BaZi Calculator: Your Free Chinese Birth Chart

This BaZi calculator turns your birth details into a complete Chinese birth chart in a few seconds, with no sign-up. You get the four pillars (year, month, day and hour), and under each one its heavenly stem and earthly branch, the Ten God of the stem, the hidden stems with their Ten Gods, the nayin, and your Day Master's life stage in that branch, one of the twelve life stages. Below the pillars you'll find your two void branches (Kong Wang) from the day pillar, a count of the five elements, your luck pillars with their start age and years, the annual pillars for the next ten years, the solar term your birth falls after, and your lunar birth date.

The form asks for six things, and each one changes the chart in a specific way. If you don't know your birth time, you can still make a useful chart; with an exact time and a birthplace, you'll get the most accurate one. Here is what each field does:

BaZi (八字) means "eight characters," and a BaZi chart is exactly that: four pillars of two characters each. The pillars are the year, month, day and hour of your birth, which is why the system is also called the Four Pillars of Destiny (四柱). The top character of each pillar is a heavenly stem, one of ten (Jia, Yi, Bing, Ding, Wu, Ji, Geng, Xin, Ren and Gui), and each stem is the yang or yin form of one of the five elements. The bottom character is an earthly branch, one of twelve, the same twelve that give the Chinese zodiac its animals, from Zi the Rat to Hai the Pig. Stems and branches pair up in a fixed cycle of sixty, and that cycle has counted days in China for well over two thousand years.

Each pillar traditionally points to a part of your life. The year pillar describes your roots: family background, ancestry and early childhood. The month pillar covers your parents and your career, and because it records the season you were born in, it is also the most important pillar for judging the strength of the whole chart. The day pillar is you: its stem is your Day Master, and its branch is the spouse palace, the seat of your closest partnership. The hour pillar speaks about children, your ideas and projects, and later life.

Every branch also holds one to three hidden stems (藏干), the elements stored inside it. Zi holds only Gui water, for example, while Yin (寅), the Tiger, holds Jia wood, Bing fire and Wu earth. A lot of a chart's real character lives below the surface, which is why the calculator lists each hidden stem with its Ten God. Each pillar also shows its nayin (納音), a poetic "sound element" shared by pairs of the sixty pillars, such as Gold in the Sea (海中金) for Jia Zi and Yi Chou, and the life stage of your Day Master in that branch, taken from the twelve life stages (十二長生): a cycle that runs from Growth through Prime and Peak to Tomb, Severed and Conception. Yang stems move through it forward and yin stems backward (陽順陰逆), so Jia reaches Growth in Hai while Yi reaches it in Wu (午). The stage names are metaphors for how your element gathers and spends its strength, not events waiting to happen.

Your Day Master (日主, also called 日元) is the heavenly stem of your day pillar, the top character in the day column. In BaZi it represents you, and every other character in the chart takes its meaning from how it relates to this one: what feeds it, what it produces, what it controls and what puts it under pressure. The calculator marks your Day Master for you, so there is nothing to work out by hand.

The Day Master is the starting point, not the whole verdict. Two Jia Wood people born in January and in July feel very different, because one tree stands in frozen ground and the other in summer heat. That's why each Day Master profile also covers the four birth seasons and the elements a chart tends to need.

There are ten Day Masters, a yang and a yin form of each element, and each one is pictured as something in nature:

Once your Day Master is fixed, every other stem in the chart, visible or hidden, becomes one of the Ten Gods (十神). The name depends on two things: how that stem's element relates to yours in the generating and controlling cycles, and whether it shares your yin or yang polarity. For a Jia Wood Day Master, Geng metal is Seven Killings and Xin metal is Direct Officer; for a Bing Fire Day Master, the same Geng metal is Indirect Wealth. The calculator labels every stem and hidden stem for you.

None of the ten is good or bad on its own. Whether Seven Killings is a crushing boss or the drive that builds a career depends on the strength of your Day Master and on what else sits in the chart. The ten fall into five pairs:

The calculator shows a count of the five elements in your chart (Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water), so you can see at a glance what you have plenty of and what is thin. It's a useful first look, and only a first look. Not every character weighs the same: the month branch carries the season and outweighs any other single character; a stem with a root in the branches is far stronger than one floating alone; hidden stems act more quietly than visible ones; and combinations and clashes can change how an element behaves. Three Water characters in a midsummer chart can matter less than one in midwinter.

That's why BaZi judges strength through the season first. Classical texts rank each element through the year as prosperous, assisted, resting, trapped or dead (旺相休囚死). Wood peaks in spring, fire in summer, metal in autumn and water in winter, while earth is strongest in the last month of each season (the Chen, Wei, Xu and Chou months) and also strong in summer. A Day Master born in its own season, rooted in the branches and backed by Resource or Friend stars is called strong; one surrounded by what it produces, controls or is controlled by is called weak. Neither is better. A strong chart has energy to spend; a weak chart is more responsive and often more collaborative.

Favorable elements (喜用神) follow from the balance of the whole chart. A strong Day Master usually benefits from the elements that channel it: what it produces, what it controls and what controls it. A weak one benefits from what produces it and from its own element. A few charts are so one-sided that the classics read them as "follow" structures, which turn the usual advice around. On top of strength comes climate, called tiao hou (調候): a chart born in deep winter needs warmth, and a midsummer chart needs moisture, so a winter-born Bing or Jia usually wants fire before anything else. This is why no one can hand the same lucky element, color or number to everyone with your Day Master.

Your birth chart is fixed, but you don't live it in one kind of weather. Luck Pillars (大運) are ten-year chapters built from your month pillar, stepping forward or backward through the cycle of sixty. Their direction depends on your gender and the yin or yang polarity of your year stem: forward for a man born in a yang year or a woman born in a yin year, backward for the other two cases. Each Luck Pillar brings its own stem and branch, and with them a new set of Ten Gods that can supply what your chart lacks or pile onto what it already has too much of.

