Bazi Calculator: Get Your Free Bazi Chart (Four Pillars of Destiny)

How to use this Bazi calculator

1. Enter your date of birth as it appears on your birth certificate, in the ordinary Gregorian calendar. Do not convert it to the Chinese lunar calendar first. The calculator works out the solar terms itself.
2. Enter your birth time and the city where you were born. The city gives the time zone used on that date and the longitude for true solar time. If your city is not listed, choose “Other place” and enter the UTC offset and longitude.
3. Choose a gender and press Calculate. Gender is only used to decide whether your Luck Pillars run forward or backward, as in the classical method.

Tips for an accurate Bazi chart

• Use a recorded time. Hospital records and birth certificates are better than family memory, which is often rounded to the hour.
• Pick your birthplace, not where you live now. Longitude decides true solar time, and true solar time decides the hour pillar.
• Don't adjust for old time zones or daylight saving yourself. The Bazi calculator already knows, for example, that Singapore and Peninsular Malaysia used UTC+7:30 until 31 December 1981 and that China used daylight saving time from 1986 to 1991.
• Read the notes under your chart. If you were born close to a solar term or near 23:00, the notes tell you which pillar would change if your time were a little off.

What your Bazi chart shows

A Bazi chart has eight characters arranged in four columns. Read in the traditional order, from right to left, they are the year, month, day and hour of birth. The Bazi calculator above shows them left to right as hour, day, month and year, which is how most Chinese almanacs print them. Below each column you will find the hidden stems, the Ten Gods and the Na Yin element.

The Four Pillars

• Year pillar: ancestry, family background and early childhood. Its branch gives your animal in the Bazi system.
• Month pillar: parents, upbringing and the season you were born in. Because the season decides which elements are strong, many practitioners treat the month as the most important pillar after the day.
• Day pillar: you. The day stem is your Day Master, and the day branch is often called the spouse palace.
• Hour pillar: children, later life and your inner plans. It is the pillar most often wrong, because it depends on an exact birth time.

Day Master (日主)

Since the Song dynasty, the Ziping method, named after Xu Ziping, has placed the day stem at the centre of the chart. Every other character is read by how it relates to this Day Master. There are ten possible Day Masters, one for each Heavenly Stem, from 甲 Jia (Yang Wood, a tall tree) to 癸 Gui (Yin Water, rain and mist). The table further down describes all ten.

Five Elements (五行)

Every stem and branch belongs to one of the Five Elements: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water. Wood feeds Fire, Fire makes Earth, Earth bears Metal, Metal carries Water and Water nourishes Wood. In the controlling cycle, Wood breaks Earth, Earth dams Water, Water puts out Fire, Fire melts Metal and Metal cuts Wood. The Bazi calculator counts the elements among your visible stems and branches and lists any element that is missing. A missing element is common and is not bad in itself. What matters is how the elements serve your Day Master.

Ten Gods (十神)

The Ten Gods name the relationship between each character and your Day Master, based on element and yin–yang polarity:

• Friend (比肩) and Rob Wealth (劫财): the same element as you; peers, siblings, competition.
• Eating God (食神) and Hurting Officer (伤官): the element you produce; talent, expression, output.
• Indirect Wealth (偏财) and Direct Wealth (正财): the element you control; money, resources, effort.
• Seven Killings (七杀) and Direct Officer (正官): the element that controls you; authority, discipline, pressure.
• Indirect Resource (偏印) and Direct Resource (正印): the element that produces you; learning, support, protection.

Hidden stems (藏干)

Each Earthly Branch holds one to three Heavenly Stems inside it. 子 Zi holds only 癸 Gui Water, while 丑 Chou holds 己 Ji Earth, 癸 Gui Water and 辛 Xin Metal. Hidden stems are why a chart that looks short of an element may still contain it. The Bazi calculator lists every hidden stem with its Ten God.

Luck Pillars (大运)

Luck Pillars are ten-year periods that follow the month pillar forward or backward through the cycle of sixty. They run forward for a man born in a yang year or a woman born in a yin year, and backward otherwise. The starting age comes from the time between your birth and the nearest solar term in the direction of travel. Each three days of that gap count as one year of age. The Bazi calculator works this out from the exact moment of the solar term, so your starting age is given to the month.

Na Yin (纳音)

The sixty stem–branch pairs are grouped into thirty Na Yin, or “sound” elements, such as 海中金 Gold in the Sea or 天上火 Fire in the Sky. Na Yin is an older layer of Chinese astrology that is still used for compatibility and for describing a year's character.

Why Bazi calculators give different results

Enter the same birthday into five free Bazi calculators and you may get three different charts. The math is simple, but a few rules decide where each pillar begins, and calculators handle them differently. This Bazi calculator handles each one explicitly and tells you when it affects your chart.

1. The Bazi year starts at Li Chun, not Chinese New Year

The year pillar changes at Li Chun (立春, Start of Spring), the moment the sun reaches 315° of ecliptic longitude. That falls on 3, 4 or 5 February. Chinese New Year follows the moon and moves between 21 January and 20 February. In 1990, Chinese New Year fell on 27 January, but Li Chun only arrived at 10:14 on 4 February. A baby born in Singapore at 08:00 that morning belongs to the 己巳 Snake year in Bazi, even though most zodiac charts would call them a Horse.

