Luck Pillars Calculator
Your birth chart is fixed, but Saju also reads life in ten-year seasons — the luck pillars, 대운 (daeun) in Korean and 大運 (da yun) in Chinese. Enter your birth details to see when each one begins.
What are luck pillars in Saju and Bazi?
Luck pillars are a second row of stem-and-branch pairs that unfold through your life, one every ten years. Your four birth pillars describe the “seed”; the luck pillars describe the seasons it grows through. Readers compare each luck pillar with your Day Master — with the same Ten Gods used for the birth chart — to describe the themes of that decade.
How is the starting age calculated?
Count the time from your birth to the next solar-term month boundary (if your pillars run forward) or back to the previous one (if they run backward). Every three days of that gap equals one year of age, one day equals four months, and two hours equal ten days. So a baby born six days before the next term starts the first luck pillar at about two years old. We calculate it to the minute and show the start age in years and months.
Why does birth sex change the direction?
The classical rule pairs yin and yang: a yang year (Jia, Bing, Wu, Geng or Ren year stem) runs forward for men and backward for women, and a yin year does the opposite. Forward means each luck pillar is the next pair after your month pillar in the 60-pillar cycle; backward means the previous pair. The rule comes from tradition, not from anything we can measure, so we simply label it as the traditional direction rule.
What is the Korean daeun number?
Korean almanacs (만세력) often show a single whole number, the 대운수 (daeun-su): the start age rounded to the nearest year (minimum 1). Luck pillars then change at that number and every ten years after it — for example 3, 13, 23. Because Koreans traditionally counted age from one at birth, some almanacs label the same number with Korean age. We show both the exact start (years and months after birth) and the daeun number.
How should I read a luck pillar?
Look at the stem first — its Ten God gives the outward theme of the decade, such as learning (Resource), output and expression (Eating God), or responsibility (Officer). The branch adds the season underneath, and readers look at how it meets the branches of your birth chart. Transitions between pillars are often felt as a change of pace a year or so either side of the switch.
Do I need my exact birth time for luck pillars?
The pillars themselves only change if you were born within hours of a solar term, but the start age moves by about ten days for every two hours. Without a time we use noon and say so; the start age can then be off by up to about two months.
Are luck pillars the same in Korean Saju and Chinese Bazi?
Yes. The direction rule, the three-days-per-year conversion and the sequence of pillars are shared. Korean almanacs commonly add the rounded daeun number; Chinese sources often give the start date to the day.
How accurate is this luck pillar calculator?
We check it against the independent almanac library lunar-python: in 2,000 random charts, every luck pillar matched, and the start age matched to the month, apart from a few cases within a month caused by solar-term timing differences of under a minute.
Which luck pillar am I in now?
The calculator highlights the pillar that covers the current year. Each one runs for ten years from its start age. The birth pillars shown use your clock time without the longitude correction; for those, use the full Saju calculator.
Rules follow standard Korean and Chinese Four Pillars references (see Four Pillars of Destiny, Wikipedia). Solar terms computed with VSOP87 (Meeus); time zones from the IANA tz database. Updated October 7, 2026. For entertainment and self-reflection only.