2017 Chinese Zodiac: Year of the Fire Rooster
2017 is the year of the Yin Fire Rooster. The Fire Rooster year runs from January 28th, 2017 to February 15, 2018. If you were born in 2017 on or after January 28, your Chinese zodiac sign is the Rooster and your element is Fire. Born earlier in January? You belong to the year before.
Born in January or early February 2017? Read this first
The Chinese zodiac year does not start on 1 January. The Fire Rooster year begins on January 28th, 2017. That one date changes the answer for everyone born in the weeks before it.
You were born before the new year turned, so you belong to 2016's sign — not 2017's.
Read the 2016 page instead →The rest of this page is yours. Everything below describes the Yin Fire Rooster.
This is the single most common mistake in Chinese astrology, and it is why two people born weeks apart in the same calendar year can have completely different signs.
What a Fire Rooster actually is
A Fire Rooster is someone born in a Rooster year that also carries the Fire element. In Chinese astrology your animal is your zodiac sign (it shapes who you are), and the element is the "energy flavour" running through it that year. So a Fire Rooster blends the Rooster's nature with Fire's energy of passion, warmth and visibility — a more specific portrait than the Rooster alone.
Fire in plain terms. Fire is the energy of summer — bright, expressive and impossible to ignore. It adds charisma, enthusiasm and the urge to connect and be seen.
They light up a room and pull people toward a shared excitement.
Unchecked Fire burns hot and fast — it can scatter, over-commit or burn out.
Rooster strengths and blind spots
Where you are strong. Roosters notice details others overlook. They have high standards for themselves and the work they produce, and they show up reliably. Their honesty is refreshingly direct.
Where it costs you. Roosters can be perfectionist, critical of others, and opinionated. Their confidence can tip into vanity, their precision into nitpicking.
Work that suits a Fire Rooster
Surgeon, critic, accountant, editor, engineer, performer, teacher, dentist.
Read that as a description of the conditions you do your best work in, not a list you have to pick from. Fire shapes how you work as much as the Rooster shapes what you are drawn to.
Who the Rooster gets on with
In the classical system the twelve animals fall into groups that support each other and pairs that grind. For the Rooster, the natural allies are Ox, Snake and Dragon, and the hardest work tends to be with Rabbit, Horse and Dog.
Lucky colours, numbers and hours for the Fire Rooster
These belong to the Rooster as a sign, which means they are shared by everyone born in a Rooster year. A colour chosen for you works differently: it is picked to feed whichever of the five elements your own chart is short of, and two Roosters can need opposite colours for that reason.
Other Fire Rooster years
The animal cycles every 12 years and the element every 10, so the exact pairing Fire Rooster only comes round once every 60 years. Anyone born in these years shares your sign exactly:
Your birth year is one pillar out of four
Everything above is true of you — and equally true of everyone else born in 2017. Millions of people share the Fire Rooster sign.
What separates your chart from theirs is the month, day and hour you were born. Those three add three more pillars to the one on this page. Together they decide whether your core element — the character at the centre of your chart, traditionally called your Day Master — is supported or drained, which of the five elements you are carrying too much of, which one is missing, and which ten-year cycle you are standing in right now.
That is the part a page about 2017 cannot know. It needs your birth time.
See your full chart, not just your year
Free, and it takes a birth date. Your Energy Chart reads all four pillars and shows the element balance behind them.
or browse every zodiac year →