2. Months follow the solar terms, to the minute

A Bazi month is not a lunar month. It begins at one of twelve solar terms (节, jie), such as 惊蛰 Awakening of Insects or 白露 White Dew. These are fixed points of the sun's path, and they arrive at a precise minute that differs from year to year. This Bazi calculator computes the sun's apparent longitude with the VSOP87 planetary theory, following Jean Meeus's Astronomical Algorithms. Its solar term times match published almanac times to within about a minute.

3. True solar time vs clock time

The hour pillar was designed for sundial time, while clocks follow time zones. Singapore sits at 103.8° E but uses UTC+8, a zone centred on 120° E, so its clocks run about an hour ahead of the sun. On 4 February 1990, 08:00 on a Singapore clock was 06:41 by the sun. After the equation of time is applied, that gives the hour pillar 己卯 (Rabbit) instead of 庚辰 (Dragon). Most traditional practitioners use true solar time, but not all calculators do. Whenever the two methods give different pillars, this Bazi calculator shows both.

4. The Rat hour (23:00–00:59)

The first double-hour of the day, 子 Zi, runs from 23:00 to 00:59. The traditional rule starts the new day at 23:00. Another school keeps the calendar day until midnight and calls 23:00–23:59 the “late Rat hour”. The calculator uses the traditional rule by default and lets you switch in Advanced options.

5. Historical time zones and daylight saving

Clocks have not always kept the time they keep today. Singapore and Peninsular Malaysia used UTC+7:30 until 31 December 1981, while Sabah and Sarawak were on UTC+8. China used daylight saving time from 1986 to 1991, and Hong Kong and Taiwan observed summer time in many years up to 1979. The calculator looks up the offset that applied on your birth date in the IANA time zone database, so you never need to correct it by hand.

Boundary cases you can test

Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches in a Bazi chart

Every pillar of a Bazi chart pairs one of ten Heavenly Stems with one of twelve Earthly Branches. The pairs repeat in a cycle of sixty, which is why years, months, days and hours all share the same names. The Bazi calculator uses the two tables below for every chart it draws.

The ten Heavenly Stems (天干) and Day Masters

The twelve Earthly Branches (地支)

Bazi chart example: 4 February 1990, 08:00, Singapore

This is the chart the Bazi calculator produces for that birth. The Day Master is 庚 Geng, Yang Metal, born in the 丑 Ox month in the depth of winter, two hours before Li Chun.

• Pillars: year 己巳, month 丁丑, day 庚子, hour 己卯 (true solar time 06:41).
• Five Elements: Earth 3, Fire 2, Metal 1, Water 1, Wood 1. Earth is the element that produces Metal, so the Day Master has plenty of support.
• Ten Gods: the two 己 stems are Direct Resource (正印) and 丁 is Direct Officer (正官). The day branch 子 hides 癸, a Hurting Officer (伤官).
• Luck Pillars: a yin year and a male chart run backward from 丁丑. The gap back to Minor Cold (小寒, 5 January 1990, 22:33) is 29.4 days, so the first Luck Pillar, 丙子, starts at age 9 years 9 months, around 1999. It is followed by 乙亥 (2009), 甲戌 (2019) and 癸酉 (2029).

A calculator that starts the year at Chinese New Year would give this person the 庚午 Horse year and the 戊寅 month, which is a different chart altogether.

Bazi vs Chinese zodiac: what's the difference?

Your Chinese zodiac sign is just one character of your Bazi chart: the branch of the year pillar. Everyone born in the same zodiac year shares it. A full Bazi chart combines 60 possible years, 12 months, 60 days and 12 hours, which gives 518,400 possible charts. That is why two people born in the same Year of the Dragon can have very different charts. The zodiac sign describes your generation. The Bazi chart describes you.

The two systems also start the year at different moments. Bazi uses the solar term Li Chun, while popular zodiac tables use Chinese New Year. That is why this Bazi calculator labels its animal as the Bazi year animal. If you only need your animal sign, any zodiac table will do. If you want the whole chart, use the Bazi calculator at the top of this page.

What Is My Chinese Zodiac Sign?

Only need your animal? The Chinese zodiac calculator finds your sign, element and yin–yang from your date of birth alone. It checks the exact date of Chinese New Year from 1900 to 2100, so January and February birthdays come out right, and it tells you when your Bazi animal is different.

Chinese Zodiac 2027: Year of the Fire Sheep

2027 is a 丁未 Fire Sheep (Goat) year. Chinese New Year falls on Saturday 6 February 2027, but the Bazi year begins two days earlier, at Li Chun on 4 February at 09:46 Beijing time. The guide covers which signs clash with the Sheep, all twelve month pillars of 2027, and every Sheep year since 1907 with exact dates.

I Ching Reading: Free Online Coin Toss

Where a Bazi chart describes a whole life, the I Ching looks at one question at one moment. Hold a question in mind, toss three virtual coins six times, and read your hexagram, its changing lines and the hexagram it turns into. All 64 hexagrams are explained in plain English.

Bazi calculator FAQ

How this Bazi calculator works

The pillar rules follow the classical Ziping school, as set out in 《渊海子平》 Yuanhai Ziping (Song dynasty) and 《三命通会》 Sanming Tonghui (Ming dynasty). The astronomy follows Jean Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms (2nd edition): the VSOP87 theory of Bretagnon and Francou for the sun's position, with corrections for nutation and aberration and the Espenak–Meeus values for ΔT. Time zone history comes from the IANA database. To learn more about the tradition itself, see Four Pillars of Destiny on Wikipedia.

Written and maintained by the BaziCalculator.wiki editorial team. Last updated November 2026.