Korean Wedding Dates: Son Eomneun Nal and Taekil.

The calendar

Korea computes its lunar calendar from KST at 135°E, while China uses 120°E. When a new moon falls in the first hour of a Korean day it lands on the previous Chinese day, so the two calendars diverge — about fifteen years in two centuries. The Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute is the legal authority.

The rules

손없는날

Days when the roaming spirits are absent: lunar days 9, 10, 19, 20, 29 and 30. Note that a 29-day lunar month has no 30th, so it yields five such days rather than six.

택일

Proper wedding date selection, run by a 역술인 against both families' four pillars using tables from the 천기대요.

생기복덕

An eight-star rotation derived from a person's trigram and matched against the day. Genuinely computable, though sources differ on the female starting trigram.

삼재

Three unlucky years in every twelve, keyed to your birth zodiac. A year-level filter rather than a date one.

What can be worked out, and what cannot

A common claim, corrected

A leap month is a bad time for a Korean wedding.

Traditionally it was the opposite. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture records the leap month as a period when the gods of heaven and earth are off watch, making it a favourable time for weddings, burials and moving. The modern aversion is an inversion — one wedding hall reported booking nineteen weddings in a normal November against three in a leap-month November, an 84% collapse, and a National Folk Museum researcher describes the belief as the exact opposite of the tradition. If you are willing to marry in a leap month, you will find the venues emptier and cheaper.