Is 2027 a year without spring?

Yes. The lunar year that runs from 6 February 2027 to 25 January 2028 contains no 立春, the solar term that opens spring, and that is what a 無春年 means. You can check it against a government table in about ninety seconds. What the label is usually taken to imply is a separate question, and the arithmetic has something useful to say about that too.

What the term actually describes

立春 is one of the twenty-four solar terms, fixed to the sun's position and falling on 3, 4 or 5 February most years. Lunar New Year moves around across a window of about a month. The two are on different clocks, so whether a Lichun lands inside a given lunar year is a question of where the New Year fell that time.

A lunar year can therefore contain two Lichun, one, or none, and each has a name: 雙春年, 單春年, 無春年. The last is also called a widow year in popular usage, which is the association most people have met.

2027, checked

The Hong Kong Observatory publishes conversion tables as plain text, one file per year, and the two files settle it between them. Lunar New Year 2027 falls on 6 February, and Lichun that year falls on 4 February — two days before the year begins, so it belongs to the year before. Lunar New Year 2028 falls on 26 January, and Lichun that year falls on 4 February — ten days after the year has already ended.

So the Ding-wei year contains neither, making 2027 a no-spring year. The same two files settle two neighbouring claims. The year running from February 2026 contains one Lichun, so it is a single-spring year, not the no-spring year some coverage described it as. And the double-spring year in this stretch is 2028, which contains both 4 February 2028 and 3 February 2029 — so pages describing 2027 as a lucky double-spring year have the right idea one year too early.

The label turns out to be a restatement

Reading the Observatory's tables for the whole published range, 1901 to 2100, gives 199 complete lunar years to sort. If you count the Lichun in each year and note whether the year carried a leap month, the two line up exactly:

• Of the 126 years without a leap month: 73 have no Lichun, 53 have one, and none has two.
• Of the 73 years with a leap month: none has no Lichun, none has one, and all 73 have two.

Across 199 years there is not a single exception. A year is a double-spring year if and only if it contains a leap month, and the reason is mechanical: a leap month makes the year about 384 days instead of about 354, and a year that long cannot avoid catching two Februaries.

The auspicious label, then, carries no information of its own. Saying a year is 雙春 is another way of saying it has thirteen months, and saying it is 無春 is a statement about where the New Year fell relative to early February. Both are bookkeeping.

How common a no-spring year is

73 of those 199 years have no Lichun — a little over a third. They arrive in no particular pattern and are not rare in any ordinary sense of the word: most people have lived through twenty or more of them.

This matters because the term is usually presented as an omen, and omens draw their power from rarity. A year described as unusual invites the reader to treat it as significant. A year that turns up more than a third of the time is harder to read that way.

What the tradition holds, and what we are not saying

The custom of associating no-spring years with marriage is real. It is widely held across Chinese communities, wedding dates get moved because of it, and describing that accurately is different from endorsing it. We are not in a position to tell anyone whether a no-spring year bears on a marriage, and we are not going to pretend the arithmetic answers that question, because it does not — the arithmetic tells you where 立春 falls, and nothing further.

Chinese astronomical bodies have gone on the record more than once saying the custom has no basis in the calendar itself, which is a narrower statement than it first appears: it says the calendar does not encode the belief, not that people are wrong to hold it. The distinction is important. What the tables can settle is whether a given year is 無春 at all, and that is frequently what someone actually wants to know when the question arrives from a relative.

Checking any year yourself

Two files and one comparison, or use our Chinese perpetual calendar to find the New Year dates. Open the Observatory's conversion table for the year in question and find the date labelled the first day of the first lunar month — that is Lunar New Year. Then find Spring Commences, which is how the tables render 立春, in that file and in the following year's. If neither falls between one New Year and the day before the next, the year has no spring.

The one thing to get right is which year you are measuring. This all works on the lunar year, New Year to New Year. There is a second convention, used in bazi, that runs the year from Lichun to Lichun — and under that convention every year contains exactly one Lichun by construction, so the whole question dissolves. Mixing the two produces nonsense in either direction.

Where this comes from, and what will date

Every date here was read from the Hong Kong Observatory's Gregorian-lunar conversion tables, which cover 1901 to 2100 and are published as free plain text. The 199-year count was made from that same series across its full range.

The dates do not date. Solar terms and lunar month boundaries for the next seventy years are already computed and published, and the equivalence between double-spring years and leap-month years is a property of how the calendar is built rather than an observation about a particular century. What will change is the surrounding coverage. This question resurfaces every time a year with an unusual label comes around, and the specific claims in circulation will be different.