Reference

Chinese zodiac elements chart

Every zodiac year has an element attached to it, and the chart is short. What it does not do is describe you — that is a different pillar.

Updated October 2026

The chart

Each Chinese year carries one of five elements, cycling on a ten-year pattern while the animals cycle on twelve. Because ten and twelve only realign every sixty years, the combination of animal and element repeats on a sixty-year cycle — which is why a 60th birthday is the traditional milestone.

Read your element off the last digit of the year you were born in:

Year ends in	Element	Chinese
0, 1	Metal	金
2, 3	Water	水
4, 5	Wood	木
6, 7	Fire	火
8, 9	Earth	土

So 1988 (ending in 8) is an Earth year. 1990 (ending in 0) is Metal. 1992 (ending in 2) is Water. The animal is read from the year separately, on its own twelve-year cycle.

How to read the pairing

The animal and the element answer different halves of the same question, and the tradition reads them together.

• The animal describes the manner — how the energy tends to express itself, and how the year is popularly characterised.
• The element describes the substance — what the energy is made of, and which of the five cycles it belongs to.

That is why the full name of a year is always given as both: Earth Dragon, Metal Horse, Water Monkey. Neither half is complete without the other.

What the element of a year is used for

Three legitimate uses, and they are all about the year rather than the person:

• Describing a cohort. Everyone born in an Earth Dragon year shares that label. That is genuinely useful for talking about a generation or a group.
• Characterising a period. The traditional calendar is read as a sequence of years, and the year element is part of how each one is described.
• A fast, memorable shorthand. It takes one digit and one table. That convenience is real and it is why the year rule is the one everyone knows.

What it cannot tell you

A Chinese chart is built from four pillars — year, month, day and hour. The element in this chart is the element of the year pillar. The pillar read as the person is the day pillar, and its element is called the Day Master.

Those two are different values most of the time. The day pillar advances on a repeating sixty-day cycle, which does not align with the year, so the day element drifts against the year element across the calendar. Two people born eleven days apart in the same year carry different Day Masters — and the year chart cannot see that, because it is not looking at it.

So the honest description of this chart is: it tells you the element of the year you were born in. Whether that element is also yours is a separate question with a separate answer.

The element of a year and the element of a person

It is worth being precise about the difference, because most explanations blur it.

If you want to describe a generation, a cohort, or a year in the traditional calendar, the year chart is exactly the right tool and it is complete for that purpose.

If you want to describe yourself — what you are made of, which energies you carry and which are thin — you need the day pillar, and that needs your full birth date rather than one digit.

Neither is more authentic than the other. They are two different readings of the same four pillars, and they answer two different questions.

Finding your own

The year element you can take from the table above in a few seconds.

The Day Master needs your birth date, and placing the hour pillar needs your birth time and city as well — the traditional reckoning runs on local solar time, which is not the same as clock time. If you do not know your birth time, the reading still works: you lose the hour pillar and nothing else.