Reference · 31 August 2026 · 2 min read
Year of the Ox: every year from 1925 to 2033, with the real start date
The one that did the crossing, and did not notice it had been used.
The part almost every site gets wrong
The Chinese year does not begin on 1 January. It begins at Chinese New Year, which falls somewhere between 21 January and 20 February depending on the moon. So a birthday in January or early February usually belongs to the previous animal.
Someone born on 15 January 1985 is not an Ox. Chinese New Year 1985 was 20 February 1985, so that birthday still falls in the year of the Rat — and every chart that says otherwise is reading the Gregorian year and stopping there.
This matters for 9.5% of all birthdays — every date between 1 January and the New Year that follows it. Counted across 1924–2043, not estimated.
Every year of the Ox, with its exact boundary
Computed from the lunisolar calendar — the same calculation the readings use — rather than copied from a table. Dates are Beijing civil days.
| Year | Sign | From | Until |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1925 | Wood Ox | 24 January 1925 | 12 February 1926 |
| 1937 | Fire Ox | 11 February 1937 | 30 January 1938 |
| 1949 | Earth Ox | 29 January 1949 | 16 February 1950 |
| 1961 | Metal Ox | 15 February 1961 | 4 February 1962 |
| 1973 | Water Ox | 3 February 1973 | 22 January 1974 |
| 1985 | Wood Ox | 20 February 1985 | 8 February 1986 |
| 1997 | Fire Ox | 7 February 1997 | 27 January 1998 |
| 2009 | Earth Ox | 26 January 2009 | 13 February 2010 |
| 2021 | Metal Ox | 12 February 2021 | 31 January 2022 |
| 2033 | Water Ox | 31 January 2033 | 18 February 2034 |
The element is not decorative. The animals run on a twelve-year cycle and the five elements on a ten-year one, so the same pairing — Wood Rat, Fire Horse — only returns every sixty years. That sixty-year cycle is the real unit of the calendar.
Check a birthday
What the Ox is taken to describe
Endurance and steadiness — and a certain difficulty in stopping to ask whether the work is still the right work.
As with everything in this system, read it as a description of a tension rather than a forecast. The Ox sits between the Rat and the Tiger in the cycle, and the three are usually easier to tell apart by what they avoid than by what they claim.
Where it sits in a whole chart
The Chinese year is one of three systems we read together, and on its own it is the broadest of them — it describes a year, and a year holds a great many different people. It gets specific when it is set against a Western Sun sign and a Life Path, which move on entirely different cycles. An Ox year is a starting point, not a conclusion.