Zodiac Sign Dates — Find Your Star Sign by Birthday

Your zodiac sign — also called your star sign or Sun sign — is simply the sign the Sun was passing through on the day you were born. The Sun moves through all twelve signs over the course of a year, spending about a month in each, so your birthday alone is enough to place you in one of them. Use the finder at the top of this page, or read your date off the table below.

For example, if you were born on July 4th, the Sun was in Cancer, so your zodiac sign is Cancer. Born on November 30th? The Sun was in Sagittarius. This is the sign your daily horoscope is written for, and the one most people mean when they ask, "What sign are you?"

The dates come from the tropical zodiac, which ties each sign to the seasons rather than to the visible constellations. The wheel starts at the March equinox, when the Sun enters Aries, and is divided into twelve equal 30-degree segments. Because the Sun takes a little under a month to cross each segment, every sign has a start and end date — the ranges you see in the table.

The one subtlety is that these boundaries can shift by about a day from year to year. The equinoxes and the Sun's entry into each sign do not fall at exactly the same clock time every year, so a cusp date like "September 22 or 23" depends on the specific year and even the time of day. The table shows the standard published dates; for a definitive answer tied to your exact birth moment, a birth chart computes the real position of the Sun and removes any doubt.

The twelve signs are grouped into four elements — Fire, Earth, Air and Water — with three signs in each. Fire signs (Aries, Leo, Sagittarius) are associated with energy and drive; Earth signs (Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn) with groundedness and practicality; Air signs (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius) with ideas and communication; and Water signs (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces) with feeling and intuition.

The element gives you a quick sense of a sign's temperament, and the table above lists it alongside each date range. But your Sun sign's element is only one thread: a full chart weaves in the elements of your Moon, your Rising sign and every planet, which is why two people who share a star sign can feel so different.

If your birthday lands right on the boundary between two signs — the "cusp" — the sign date tables cannot always give a firm answer, because the exact moment the Sun changes signs varies by year and time zone. A chart of one sign, calculated with the boundary a day off, could put your Sun in the neighbouring sign.

Astrologically there is no such thing as being "half" of two signs: at any instant the Sun is in exactly one sign. The only way to know for certain is to compute the real position of the Sun for your birth date, time and place. Our free birth chart does exactly that — it removes the guesswork and tells you your true Sun sign, along with your Moon, Rising and the rest of your chart.