The first Luck Pillar doesn't begin at birth. Its start age comes from the time between your birth and a Jie (節) solar term, the next one if your pillars run forward and the previous one if they run backward, with every three days counting as one year. Most people start somewhere between infancy and about age ten, and the calculator shows the start age and the calendar years of each pillar.

Inside each decade, the annual pillars (流年) change every Li Chun. 2026 is Bing Wu (丙午), a Fire Horse year, and 2027 is Ding Wei (丁未), a Fire Goat year. An annual pillar is read against your Day Master and your current Luck Pillar together. For a Geng Metal Day Master, 2026's Bing fire is Seven Killings, often a year of pressure and tests; for Ren Water it is Indirect Wealth, with deals and opportunities on the table; and if your chart holds a Zi (子) branch, the Horse year's Wu (午) branch clashes it. The calculator lists the next ten annual pillars so you can see what's coming.

BaZi runs on the solar calendar of the 24 solar terms, not on January 1 and not on Lunar New Year. The year pillar changes at Li Chun (立春), the Start of Spring, around February 4. In 2026 Li Chun fell on February 4 while Lunar New Year came on February 17, so a baby born on February 10, 2026 is already a Bing Wu Fire Horse in BaZi, even though many zodiac calendars were still calling it a Snake year. In the same way, each month pillar begins at one of the twelve Jie (節) terms: Start of Spring (立春, about Feb 4), Awakening of Insects (驚蟄, about Mar 6), Clear and Bright (清明, about Apr 5), Start of Summer (立夏, about May 6), Grain in Ear (芒種, about Jun 6), Minor Heat (小暑, about Jul 7), Start of Autumn (立秋, about Aug 8), White Dew (白露, about Sep 8), Cold Dew (寒露, about Oct 8), Start of Winter (立冬, about Nov 7), Major Snow (大雪, about Dec 7) and Minor Cold (小寒, about Jan 6). If you were born within a day of one of them, your exact time decides your month pillar, and around Li Chun your year pillar too.

The hour pillar is the most time-sensitive part of the chart. Each of the twelve double-hours (時辰) lasts two hours, with the Rat hour (子時) running from 23:00 to 01:00, and schools disagree about 23:00 to 24:00. Some start the new day at 23:00; others keep the old day until midnight, calling that hour the late Rat hour (晚子時) and 00:00 to 01:00 the early Rat hour (早子時). Because the choice can change your Day Master, the calculator lets you pick.

Clock time is also not sun time. True solar time (真太陽時) corrects for your birthplace's longitude: four minutes for every degree east or west of your time zone's standard meridian, plus the equation of time, a seasonal wobble of up to about sixteen minutes. Detroit sits about 32 minutes behind Eastern Time; Seoul runs about 30 minutes behind Korea's clock, which is why Korean practice commonly corrects; and Madrid's clock is about 75 minutes ahead of the sun, more than two hours in summer. Daylight saving time adds another shift. It is ongoing in the US and Europe, and it was used in China from 1986 to 1991, in Taiwan in various years from 1945 to 1979, in Korea in several years between 1948 and 1960 and again in 1987 and 1988, and in Japan from 1948 to 1951. The calculator removes historical daylight saving automatically, and true solar time is a switch you can turn on.

Without a birth time, you get three pillars instead of four. Your Day Master, your season and most of the chart's structure stay the same. You lose the hour pillar's two characters and their Ten Gods, some precision in the element count, and up to about four months of accuracy in your luck pillar start age, since a whole day counts as four months. If you could have been born near 23:00 or midnight, even the day pillar is uncertain, so it's worth asking family or checking a birth certificate.

A chart is a map; a reading is someone walking it with you. Once your Four Pillars are on screen, choose where Geumeum should start (the big picture, personality and gifts, career, money, love and marriage, or this year) or type your own question, and she reads the whole chart. She answers you first, plainly and without a lecture. Then she shows her working: your Day Master and what it's made of, whether your chart runs strong or weak and what it needs, the Luck Pillar you're in now, the year ahead, and how all of it bears on what you asked.

She'll tell you which part of your chart is doing the heavy lifting and which part you've been ignoring, and she may tease you a little on the way. When she's finished, the conversation stays open, so you can keep asking her about the same chart: the job offer, the relationship, the decade that starts next year.

Making your chart is free and needs no account. Anyone can read the opening of Geumeum's reading for free; the full reading costs 10 credits. A new free account comes with 10 credits, which is exactly one full reading.

Your Chinese zodiac sign is only the year animal: one branch out of your eight characters, shared with everyone born in the same year. A BaZi chart uses the full birth moment, so it can tell apart two people born in the same Year of the Horse. The boundary differs too. Many zodiac calendars switch animals at Lunar New Year, while BaZi switches at Li Chun, so a birthday in late January or early February can have a different animal in each system.

Western astrology and BaZi are both birth charts, built from different materials. Astrology maps the planets against signs and houses for your birth moment and place; BaZi uses no planets at all, only the stem-and-branch calendar anchored to the sun's path through the solar terms. Astrology is rich in psychological nuance; BaZi is especially strong on structure and timing, with Luck Pillars and annual pillars that tell you which decades and years favor which kinds of effort. Many people use both and find that they rhyme.

Tarot and the I Ching answer a question about now: should I take this job, where is this relationship heading, what am I missing this month? BaZi describes your baseline and your seasons over a lifetime. A good rhythm is to use BaZi to understand your terrain and timing, then turn to a tarot spread or an I Ching hexagram when a specific decision is in front of you this week.