Zodiac dates
The full calendar, and why the boundaries move by a day.
| Sign | Dates | Element | Ruler |
|---|---|---|---|
| ♈ Aries | March 21 – April 19 | Fire | Mars |
| ♉ Taurus | April 20 – May 20 | Earth | Venus |
| ♊ Gemini | May 21 – June 20 | Air | Mercury |
| ♋ Cancer | June 21 – July 22 | Water | Moon |
| ♌ Leo | July 23 – August 22 | Fire | Sun |
| ♍ Virgo | August 23 – September 22 | Earth | Mercury |
| ♎ Libra | September 23 – October 22 | Air | Venus |
| ♏ Scorpio | October 23 – November 21 | Water | Pluto (traditionally Mars) |
| ♐ Sagittarius | November 22 – December 21 | Fire | Jupiter |
| ♑ Capricorn | December 22 – January 19 | Earth | Saturn |
| ♒ Aquarius | January 20 – February 18 | Air | Uranus (traditionally Saturn) |
| ♓ Pisces | February 19 – March 20 | Water | Neptune (traditionally Jupiter) |
Why the dates move
The zodiac starts at the spring equinox, which is an astronomical event rather than a calendar date. It falls on 19, 20 or 21 March depending on the year, because the Earth's orbit does not divide evenly into 365 days. Every sign boundary inherits that wobble.
Published tables — including the one above — use the common approximation. For most people it is correct. For anyone born within about a day of a boundary, it is a coin toss until a chart is calculated properly.
There is no such thing as a cusp
The Sun is in one sign or the other at any given instant; it does not straddle two. "Cusp" describes the uncertainty of the reader, not a state of the sky. If you were born near a boundary, the answer exists — it just needs your birth time and place to find it.
And the thirteenth sign
Ophiuchus appears in the news every few years as a discovery. It is not one. Western astrology uses the tropical zodiac, which divides the year from the equinox into twelve equal segments, and has done for two thousand years. It was never a claim about which constellation the Sun is in front of — so a thirteenth constellation changes nothing about it.