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What day is it today, in every calendar

The table below is generated at the daily build (UTC) with today and tomorrow. When the page loads, your browser recomputes everything for YOUR local date, so what you see matches your own time zone.

Chinese calendar today

The Chinese calendar is lunisolar and depends on the exact instant of the new moon and the Sun's longitude, so it is computed live by the astronomy-engine in your browser, following the national standard GB/T 33661 (the 120 East meridian, China time).

Why the world has so many calendars

Every calendar solves the same problem with a different answer: the solar year is about 365.2422 days and the lunar month is 29.53 days, and those two numbers do not fit neatly inside each other. Systems that follow the Sun, like the Gregorian, Julian, Persian, Ethiopian, Indian and Buddhist, keep the seasons in place and let the Moon roam. A system that follows the Moon, like the Hijri, keeps months faithful to the lunar phase but watches its dates drift about 11 days a year through the seasons. Systems that try to honour both, like the Hebrew and the Chinese, are lunisolar: they track the Moon month by month and, a few times each decade, insert an entire extra month to catch up with the Sun.

The eras also count from different starting points, which is why the same day carries such distant years. The Buddhist calendar adds 543 to the Western year because it counts from the parinirvana of the Buddha. The Ethiopian one runs 7 to 8 years behind ours, which is why the hook is literally true: in Ethiopia our year has not arrived yet, and today they live in 2018 while the West marks 2026. The Persian and the Hijri both start at the Hijra, the migration of the prophet Muhammad in 622, one counting by the Sun and the other by the Moon, which is why they diverge so widely. The Hebrew calendar counts from the creation of the world in Jewish tradition, already past the year 5780. The Javanese calendar has no single day number at all: it pairs the ordinary 7 day week with the ancient 5 day market cycle (pasaran), and the two together form the weton, still used to choose dates today.

An honest note on precision: the Hijri here is the arithmetical tabular one, a predictable 30 year cycle that can differ by up to one day from the observational or official calendar of any given country, because the real start of the month depends on sighting the new moon and on the announcement of local authorities. The Persian one follows Borkowski's arithmetical algorithm, which agrees with the official Iranian calendar of the Tehran equinox from 1925 to 2088. Every other calendar in this table is deterministic and needs no observation.

Last updated: 2026-10-11 · Methodology and sources