Chinese Zodiac Years 2020–2029 — Animals, Stems and Elements

Every year in this decade

Stem elements across this decade

Every decade contains one of each of the ten stems, so the element counts below are structural rather than distinctive — each of the five elements appears exactly twice across any complete ten-year span.

What this decade shares

The span is identical to the 1960s, sixty years earlier: Rat through Rooster, missing the Dog and the Pig. Anyone comparing a 2020s birth to a 1960s birth is comparing two people with the same year pillar.

The decade contains 2024, Jia-Chen, which is the first year of a new twenty-year period in the traditional three-yuan nine-luck division of time — a scheme used in feng shui rather than in BaZi, and one of the places where Chinese metaphysics runs two incompatible period systems side by side. BaZi itself does not use the twenty-year periods.

2026 is Bing-Wu: Yang Fire on Yang Fire, with Wu holding only Ding fire and Ji earth and no water to cool it. In structural terms it is one of the two most intense fire years in the sixty-year cycle, and it is the reason annual readings for that year focus on heat and depletion rather than on any specific animal.

For a decade that is still in progress, the honest caveat applies: the table gives the year pillars, and year pillars alone are one position out of four in a chart. Annual material that reads a whole year from its animal is working at the coarsest available resolution.

The same ten-year sequence occurs sixty years earlier as 1960–1969 — identical stems, identical branches, identical elements.

Questions about 2020–2029

Other decades

Keep reading