Year of the Goat 2027: Fire Goat Dates, Years and Customs

The next Year of the Goat starts on Saturday, February 6, 2027, and ends on Tuesday, January 25, 2028. It’s a Fire Goat year, the first since 1967. Goat years come every twelve years, so 1955, 1967, 1979, 1991, 2003 and 2015 were Goat years too.

The catch is the start date. A zodiac year begins at Lunar New Year, not on January 1, so anyone born in January or early February should check the exact dates below before calling themselves a Goat. After the dates come the Fire Goat, the goat, sheep and ram question, what tradition says about Goat people, and the customs for a Goat’s own year.

Goat years and their exact dates, 1931 to 2039

Each Goat year runs from one Lunar New Year to the day before the next. The dates below follow Wikipedia’s Goat (zodiac) table. From 1984 on, they also match the Lunar New Year page in our Zodiac Code guide.

Goat year	Starts	Ends	Element that year
1931	February 17, 1931	February 5, 1932	Metal
1943	February 5, 1943	January 24, 1944	Water
1955	January 24, 1955	February 11, 1956	Wood
1967	February 9, 1967	January 29, 1968	Fire
1979	January 28, 1979	February 15, 1980	Earth
1991	February 15, 1991	February 3, 1992	Metal
2003	February 1, 2003	January 21, 2004	Water
2015	February 19, 2015	February 7, 2016	Wood
2027	February 6, 2027	January 25, 2028	Fire
2039	January 24, 2039	February 11, 2040	Earth

For a family with more than one sign to look up, Chinese zodiac signs lists the birth years of all twelve animals and the Lunar New Year date for each year from 1950 to 2029.

Born in January or February? Check the date first

Look at the Starts column for your birth year. If your birthday falls before that date, you belong to the animal before the Goat, which is the Horse.

Look at the Ends column for the year before yours, too. A Goat year that started late runs into the next January or February. So some people born early in 1956, 1968, 1980, 1992, 2004 and 2016 are Goats as well.

Three examples:

• Born February 10, 2015: a Horse. The Goat year didn’t start until February 19.
• Born January 30, 2016: a Goat, even though 2016 is a Monkey year. The 2015 Goat year ran to February 7, 2016.
• Born January 20, 1980: a Goat. The 1979 Goat year lasted until February 15, 1980.

A chart that disagrees with this table may be counting the year from lichun, the start of spring around February 4. Some Chinese astrologers use that date instead of Lunar New Year, so a birthday in the gap between the two can come out as different animals.

2027 is a Fire Goat year: what the element means

Every Goat year carries two elements, and that’s where most of the confusion comes from. The Goat’s own, fixed element is always Earth. On top of it, each year gets a second element from the 60-year cycle, and that one changes every two years.

That second element is the one people mean by “Fire Goat.” In the Chinese calendar, 2027 is written 丁未 (dīngwèi). Wèi (未) is the Goat’s earthly branch, and dīng (丁) is the heavenly stem that gives the year its Fire. Ten stems and twelve branches pair off into the 60-year cycle, so the same Fire Goat year comes round only once every 60 years.

That makes 2027 a real return for people born between February 9, 1967, and January 29, 1968. They were born in a Fire Goat year, and 2027 is the next one. Wood Goats born in 2015 have their own year in 2027 too, but their next Wood Goat year is 2075.

Our guide uses the fixed element on its sign pages. A calendar or horoscope that says “Fire Goat” is using the yearly one. Neither is wrong; check which one a source means before comparing the two.

Year of the Goat or Year of the Sheep?

All three English names are the same sign. The Chinese word 羊 (yáng) covers both goats and sheep. To tell them apart in Chinese, you add a word: shānyáng (山羊) for a goat and miányáng (绵羊) for a sheep. The zodiac sign uses plain yáng, so English writers have called it the Goat, the Sheep and the Ram.

Other zodiacs in the region picked one animal. Japan’s version uses the sheep, and the Filipino zodiac has a ram or sheep, according to Wikipedia’s Chinese zodiac article. In the United States, “Year of the Goat” is the usual name on cards and decorations, though “Year of the Sheep” turns up on plenty of them.

The character also hides a good wish. Yáng (羊) is part of xiáng (祥), the character for good fortune, and the Goat page in our guide plays on the sound with its motto, “Three suns rising, fortune and rank both.” That’s an English version of sān yáng kāi tài (三阳开泰), an old New Year blessing in which yáng means sun, not goat.

What tradition says about people born in Goat years

Tradition paints Goat people as gentle, kind and creative, and easy to get along with. Wikipedia sums up the sign as peace-loving, kind and popular. Our guide calls the Goat “The Artist” and lists its strengths as creative, empathetic, gentle and persevering.

