About SG Chinese New Year

A single, reliable place to check when Chinese New Year falls in Singapore, which days are gazetted public holidays, and what the zodiac year and the fifteen-day festival are about.

What this site is, and who it is for

Chinese New Year moves against the Gregorian calendar, so people re-ask the same question every December. This site answers it: the exact dates, which of them are gazetted public holidays, whether one lands on a weekend and shifts the day off, the animal of the zodiac year, and guides to the reunion dinner, ang bao and the fifteen days. It is for families lining up the reunion dinner and travel, people deciding whether to take leave around the two holidays, and anyone who just wants the date. It is a small focused reference, not a blog.

Where the material comes from

• The public holiday dates come from the consolidated public-holiday dataset on data.gov.sg, read live, and are checked against the list MOM publishes. Chinese New Year is gazetted as two days. When one of them falls on a Sunday the following Monday is a public holiday, which is shown here as its own entry rather than as a moved date.
• The lunar dates follow the Chinese lunisolar calendar, which is why the first day drifts across late January and February. The gazette is what makes a date a day off; the calendar is what makes it the first day of the year.
• Customs and heritage are attributed to a published source, usually the National Heritage Board's Roots or the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre's Culturepaedia, which document how the practices are actually kept here rather than in general.
• What is on in a given year, such as the Chinatown light-up and street market, is sourced to the organiser, Chinatown Festivals, and dated, because the programme changes annually and an old line about it is worse than none.

How it is verified, and how often it updates

The holiday feed is fetched at most once a day and the year pages rebuild on an hourly cycle, so a change on data.gov.sg reaches this site within a day. Year pages run from 2020 to 2027, which lets you check a past date as easily as a future one. Anything that is recalculated each year, a festival programme or a price, is dated and linked at the point it appears, so you can see how old it is. Where a feed and a government document disagree, the document wins.

We check the gazette, not only the feed

An open-data feed can lag the gazette it is meant to reflect, which is why the feed is not the last word here. On our sister site SG Hari Raya we found a live case: the same consolidated dataset on data.gov.sg still serves the superseded April 2021 gazette for 2022, and the dates from MOM's October 2021 re-gazette are applied in the data adapter instead. The full account is on that site's about page. The dates involved are Hari Raya Puasa and Labour Day, neither of which this site publishes, so no override applies here. If one ever does, it will be written up on this page.

Editorial independence

Nothing here is a paid placement. No restaurant, hamper brand, bakery or travel operator has paid to be named, listed or ranked, and there is no affiliate arrangement behind a recommendation. Where advertising runs it is labelled as advertising and kept outside the article, and it does not affect what a page says.

What this site does not do

It does not tell fortunes. The zodiac pages describe a tradition and report what is commonly said within it, which is not the same as a forecast of your year, and nothing on them should be used to decide anything about money, health, a marriage or a birth. Where a belief is folklore, it is named as folklore rather than presented as fact. The site also does not speak for any temple, clan association or organiser, and it does not rule on the right way to observe anything. For an event, a closure or an opening time you are going to act on, check with the organiser, whose page is linked wherever one is named.

The Chinese version

Every page here has a Chinese twin at /zh, translated from the same source and reading the same dates rather than written separately. If the two ever show different dates, that is a bug and worth reporting.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, particularly a date or a description of a custom, tell us through the contact page and cite what you are going by. Include the page, the value it showed and the value you believe is correct. A correction with a source can be checked in minutes, and a confirmed one is applied in the data layer every page reads from, so the year pages, the zodiac pages and the guides change together.

SG Chinese New Year is an independent publisher and is not affiliated with the Government of Singapore.