changes at the lunar new year, not on 1 January. Someone born in late January is often a year off if they check a solar-year table.
Related tools
- Date Calculator — add or subtract days from a date.
- Time Duration Calculator — the days between two dates.
- Age Calculator — your exact age in years, months and days.
- Countdown to Date — count down to the next holiday once you know its solar date.
