When Is Chinese New Year in Singapore? Dates to 2036 and the Rule Behind Them

Chinese New Year 2027 falls on Saturday 6 February, and the second public holiday is Sunday 7 February. Chinese New Year 2028 is Wednesday 26 January. Those are the two answers most people came for.

The more useful answer is that you never have to look the CNY date up again. It moves on a rule tight enough to compute centuries out, and once you know the rule the shape of the next decade is obvious: back about eleven days, back about eleven days, then a jump forward of about nineteen.

Chinese New Year in Singapore, 2026 to 2036

Year	First day	Second day	Zodiac	Shift on the year before
2026	Tue 17 Feb	Wed 18 Feb	Horse	19 days later
2027	Sat 6 Feb	Sun 7 Feb	Goat	11 days earlier
2028	Wed 26 Jan	Thu 27 Jan	Monkey	11 days earlier
2029	Tue 13 Feb	Wed 14 Feb	Rooster	18 days later
2030	Sun 3 Feb	Mon 4 Feb	Dog	10 days earlier
2031	Thu 23 Jan	Fri 24 Jan	Pig	11 days earlier
2032	Wed 11 Feb	Thu 12 Feb	Rat	19 days later
2033	Mon 31 Jan	Tue 1 Feb	Ox	11 days earlier
2034	Sun 19 Feb	Mon 20 Feb	Tiger	19 days later
2035	Thu 8 Feb	Fri 9 Feb	Rabbit	11 days earlier
2036	Mon 28 Jan	Tue 29 Jan	Dragon	11 days earlier

Dates to 2036 agree across the Hong Kong Observatory's conversion tables, Wikipedia's list and the 1900 to 2644 tables at pinyin.info. Singapore gazettes the first two days only, which is a smaller thing than it sounds when both land on a weekend. The 2027 page works through what a Saturday and Sunday Chinese New Year is worth here.

The zodiac column is the year that begins on that date, not the calendar year, which is why a birthday in January or early February belongs to the animal before it. The zodiac calculator resolves a full birth date against these same dates and returns the animal, the element and the stem-branch year.

Eleven back, nineteen forward, seven times in nineteen years

Twelve lunar months run about 354 days. A solar year runs about 365. Left alone, the new year would slide back through the seasons at roughly eleven days a year and end up in summer, so a thirteenth month gets inserted to pull it back. A thirteen-month year runs about 384 days, which puts the following Chinese New Year about nineteen days later on the Western calendar instead of eleven days earlier.

That is the whole saw-tooth. In the table above, 2026, 2029, 2032 and 2034 are the years that follow a thirteen-month year.

The ratio is fixed rather than occasional. Across the 744 year-on-year steps from 1900 to 2644, 274 were thirteen-month years. That is 36.8 per cent, which is seven in every nineteen almost exactly, and 19 solar years happen to be within a couple of hours of 235 lunar months. Two thirteen-month years are never adjacent, so the date always moves earlier the year after it moves later.

Why it is never earlier than 21 January

The rule everyone quotes is that Chinese New Year is the second new moon after the December solstice, occasionally the third. The rule underneath it is the one that fixes the window: the lunar month containing the December solstice is defined as the eleventh month, and the new year begins two new moons after that month starts.

So measure from the solstice, around 21 December. If the solstice lands on the last day of the eleventh month, only about thirty days separate it from the new year, and you get 21 January. If the solstice lands on the first day, about fifty-nine days separate them, and you get 20 or 21 February. Everything else falls between. The window is not a convention. It is the length of two lunar months minus the length of one.

The latest possible date is 21 February, and it happens once in 745 years

Nearly every page on this topic gives the range as 21 January to 20 February. Helmer Aslaksen, who worked the calendar out in the mathematics department at NUS, gives 21 February as the upper bound. Both are defensible, and counting settles it.

Across the 745 Chinese New Years listed from 1900 to 2644:

Date	How often	Years
21 January, the earliest	11 times	Last 1966, next 2061
20 February	8 times	Last 1985, next 2148
21 February, the latest possible	Once	2319

So 20 February is the practical limit and 21 February is the true one. Between now and 2100 the latest Chinese New Year is 19 February, which happens in 2034, 2053 and 2072. If a page tells you the festival can fall in March, or in December, it is wrong in both directions.

Which of these dates Singapore has actually committed to

This is the part the date tables leave out. The Ministry of Manpower publishes gazetted public holidays for 2025, 2026 and 2027 and nothing further. Everything from 2028 onward in the table above is astronomy, not law.

The astronomy is reliable. The Hong Kong Observatory publishes conversion tables to 2100 and flags only a possible one-day discrepancy on far-future new moons and solar terms. What is not settled is the Singapore layer on top: which two days are gazetted, and what happens when one falls on a Sunday or a non-working Saturday. That gets decided when the year is gazetted, which MOM does a year or so at a time.

The practical split:

Use	Safe on a computed date?
Booking flights or a reunion dinner years out	Yes, the lunar date will not move
Blocking annual leave with your employer	Only for gazetted years, so 2027 at present
Publishing a staff or school calendar	Wait for the gazette, or mark it provisional

Check the MOM list for the current gazetted years, and our 2026 and 2027 pages for what the gazetted days are actually worth once the weekend is accounted for.

2033, the year the printed calendars were wrong

One future date is worth knowing about even though it does not move. In the early 1990s astronomers found that calendars had placed the 2033 leap month after the seventh month, when the rule places it after the eleventh (webexhibits, following Aslaksen). A leap eleventh month had not occurred since the calendar reform of 1645, so the error had gone unnoticed for centuries of printing.

It does not change Chinese New Year. Either placement makes 31 January 2033 to 19 February 2034 a thirteen-month year, which is why the table above is safe. What it changes is every lunar date printed in between, and lunar dates are what a lunar birthday, a death anniversary and a temple's festival calendar are reckoned on. If you hold an old calendar covering 2033, the new year is right and the months after it are not.

Why a Vietnamese colleague sometimes has a different date

The calculation is done for the meridian 120 degrees east, which is also the clock Singapore has run on since 1982, so the date here is never a day apart from China, Hong Kong or Taiwan. Vietnam reckons Tết on its own time zone, an hour behind, and a new moon falling either side of midnight lands on a different day there. Most years the two agree. In 1985 they were a month apart, with Vietnam in January and China on 20 February (Tết).

Common questions

What date is Chinese New Year 2027 in Singapore? Saturday 6 February 2027, with the second public holiday on Sunday 7 February. It starts the Year of the Goat.

What date is Chinese New Year 2028? Wednesday 26 January 2028, the Year of the Monkey. It is eleven days earlier than 2027 because the intervening lunar year has twelve months rather than thirteen.

Why is it early some years and late others? Twelve lunar months fall about eleven days short of a solar year, so the date walks backwards. A thirteenth month is added seven times every nineteen years to correct it, and that pushes the next new year about nineteen days later instead.

Can Chinese New Year fall in March or in December? No. It falls between 21 January and 21 February, and 21 February has happened once in the 745 years from 1900 to 2644, in 2319. The window is set by the rule that the lunar month containing the December solstice is the eleventh month.

Are the dates after 2027 official in Singapore? Not yet. MOM has gazetted through 2027 only. The lunar dates beyond that are computed and will not move, but the gazetted days off are confirmed year by year, so treat anything past 2027 as provisional on a work calendar.

How many days off is it in Singapore? Two gazetted public holidays, the first and second days. The festival itself runs longer, and what that means for what is open and closed is on the guide to Chinese New Year opening hours.