2025 Year of the Snake (Wood): Dates & Li Chun

2025 is a Wood Snake year (Yi-Si, 乙巳) in the Chinese zodiac calendar. The name comes from the year’s stem-branch pair: the Heavenly Stem Yi supplies the wood element, and the Si Earthly Branch supplies the Snake. The same pair returns once every 60 years.

Wood adds vision, growth, and adaptive planning. A Wood Snake year tends to be strategic, forward-looking, and quietly influential. For people born in this year, the wood modifier shapes how the Snake’s traditional traits (strategic, intuitive, and refined) express themselves.

In a Bazi chart, Yi-Si (乙巳)would be only the year pillar, one of four. The day pillar’s stem (the Day Master) is the reference point of the reading, so two people born in 2025 can have very different charts.

Read the Snake zodiac page for the base Snake personality, or use the Bazi calculator to see how this year pillar interacts with your full chart.

The 2025 Year of the Snake (Wood Snake, Yi-Si 乙巳) runs from January 29, 2025 to February 16, 2026, while Li Chun, the year-pillar boundary used by many Bazi schools, falls on February 3, 2025.

If your birthday falls before January 29, 2025, the popular zodiac places you in the previous sign, the Dragon. Many Bazi schools use Li Chun (February 3, 2025, 22:10 China Standard Time) as the year-pillar boundary instead, so a birth between Li Chun and Lunar New Year can have a Snake year pillar in a Li Chun-based chart but is usually listed as a Dragon in popular zodiac charts. Check which boundary a calculator uses before comparing results. The Lunar New Year date can fall one day earlier in the Americas because of time zones.

The Snake repeats every 12 years in the zodiac cycle. Each occurrence carries a different Heavenly Stem that modifies the year energy. Recent Snake years include 1953, 1965, 1977, 1989, 2001, 2013, 2025. The full sexagenary cycle produces five Snake types — Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water.

In Five Element theory, the wood element generates Fire, controls Earth, and is controlled by Metal. In a Bazi reading, whether more wood helps or strains a chart depends on the balance of the other seven characters, which the year label alone does not show.

By branch, Snake combines with Monkey, shares a Metal triad with Rooster and Ox, and clashes with Pig. Those patterns are the same in every Snake year; the wood stem does not change them.

For a complete compatibility check, use the zodiac compatibility tool or generate a full Bazi chart.