Zodiac Signs: The 12 Astrological Signs and Their Dates

There are 12 zodiac signs, also called star signs or astrology signs. In order, they are Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces. Each is a 30° slice of the Sun's apparent yearly path, counted from the March equinox. When people say "your sign," they usually mean the Sun's sign at birth.

Western zodiac at a glance

• 12 signs: equal 30° sectors of the 360° ecliptic, starting at the First Point of Aries (the March equinox)
• Four elements (triplicities): Fire, Earth, Air, and Water, three signs each
• Three modalities (quadruplicities): Cardinal, Fixed, and Mutable, four signs each
• System: the tropical zodiac, tied to the seasons, used in Western astrology and on Astrolivo

These are the usual ranges for recent years in US Eastern Time; the exact start of each sign shifts by about a day from year to year.

Many zodiac charts print fixed birthday windows and start Aries on March 21. In Western astrology, though, a sign is a stretch of the Sun's path, not a block of calendar days. Aries begins at the First Point of Aries, where the Sun stands at the March equinox, and every other sign follows in 30° steps.

The equinox does not fall on the same date every year. It always lands between March 19 and March 21, so the start of Aries, and with it the start of every other sign, moves slightly. NASA JPL Horizons ephemeris data for 2020–2030, converted to US Eastern Time, shows the Sun entering Aries on March 19 in 3 of those years and on March 20 in the other 8. It never started on March 21 in that span. In 2026 the moment was March 20, 2026, at 10:46 AM EDT (14:46 UTC).

Two other details explain why tables and websites can disagree by a day. Earth's orbit is slightly eccentric, so the Sun spends a little more time in some signs than in others, which is why the ranges in the table are not all the same length. Time zones matter too: a change shortly after midnight Eastern is still the previous calendar day in Pacific Time, and an evening change in the East is already the next day in UTC. In 2026, for example, the Sun entered Taurus on April 19 at 9:39 PM EDT, which was already April 20, 01:39 UTC.

If your birthday falls on one of these change days, the date alone cannot settle your Sun sign. Enter your birth date, time, and city in your birth chart to see which sign the Sun was in when you were born.

Greek astrology tied the twelve signs to the four classical elements named by the philosopher Empedocles in the fifth century BC. Going around the wheel from Aries, the elements always repeat in the same order: Fire, Earth, Air, Water. Each element covers three signs, a group called a triplicity, and those three sit 120° apart. Astrologers call that angle a trine and read it as an easy, free-flowing connection.

• Fire (Aries, Leo, Sagittarius): classically described as hot and dry, and counted among the active, expressive signs. The tradition links Fire with initiative, directness, and energy that moves outward.
• Earth (Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn): classically cold and dry, one of the receptive groups. Astrologers read Earth as practical and grounded in the material world: work you can see, plans that hold.
• Air (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius): classically hot and wet, the other active group, set opposite Fire around the wheel. Air is associated with ideas, conversation, and social exchange.
• Water (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces): classically cold and wet, receptive, and set opposite Earth. The tradition connects Water with feeling, sensitivity, and reflection.

Modality describes where a sign falls within its season. Aries opens spring in the Northern Hemisphere, so astrologers call it cardinal. Every element appears once in each of the three modalities, and the pairing gives each sign its own character. Capricorn, for instance, is cardinal Earth: action applied to the material world.

• Cardinal (Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn): read as the starting impulse, the push to begin something.
• Fixed (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius): read as steadiness and persistence, slow to change course once set.
• Mutable (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, Pisces): read as adaptable and flexible, comfortable with change.

Each sign also has a ruling planet, and a planet in the sign it rules is said to be strong there. For three signs the table gives two rulers, because 20th-century astrologers added the outer planets: Pluto for Scorpio (classically Mars), Uranus for Aquarius (classically Saturn), and Neptune for Pisces (classically Jupiter).

In astronomy, the zodiac is a belt of sky reaching about 8° north and south of the ecliptic, the Sun's apparent yearly path. The Moon and the brightest planets move within it. Splitting that path into 12 equal parts began in Babylonian astronomy during the 1st millennium BC and reached Greek astronomy by the 2nd century BC.

The signs are named after constellations along the ecliptic, but they are not the same thing. Every sign is exactly 30°, one-twelfth of the circle. The constellations are uneven: Virgo takes up five times as much of the ecliptic as Scorpius. The ecliptic also crosses a 13th constellation, Ophiuchus, between Scorpius and Sagittarius. News reports in 1995, 2011, and 2016 mistakenly presented this as a "change" to the astrological signs; the list of signs never changed.

The bigger reason is the axial precession of the equinoxes, whose discovery is attributed to Hipparchus around 130 BC. Ptolemy described it in the Almagest in the 2nd century. Greek astronomers counted the first degree of Aries from the vernal equinox rather than from the stars, a convention already described by Geminus of Rhodes in the 1st century BC and later spelled out by Ptolemy. This is the tropical zodiac, from the Greek trópos, "turn." Because the equinox drifts against the background stars by about 1.4° per century, it has moved since Babylonian times from the constellation Aries into Pisces, and tropical Aries now lies within the constellation Pisces.

Indian astrology uses a sidereal zodiac instead, which keeps the signs roughly lined up with the constellations and corrects for precession. Astrolivo calculates charts in the geocentric tropical zodiac of Western astrology, and the zodiac cannot be switched.

Popular Sun-sign astrology boils a chart down to one placement: the Sun's sign on your birthday. Horoscopic astrology, which grew out of the Hellenistic tradition, reads the whole birth chart instead, including the Moon, the planets, the Ascendant, and the twelve houses.

Astrologers usually start with three placements: the Sun sign, the Moon sign, and the rising sign, also called the Ascendant, the rising degree of the ecliptic at the time of birth. Take an example chart with the Sun in Capricorn, the Moon in Taurus, and Libra rising. An astrologer would read the cardinal Earth Sun as a drive to get things done in the practical world, the fixed Earth Moon as a need for steady, familiar ground, and the cardinal Air Ascendant as a first impression shaped by conversation and social ease.

Astrology is an interpretive tradition rather than a scientifically validated method, so treat these readings as themes to think about, not facts about who you are.

To find your own three placements, use the Sun, Moon and rising calculator, or open your full birth chart with your birth date, time, and city. The birth chart is free, with no sign-up needed to see the result.

FAQ

What are the 12 zodiac signs in order? Counting from the March equinox, the 12 signs of the Western tropical zodiac are Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces.

What are the zodiac sign dates? In recent years, in US Eastern Time, the zodiac year runs from Aries (March 20 – April 19) to Pisces (February 18 – March 20), with each sign lasting about a month. The table above lists all twelve ranges. The exact start of each sign shifts by about a day from year to year.

What is a cusp? People say "born on the cusp" when a birthday falls near the day the Sun changes signs. In the tradition, the boundary is a single point, not an overlap: each sign includes its first degree and ends where the next one begins, so 30° is the first point of Taurus, not part of Aries. At any moment the Sun is in one sign, and your birth time tells you which.

Can my zodiac sign change? No. The Sun's sign at the moment of your birth is fixed. When two websites give you different signs, the cause is either a different method, such as the sidereal zodiac, or a mistake in the birth time or time zone on a change day.

How this page was made

Prepared by the Astrolivo editorial team from the Wikipedia articles "Astrological sign," "Zodiac," "Triplicity," and "Astrology and science," plus NASA JPL Horizons ephemeris data for 2020–2030, and fact-checked against them. Astrological meanings are given as the tradition's readings.