Goat personality
Tradition sees the Goat as the zodiac's gentle artist: calm, kind and creative, with a deep sense of beauty and a soft spot for anyone in trouble. People born in Goat years are read as sensitive and imaginative, easy to be around and happiest in a peaceful home with the people they love. They are credited with good taste, patience and a talent for making things by hand.
The shadow side is worry. Goats are read as indecisive, inclined to fret about what might go wrong, and reliant on others to take the lead. Tradition's advice to the Goat is to trust its own judgment, and to act on a good idea before the doubts arrive.
The Goat in love and friendship
A Goat is read as a romantic, caring partner who gives a great deal of warmth and needs to feel safe in return. Tradition's best matches are the Rabbit and the Pig, the Goat's partners in the trio of animals four years apart: the Rabbit shares its gentleness and love of beauty, and the Pig its generosity and easygoing warmth. The Horse is the Goat's secret friend, one of the six harmonious pairs, read as the energetic partner whose confidence steadies a Goat.
The Ox sits opposite the Goat, six years away, and the pair is read as the classic clash: the Ox's rules and routine weigh on a free-spirited Goat. The Rat, one of the six harming pairs, is read as too calculating for a Goat. These readings go by animal alone. Tradition also weighs each person's element, and the grid further down links to every other animal's page.
The Goat at work
Tradition expects Goats to do well in creative and caring work: art and design, music, writing, gardening, teaching, nursing and anything done with the hands or the heart. They are read as considerate colleagues who make a team feel like a family. Cutthroat competition and cold, numbers-only workplaces are what tradition expects a Goat to find hardest.
The Fire Goat year of 2027
The next Year of the Goat begins on February 6, 2027, the day after the Fire Horse year ends, and runs until January 25, 2028. It is a Fire Goat year, 丁未 dīngwèi, the forty-fourth year of the sixty-year cycle; tradition reads Fire as warming the Goat's own Earth, making the Fire Goat the most confident and expressive Goat. The last Year of the Goat was a Wood Goat year, from February 19, 2015 to February 7, 2016.
The city of Guangzhou takes one of its nicknames from the Goat: Yangcheng (羊城), "City of Rams", after a legend of five immortals who rode into the city on rams carrying rice, and a statue of the five rams still stands in Yuexiu Park.
The Goat in the Great Race
In the best-known story of how the zodiac got its order, the Jade Emperor held a race across a wide river, and the animals took their places in the order they finished. The Goat, the Monkey and the Rooster crossed together: the Rooster found a raft, and the Monkey and the Goat pulled away the weeds and steered it across. The three reached the bank one after another, and the Goat took eighth place.
When does the Year of the Goat begin?
Each Year of the Goat starts at the Lunar New Year, the new moon that begins the first month of the Chinese calendar, which falls between January 21 and February 20. So Goat years don't line up with calendar years: someone born on February 10, 1991 is a Metal Horse, because the Metal Goat year began five days later, on February 15. The checker at the top of this page and the Chinese zodiac calculator both allow for this, and the table above gives the first and last day of every Goat year since 1907.
Four Pillars astrology (BaZi) counts the year differently, from Lichun, the start of spring in the solar calendar, around February 4. Its Goat years begin on that day instead, so for a few days either side of the Lunar New Year the two systems can disagree.