Zodiac Signs by Month: Every Sign and Its Dates

Aries runs roughly 21 March to 19 April. Taurus, 20 April to 20 May. Gemini, 21 May to 20 June. Cancer, 21 June to 22 July. Leo, 23 July to 22 August. Virgo, 23 August to 22 September.

Libra runs roughly 23 September to 22 October. Scorpio, 23 October to 21 November. Sagittarius, 22 November to 21 December. Capricorn, 22 December to 19 January. Aquarius, 20 January to 18 February. Pisces, 19 February to 20 March.

Read every one of those as approximate at the edges. The dates in the middle of each range are certain for any year. The first and last day of each range is the part that moves.

A tropical year is about 365.24 days long, not 365. The calendar absorbs the extra quarter day with a leap year every four years, which means the astronomical events the calendar is tracking drift forward by roughly six hours a year and then snap back when February gains a day.

The sun's entry into each sign is one of those events. It happens at a precise instant, and that instant shifts by up to about eighteen hours across a four year leap cycle. When the instant lands near midnight, the calendar date of the change flips.

Time zones do the rest. If the sun enters Virgo at 23:40 in London, it entered at 18:40 the same day in New York and at 08:40 the following morning in Sydney. All three are correct locally, and all three appear in date tables published in those countries.

This is also why almost every printed table quietly hedges with the word around.

If your birth date is the first or last day of a sign range, do not guess. Look up the exact ingress time for your birth year, and compare it to your birth time in your birth location.

You need the birth time for this, and unlike the rising sign, an approximate one is usually enough. Knowing whether you were born in the morning or the evening resolves most boundary cases.

If you genuinely cannot establish the time and the ingress fell during your birth day, read both signs and see which describes you. That is unsatisfying but honest, and it is what an astrologer would do rather than picking the more flattering option.

One thing worth knowing: the sun is either in one sign or the other. There is no astronomical state of being partly in both, whatever a cusp article implies.

In technical astrology, a cusp is the boundary line between two houses in a chart, and it has nothing to do with birthdays. In popular usage it means being born close to a sign change, and the popular usage is now so widespread that the technical one has largely lost the word.

The popular claim is that someone born near a boundary blends the two signs. Most astrologers reject that as stated, because the sun is fully in one sign, but there is a real observation underneath it.

The real version comes from the rest of the chart. Someone born on 22 August with a Leo sun frequently has Mercury or Venus already in Virgo, since those two planets never travel far from the sun. So the Virgo flavour people notice is genuinely there, it is just coming from other placements rather than from a blended sun.

The way to settle it is to run a full chart. Cusp language is usually a sign that only the sun has been looked at.

The zodiac used in Western astrology is the tropical zodiac, which is anchored to the seasons rather than to the stars. Zero degrees of Aries is defined as the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere, and the twelve signs are twelve equal thirty degree slices measured from there.

The constellations are a different thing. They are irregular in size, there is a thirteenth along the ecliptic, and they sit where they sit.

Because the earth's axis wobbles over a roughly 26,000 year cycle, the equinox point has moved backward against the constellations by about one full sign since the tropical zodiac was defined. So a person described as a Leo was, in most cases, born while the sun stood in the constellation Cancer.

This is the source of the recurring news story about star signs being wrong. It is not a discovery and it is not a correction. Tropical astrology never claimed to be tracking constellations, and sidereal astrology, used in the Indian tradition, does track them and produces different sign assignments for the same birthday.

January covers Capricorn then Aquarius. Capricorn reads as disciplined and long viewed. Aquarius reads as independent and systems minded, more interested in the group than in the individual.

February covers Aquarius then Pisces. Pisces reads as absorbent, imaginative and unusually permeable to other people's states.

March covers Pisces then Aries, the start of the astrological year. Aries reads as direct, fast and impatient with process.

April covers Aries then Taurus, which reads as steady, sensory and extremely difficult to hurry. May covers Taurus then Gemini, which reads as quick, verbal and easily bored.

June covers Gemini then Cancer, which reads as protective and tidal. July covers Cancer then Leo, which reads as warm, generous and in need of an audience. August covers Leo then Virgo, which reads as precise, useful and quietly critical.

September covers Virgo then Libra. Libra reads as social, aesthetic and reluctant to be the one who creates conflict, which is not the same as being agreeable.

October covers Libra then Scorpio, which reads as intense, private and unusually good at knowing what someone is not saying.

November covers Scorpio then Sagittarius, which reads as expansive, blunt and restless for somewhere else. December covers Sagittarius then Capricorn, closing the year on the sign most associated with structure and long timelines.

Every one of those descriptions is the sun sign only. Held next to a moon and a rising sign they get considerably more specific, and held on their own they will always feel partly true and partly generic.

Modern date tables come from an ephemeris, a table of planetary positions computed from orbital mechanics. Astrologers do not estimate these. The sun's position for any moment in the last several thousand years is known to a precision far beyond what any interpretation requires.

So when a table gives 23 August as the start of Virgo, that is a rounding of a computed instant to a calendar day in some reference time zone, usually Greenwich or the publisher's local zone.

If precision matters to you, the question to ask about any table is which time zone it assumes. Most do not say, which is the single most common reason two sources disagree by one day.

For everything except boundary births, the difference is irrelevant, and the standard ranges above are fine.

The sun sign is one placement. It describes drive and direction and it does not describe your emotional life or your first impression, both of which people usually recognise faster.

The next step is the moon sign, which needs your birth date and, ideally, an approximate time. After that the rising sign, which needs an accurate time and a birth place. Those three together are the point at which a chart stops sounding like a horoscope column.

If you only ever add one thing to your sun sign, make it the moon. It is the placement that most often explains the mismatch people feel when they read their sun sign description and think that it is not really them.