Chinese festival dates, 2026 to 2040

Most Chinese festivals are tied to the moon, not to a printed calendar. A festival such as Chinese New Year is defined as the first day of the first lunar month; the rule never changes, while the Gregorian date it lands on does.

A lunar month is one cycle of the moon, measured from new moon to new moon: twenty-nine or thirty days. Twelve of them come up roughly eleven days short of a solar year, so a calendar built from moons alone would drift steadily through the seasons, and Chinese New Year would eventually arrive in autumn.

The correction is the leap month. Every second or third year an extra month is inserted into the lunar year, which is what keeps the festivals in step with the seasons. The dates move, but they never run away: Spring Festival stays inside a window running from 21 January to 21 February, and always has.

Two of the fifteen festivals are not lunar at all. Qingming and the Winter Solstice are solar terms — points fixed by the sun’s apparent longitude rather than by the moon. They land within a day or two of the same Gregorian date every year, which makes a fixed date the exception on this site rather than the rule.

Every date in the table below is computed rather than copied. Each one is calculated from the lunar calendar and from the sun’s apparent longitude, then checked against a second, independent lunar calendar and against published tables. Where the two sources disagreed, the disagreement is recorded rather than smoothed over.

One thing to watch in the table: a festival listed under a Gregorian year can belong to the lunar year that began in the year before, because a lunar year straddles two Gregorian ones. Anything in January or early February sits in that gap.