Vietnamese Calendar Year (Can Chi)

Vietnam files its paperwork in Gregorian dates, but the year that governs Tet, traditional birthdays and temple dates is the lunar one, and it does not turn over on 1 January. That is why this page asks for a full date rather than a year. Feed it 1 January 2026 and the answer is still Ất Tỵ, the year of the snake; feed it 17 February 2026, the first day of the lunar year, and it becomes Bính Ngọ, the fire horse. Collapsing the two is the standard failure in zodiac converters, which treat January as though it already belonged to the next animal.

The year name is more than an animal. It pairs one of ten heavenly stems, Giáp through Quý, with one of twelve earthly branches, Tý through Hợi. Ten and twelve have a least common multiple of sixty, so the full pair only comes round once every sixty years, and the page tells you which slot of that cycle you are in. Giáp Tý, slot 1, corresponds to 1984. The stem also fixes the element in the ngũ hành cycle, from wood to water. And the Vietnamese bestiary is not a copy of the Chinese one: the fourth branch is the cat rather than the rabbit, the second reads as water buffalo, and the eighth as goat.

The calculation starts from the Chinese lunar calendar your browser already carries. That matters because Vietnam has computed its new moons at UTC+7 since 1967 in the north and 1975 in the south, while China uses UTC+8. A new moon falling in the final hour of a Vietnamese day already belongs to the next day in China, so Tet can arrive a day early. That happened in 2007, when the official Vietnamese date was 17 February against 18 February in China and printers shipped calendars both ways. This page uses the Chinese boundary and flags any date sitting in that one day window. It reports the year, the animal, the element, the cycle position and the lunar new year date, but not the lunar month and day.