Lunar Birthday
Your birthday on the Korean lunar calendar.
Why some Koreans celebrate two birthdays
Korea runs on the solar calendar, but the lunar calendar never left. Seollal and Chuseok follow the moon, and many people — especially parents and grandparents — still celebrate their birthday on its lunar date.
That means the birthday moves: a lunar birthday can land anywhere in a window of about a month on the solar calendar, a little different every year. Families check the calendar each year to know when the seaweed soup (miyeokguk) goes on the table.
Lunar months have 29 or 30 days, and about every three years an extra leap month is added to keep up with the seasons. People born in a leap month usually celebrate in the regular month of the same number.
Converted with a Korean lunar calendar table (Korean time) generated from the Unicode ICU dangi calendar.
How does the lunar birthday calculator work?
Your solar birth date is looked up in a table that lists the solar date on which every Korean lunar month began, from 1920 to 2041. The month your date falls in gives the lunar year and month, and whether it was a leap month; the lunar day is the number of days since that month began, plus one. Nothing astronomical is computed when you press the button — it's a lookup in that table.
For the upcoming birthdays, your lunar month and day are found again in the following lunar years. A leap-month birthday is placed in the regular month with the same number. If that month has only 29 days in a given year, a day-30 birthday moves to day 29. The page shows the next two dates that fall on or after today, using your device's date.
Because the table follows Korean time, a date can differ by a day from a Chinese lunar calendar, which is based on China time. The hour of birth isn't asked; the conversion works on whole days. For anything formal, compare the result with an official Korean almanac. Your birth date stays in the page address and isn't saved on our server.