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Twelve animals, five elements, one sixty-year cycle. Enter your birth date and find your animal, your element, and the years of your sign — computed on the traditional solar boundary used by Chinese astrologers.
The twelve animals follow a cycle anchored in the year of Jupiter — the giant planet takes just under twelve years to circle the zodiac, which is why Chinese tradition calls it the Year Star and counts age by its stations. The five elements (Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water) cycle over the same years in pairs, so an animal-element combination — Wood Rat, Fire Rat — repeats only every sixty years: a full cycle is a lifetime, and turning sixty is celebrated accordingly.
One honest complication: the zodiac year does not begin on January 1. Popular calendars turn at Lunar New Year (late January to mid-February); professional Chinese astrology traditionally turns at Li Chun, the solar term "Start of Spring," around February 4. This calculator uses the astrologers' Li Chun boundary and says so — if your birthday falls in late January or early February, different calendars may give you the neighboring animal, and now you know why the websites disagree.
Almost certainly the January/February boundary: sites that turn the year at Lunar New Year (which moves between Jan 21 and Feb 20) will disagree with a Li Chun (Feb 4) calculator for birthdays in that window, in about one year out of three. Both conventions are centuries old.
The element flavors the animal: a Fire Tiger is bolder than a Water Tiger, a Metal Ox more unbending than a Wood Ox. The sixty combinations are the tradition’s real unit — no two people share one more often than every sixty years.
That is the beloved folk tale: the Jade Emperor’s race across the river, the Rat riding the Ox’s ear and leaping off at the finish. The cycle itself is far older than the story — but nobody tells the astronomical version at New Year.