Perpetual Calendar: Lunar Dates, Solar Terms, Holidays

The fewer dates we remember, the more we need to look them up: how many days Qingming actually gives, whether the lunar new year eve falls on the 29th or the 30th of the twelfth lunar month, which Gregorian day a lunar birthday lands on, whether the next Spring Festival is in January or February. This page opens one day out in full, with Gregorian and lunar dates, the solar term in force, the ganzhi cycle, the zodiac animal, the weekday, and one line saying whether the day is a rest day, a make-up workday, or ordinary.

What one day shows

• Month grid: one cell per day; pick any day and the detail card below follows. A dark rest tag marks a statutory holiday itself, the days on which overtime is paid at three times the wage; a pale rest tag is a day off arranged by the notice; an orange work tag is a weekend the notice calls back to work. The grid header counts rest days and work days for that month and how many of them are statutory
• Detail card: Gregorian date and weekday, lunar month and day with a leap month spelled out, the year, month and day ganzhi, the zodiac animal, the solar term, the festival name, how many days until or since today, the day-of-year number and the ISO week
• Holidays for the year: the blocks of days off with their start and end dates, the statutory days inside them, and the weekends worked back, together with a link to the notice itself
• Two buttons: print the current month on paper, or copy the selected date as YYYY-MM-DD; the zodiac boundary can be switched from the first day of the lunar month to the start of spring

Where the data comes from

• Range: 1899-02-10 to 2101-01-28, 202 lunar years in the table. Dates outside it show a dash rather than an approximation
• Two sources checked day by day: values come from lunar-javascript (MIT) and are cross-checked against solarlunar (ISC), with zero disagreement from 1949 to 2035. Two 30-day windows, in 1933 and 2097, differ between the sources and were settled against verified Spring Festival anchors, recorded in the generator report
• Solar terms: 24 a year, accurate to the day and without the exact hour of entry; dates follow those observed in China
• Festival labels: 10 lunar (Spring Festival, Lantern Festival, Dragon Head Raising, Dragon Boat, Qixi, Ghost Festival, Mid-Autumn, Double Ninth, Laba, and the new year eve) and 12 Gregorian. The eve is taken as the last day of the twelfth lunar month, so it moves between the 29th and the 30th
• Holidays and make-up days: 142 day-by-day rows for 2024 to 2027, transcribed from the annual State Council notices, each year linked to its original text. Of the recorded years, 2026 gives 33 days off, 13 of them statutory, plus 6 make-up workdays
• No guessing ahead: turn to 2028 and the grid keeps only Gregorian and lunar dates with a line saying the arrangement is not published yet. Past patterns are not used to fill the gap

FAQ

• What separates the two rest tags? Both are days off, but only the darker one is a statutory holiday, the category that carries triple pay for overtime; the pale one is a day off created by joining holidays to weekends
• Why is a solar term a day off from another calendar? When the moment of entry sits near midnight, time zone and the convention of what counts as the date differ by one day. This page uses the date observed in China
• Zodiac by lunar new year or by start of spring? The first day of the lunar month is the default and the detail card can switch to the start of spring; the two can give different animals within the same year
• Is this a Chinese almanac? No. The almanac core is auspicious and inauspicious listings, which this page does not offer; it does date conversion and official holiday facts
• Dates before 1949? Yes, lunar dates and solar terms reach back to February 1899. Holiday arrangements then were completely different, so the rest and work tags only mean something from 2024 on
• Is anything uploaded? No. Table lookup, rendering and copying all run in the browser and no request is sent