2025 Chinese Zodiac Year: Wood Snake (Yi-si)

By Astrolivo editorial team

Under the Chinese Lunar New Year convention used on this site, 2025 is the Year of the Wood Snake (Yi-si), running inclusively from January 29, 2025 through February 16, 2026. Births in 2025 from January 1 through January 28 fall at the end of the preceding Dragon year rather than the Snake year.

2025 Birth-Date Lookup

Check your exact Gregorian birth date against the inclusive Lunar New Year boundaries below:

For an overview of all twelve animals and other birth years, visit the main Chinese zodiac guide.

Why the Gregorian Year Alone Is Not Enough

The Chinese calendar is lunisolar, combining lunar month cycles with the solar year. Because Lunar New Year moves between late January and mid-February on the civil Gregorian calendar, a birth year of "2025" on a birth certificate does not automatically mean the Year of the Snake.

Compare two clearly hypothetical birth dates:

• Hypothetical example A: A child born on January 15, 2025 arrives two weeks before the 2025 Lunar New Year, so that birth date belongs to the Dragon year.
• Hypothetical example B: A child born on January 29, 2025 (or on February 10, 2026) falls inside the inclusive January 29, 2025 – February 16, 2026 span, which is the Wood Snake (Yi-si) year.

How the "Wood Snake" (Yi-si) Name Works

Traditional Chinese year names follow a 60-year cycle formed by pairing ten Heavenly Stems (Jia, Yi, Bing, Ding, Wu, Ji, Geng, Xin, Ren, Gui) with twelve Earthly Branches linked to the twelve zodiac animals. For 2025, the stem Yi maps to Wood in the traditional five-phase (Wu Xing) system, and the branch Si corresponds to the Snake.

Although the Snake appears every 12 years in the animal cycle, the specific combination Yi-si (Wood Snake) recurs only once every 60 years.

How This Differs from Western Sun Signs and Four Pillars (BaZi)

This page provides a calendar lookup within a traditional symbolic system, not a scientific measurement or fortune-telling forecast. Keep two common structural distinctions in mind:

• Western Sun signs: Western tropical astrology assigns signs by approximately month-long solar segments along the ecliptic, whereas a Chinese zodiac animal spans a full lunisolar year.
• Four Pillars (BaZi) and Li Chun: This reference defines year boundaries by civil Lunar New Year. In Four Pillars (BaZi) practice, the year pillar switches at Li Chun (the solar term marking the start of spring) and works alongside month, day, and hour pillars. Do not treat this Lunar New Year table as a Li Chun or full Four Pillars calculation.

Methodology and Sources

The inclusive date range and Yi-si year designation are taken from the official Hong Kong Observatory (HKO) Gregorian–Lunar Calendar Conversion Tables (T2025e.txt and T2026e.txt) and the HKO Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches sequence (anchored to the 60-year cycle starting with Jia-Zi on February 2, 1984). The traditional cultural mapping of stems to the five phases (Jia/Yi = Wood) is verified against Yoo & Yoon (2019, DOI: 10.14369/jkmc.2019.32.2.017 abstract), with calendar and historical context from Royal Museums Greenwich and the Victoria and Albert Museum (updated April 17, 2024).