When does your cohort's Saturn Return actually happen?

What the table shows

Your Saturn Return is the period when transiting Saturn comes back to the exact degree it held when you were born. Because Saturn retrogrades every year, it usually crosses that degree three times over about nine to twelve months, and once in a while only once. The window for a birth year is therefore a range: the earliest first pass for anyone born on 1 January to the latest final pass for anyone born on 31 December.

The sign column matters more than most guides admit. Saturn changes sign roughly every two and a half years, and it often steps into the next sign, retrogrades back out, and enters again months later. Someone born in July 1998 has Saturn in Taurus; someone born in December 1998 has it in Aries again. Their returns are a year apart and in different signs.

How it was computed

Saturn's apparent geocentric ecliptic longitude of date was taken from JPL DE442 through Skyfield 1.53 at noon UTC on every fifth day of each birth year. For each of those birth dates, the transiting longitude was scanned daily between the 27th and 31st birthdays, and every crossing of the natal degree (direct or retrograde) was recorded to the day. The table reports, per birth year, the earliest first crossing, the latest final crossing, and the minimum and maximum number of crossings across the sampled birth dates. Sign changes within the birth year were detected from the same daily scan. All dates are UTC; in the Americas a change can fall on the previous local day.

Read your own line

Find your birth year, then check the sign-change dates: if you were born before the first change, use the first sign; after it, the next. The window is the outer bound for the whole year, so your own return sits inside it. For your exact dates, the free Saturn Return calculator runs the same computation for your birth date and time, and the Saturn Return guide explains what the passes mean.

Limits

The scan is daily, so a crossing is placed to the day, not the minute. Birth dates are sampled every five days; a birth date between samples can shift a bound by a few days at most. The table is about the first return only; the second, near 58 to 60, follows the same pattern about 29.5 years later. Nothing here interprets the return, and no astrologer is named as the author: the numbers are the ephemeris, and the byline is Shymea Editorial.