Wedding Date Picker — Every Day Scored by Rule

Find candidate dates

The birth hour only enters through the natal day branch, and only for births between 23:00 and midnight (this engine switches the day at the zi hour); noon is fine otherwise. Dates are treated as Beijing civil time. A run covers up to 800 days.

The rules: five hard conditions plus fifteen weighted terms

A day that fails a hard condition is out, with no score; the rest are summed by weight. The score starts at 60, adds favourable terms, subtracts the others, and is clamped to 0–100; tiers are cut at 85 / 70 / 55. The weights are ours, and they are all listed below — you can reject them and read the per-term output instead.

Hard exclusions (any hit disqualifies)

Weighted terms

The twelve officers against marriage

The twelve officers come from one formula: the month branch is the Jian seat, and the offset to the day branch is the officer (offset 6 being the break day that clashes the month). Almanacs do not agree on which of the twelve suit a wedding; the rows marked disputed are exactly where they differ, and the weight follows the majority reading.

The twelve day spirits: a second colour system

The twelve spirits cycle in a fixed order whose start is set by the month branch, from the mnemonic “Yin and Shen months start at Zi, Mao and You at Yin, Chen and Xu at Chen, Si and Hai at Wu, Zi and Wu at Shen, Chou and Wei at Xu” — equivalent to the closed form: spirit index = (day branch + 4 − 2 × month branch) mod 12. This page reconciles against the calendar library over 900 consecutive days with zero mismatches.

Starting rule (month branch to the Azure Dragon seat)

The two colour systems are two independent cycles: across all 144 month-branch by day-branch combinations they agree on only 72 — exactly 50.0 percent. So “today is a yellow-path day” is a statement that has to name its system first. This page computes both and flags, for every day, whether they agreed.

The 28 mansions against marriage

One mansion rules one day, cycling every 28 days: this page derives the ruling mansion as (Julian day number + 11) mod 28 and reconciles with the calendar library over 900 consecutive days with zero mismatches. Both the seven luminaries (wood, metal, earth, sun, moon, fire, water) and the four beasts (one per group of seven) are derived from the index rather than copied, and the test cross-checks them character by character against an external per-mansion table.

Our mansion ratings agree with the calendar library on 21 of 28; the seven disagreements are exactly the ones marked mixed above, i.e. the seven where the sources conflict. Leaving disagreements visible is the point.

Known limits

• Four separations and four severances are not implemented — Traditional selection rules out the day before each equinox and solstice (the four separations) and the day before each season-start (the four severances). Computing them needs a table of all 24 solar-term instants, and there is no astronomy library in the browser — this site only ships the Start of Spring table used for the year pillar. The gap is stated rather than papered over.
• Schools not implemented — The marriage hall diagram, the couple’s “great months”, bride-specific taboo days and mansion-hour pairings each form their own system; none is folded into the score here.
• Not a prediction — What this page outputs is the property of a date under a published rule set — not a prediction about a marriage, and not advice.

School differences (stated, not silently picked)

• Which officers suit a wedding — Almanacs differ on which officers suit a wedding: Ding, Cheng and Kai are widely listed first, Jian, Man, Ping, Po and Bi widely avoided, while Chu, Zhi, Wei and Shou are disputed — Shou most of all, since the classic verse assigns marriage to it while the black-path reading advises against it.
• Two colour systems — The officer method and the day-spirit method are independent cycles agreeing on 72 of 144 combinations (50.0 percent).
• Mansions and marriage — Five of the 28 mansions have conflicting sources (Kang, Ji, Dou, Jing, Xing); they are marked disputed, carry weight 0, and are not silently resolved.
• Lone and widow stars — The main reading is that a groom fears the lone star and a bride the widow star; those carry the main weight here, while the reverse pairs are shown with a lower weight.

FAQ

How does this page pick a wedding date?

Five hard conditions exclude a day outright: month breaker, year breaker, a clash with either partner’s natal day branch, a clash with either birth-year branch, and the closing officer day. Surviving days are then scored on fifteen terms: the twelve officers, the twelve day spirits, the officer colour system, the 28 mansions, red phoenix and heavenly joy days, the heavenly pardon day, six and three harmony with both partners, harm and punishment, and the lone and widow stars. The score starts at 60, adds the favourable terms and subtracts the rest, clamped to 0–100.

Why a score instead of a plain auspicious or inauspicious verdict?

Because the verdict itself is not agreed on between schools and almanacs. The whole weight table is on this page, and every result lists the terms that fired. You can disagree with our weights and still see every input — which is the difference from an almanac that states a verdict with no derivation.

What is a break day, and why is it excluded outright?

One structural line defines it: the day whose branch clashes the month branch — offset 6 in the twelve-officer cycle, the seat named Break. If the day branch clashes the year branch instead, that is a year breaker. Traditional date selection treats both as major taboos, so this page excludes them rather than scoring them.

Why are there two colour systems for the day, and why do they often disagree?

They are two independent cycles. One is built on the twelve officers (the verse: Jian, Man, Ping, Shou are black; Chu, Wei, Ding, Zhi are yellow; Cheng and Kai are usable; Bi and Po stand alone). The other is the twelve day spirits, whose starting rule is Yin and Shen months start at Zi, Mao and You at Yin, Chen and Xu at Chen, Si and Hai at Wu, Zi and Wu at Shen, Chou and Wei at Xu. Across all 144 month-branch by day-branch combinations the two agree on only 72 — exactly 50.0 percent, i.e. statistically independent. This page computes and shows both, and marks whether they agreed on the day you are looking at.

Is a top pick here the same as an almanac’s suitable-for-marriage day?

No. Almanac advice is derived from its own shen-sha combinations; this page publishes a rule list instead. In a full-year 2026 run, 28 of the 69 days we rated 70 or higher (40.6 percent) carried a marriage-favourable tag in the calendar library we reconcile against, versus a 34.2 percent baseline across all 365 days — a mild positive tilt, not the same thing. We show the rules and the gap rather than pretending two systems agree.

Reference

• Chinese zodiac
• Sixty day pillars
• The twelve branches
• The twelve stages
• Ten gods by position
• The 64 hexagrams
• The 36 shen sha
• The 30 scenario pages
• The ten day masters
• The 8 stem & branch relations