The traditional cautions are the flip side of that softness. The guide’s three growth edges for the Goat are indecisive, anxious and dependent. Its note on how a Goat acts under pressure says they worry in circles and look for somebody else to make the call.

These are tradition, not a test result, and the guide says as much in its own introduction. It calls the zodiac a framework for reflection rather than fortune-telling. Read the list as a set of questions to ask yourself, not a verdict on a child or a partner.

Where the lucky things are listed, sources only partly agree:

	Wikipedia’s Goat (zodiac) article	Our Zodiac Code guide
Lucky colors	Green, red, purple	Green, red, purple
Lucky flowers	Carnation, primrose	Carnation, primrose
Lucky numbers	2, 3, 4, 7, 9	3, 4, 9
Lucky directions	Not listed	North, east, southeast

The numbers are where sources split most often. If you’re putting lucky numbers on a card or a party sign, use the ones both lists share: 3, 4 and 9.

Which signs the Goat is said to get along with, and which one it clashes with, is in our Chinese zodiac compatibility chart. The chart explains each traditional rule and where it comes from.

2027 as a Goat’s own year: benmingnian customs

A Goat year is the own year, or benmingnian (本命年), for everyone born in an earlier Goat year. Chinese folk tradition treats that year as an unlucky one. The usual remedy is red: the Chinese Wikipedia entry for 本命年 names red underwear and a red string bracelet as the things people wear to ward off bad luck.

Our guide adds one detail on its other sign pages: the red is meant to come from someone else. That’s why the custom so often turns into a gift from a parent, grandparent or friend.

Here is who has a Goat own year in 2027, by the age they turn on their 2027 birthday:

Born in the Goat year of	Age on 2027 birthday
2015	12
2003	24
1991	36
1979	48
1967	60
1955	72
1943	84

Check the dates table for anyone born in January or February. A child born on February 12, 2015, is a Horse, and their own year was 2026.

If the Goat is a 12-year-old: this is often the first own year a child is old enough to notice. Red socks, a red string bracelet or a red scarf from a grandparent fits the custom without anything awkward. Tell them it’s for good luck in their own year, and leave out the part about the year being unlucky. A 12-year-old doesn’t need a reason to worry about the year ahead.

If the Goat is turning 60: for someone born in 1967, the Fire Goat year is the one they were born in, which makes a good line for a birthday card. You don’t need anything more elaborate than the date table and a red gift.

Will 2027 be a good year for Goats?

We don’t make zodiac forecasts, and the reason is simple: the forecasts disagree. Horoscope sites write their own predictions for each sign, and two of them can say opposite things about the same year. The one thing tradition agrees on is the own-year custom above. Treat any detailed prediction for work, money or love as that writer’s reading, not as part of the zodiac itself.

Mark the start of the Goat year at home or in class

A simple way to use the Goat year is to note where you are at the start and look again at the end. It fits into one evening at home or one class period, and the group size and timing below are suggestions, not rules.

Group and time: any family, or a class of 30 or fewer, in half an hour. Anyone who can follow a row across a table can look themselves up. Pre-readers need a grown-up for that part.

What to prepare: the dates table on this page, a printed picture of a goat for each person or one for the wall, and pens. For a written record, add one Year Ahead page per person.

The goat above is from the muted style of our Chinese zodiac clipart. Each of its three styles has a goat as both a PNG and an SVG file, and the tribal style adds a solid black goat for one-color printing.

How to run it:

1. Everyone finds their birth year in the dates table and writes their animal next to their name.
2. Anyone born in January or February checks the Starts and Ends columns before writing anything down.
3. The Goats in the group, if there are any, get a red item or a red sticker for their own year.
4. Each person writes one thing they want from the Goat year, on the back of the goat picture or on a Year Ahead page.

How it ends: collect the pages and put them away until the Goat year closes on January 25, 2028. Then hand them back and let everyone see how close they came. The worksheet is from our Zodiac Code guide, which says on that page it’s meant to be written at the start of a lunar year and read at the end of it.

Where it goes wrong: the Year Ahead page is written for adults, with headings for work, money and love. For children, read “work” as school and swap “love” for friends. In a class whose birthdays run from fall 2014 to summer 2015, expect a split at February 19, 2015: the students born before it are Horses, and the ones born on or after it are Goats.

If you’re adding the character to a card, 羊 takes six strokes. The two short strokes at the top look like horns, then come three horizontals and one long vertical down the middle. Children who want to get the order right can practice first with how to write Chinese characters, which explains the stroke order rules and the grid paper that keeps each stroke in place.

Getting ready for the first day of the Goat year

The Goat year begins with Lunar New Year itself, so the cleaning, red decorations, reunion dinner and red envelopes all happen in the first days of February 2027. Our Chinese New Year traditions guide walks through those customs day by day for 2027, from the week before New Year’s Eve to the Lantern Festival on Saturday, February 20.