Zodiac Sign Calculator

How to find your zodiac sign by date of birth

1. Enter your date of birth. For most birthdays this is all you need.
2. Add the birth time and time zone if you know them. They only matter for people born on a day when the Sun moved from one sign to the next.
3. Press Find zodiac sign. You get your Western sun sign with its element, quality and ruling planet, your Vedic sun sign and your Chinese zodiac animal.

Why your Western and Vedic signs can differ

Western astrology uses the tropical zodiac, which starts Aries at the March equinox. Indian (Vedic) astrology uses the sidereal zodiac, which is tied to the stars. Because of the slow wobble of the Earth’s axis, the two zodiacs are now about 24 degrees apart. The Sun takes roughly 24 days to cover that distance, so many people’s Vedic sun sign is the sign before their Western one.

This calculator measures the Sun’s actual position at the moment of birth rather than looking up a fixed date table, and it uses the Lahiri (Chitrapaksha) ayanamsa for the Vedic sign. That is the standard recommended by the Indian government’s Calendar Reform Committee in 1955 and the one most Indian almanacs use.

Western zodiac sign dates

The start dates can shift by a day from year to year, because the Sun does not cross into each sign at the same moment every year. If your birthday is on the first or last day of a sign, the calculator checks the exact day and tells you if the time of birth decides the answer.

The two questions people keep asking

On Reddit, the most common zodiac question is the cusp birthday. One user born on 20 January asked whether they were Capricorn or Aquarius, and the top reply got it right:

“The date that the sun enters aquarius varies year to year. Sometimes it’s on the 19th, sometimes on the 20th.”

— r/astrology, February 2021 (8 upvotes, top reply)

The second is the shock of finding a different sign in the sidereal zodiac:

“In tropical my big three are Virgo (cusping leo) sun Leo ascendant Cancer moon And in sidereal Leo solar Gemini Moon Cancer ascendant”

— r/SiderealAstrology, March 2025 (17 upvotes, post excerpt)

The calculator answers both: it checks the exact moment the Sun changed sign in your birth year and gives the Western and Vedic signs side by side.

When the Sun changes sign in 2026 (India time)

If a birthday falls on one of these dates, the sign depends on the time of birth. The Vedic column also gives the Sankranti dates: Makar Sankranti is the day the Sun enters Makara, and Mesha Sankranti marks the solar new year in many regions. Times are in IST, calculated with the Swiss Ephemeris and the Lahiri ayanamsa, and rounded to the minute.

Almanacs that use a different ayanamsa or a different reference point for the Sun can differ by a few minutes. The calculator above gives these change times to within about a quarter of an hour.

Chinese zodiac

The Chinese zodiac assigns one of twelve animals to each year, in the order Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog and Pig, together with one of five elements. The Chinese year begins at Chinese New Year, which falls between 21 January and 20 February, so people born in January or early February may belong to the previous year’s animal. The calculator flags those dates.

Celebrity zodiac signs

Worked out from the birth dates reported in each FamousTarz profile, with no birth time, so midday in India was used.

Tina Ahuja’s birthday shows why the time can matter: the Sun entered sidereal Cancer (Karka) early that morning, India time.

Zodiac sign questions