February zodiac signs: Aquarius and Pisces

This table gives the sign for each February birthday in New York time, checked against all 80 years from 1951 to 2030. The 29 February row counts only the leap years. Two dates carry both sign names because the Sun has changed sign on each of them in some years. The third column is the decan, the 10° slice of the sign the Sun occupied, with the planet the Chaldean sequence assigns to it.

Seventeen dates are fixed Aquarius and ten are fixed Pisces, counting the leap day. Inside Aquarius the decan changes from Mercury's to the Moon's on 8 or 9 February, so February Aquarians are split between those two faces. Pisces starts in the decan the Chaldean order gives to Saturn and moves to Jupiter's on 28 February to 1 March, which is why 28 and 29 February show either decan in the table.

Every American February from 2021 to 2030 has the same shape: Aquarius until some point on 18 February, Pisces after it. The Sun entered Pisces during 18 February in 10 of those 10 years in US Eastern time, and in all 10 in Central and 10 in Pacific time. Over the longer run the 18th has won 54 of 80 years in New York and the 19th the other 26, so the familiar "Pisces, 19 February to 20 March" describes a minority of US years and none of the recent ones.

The decade table reads like a slow handover. In the 1950s the 18th took 4 of the 9 counted years. It reached 8 of 10 in the 1990s, and in the 2020s it takes all 10. The last time Pisces waited until 19 February in New York was 2016, at 12:34 am, and every 19 February start since 2000 was a leap year with the change in the small hours: 3:33 am in 2000, 1:50 am in 2008, 1:18 am in 2012.

Why the date crept back comes down to arithmetic in the calendar. A leap day every fourth year makes the Gregorian calendar average 365¼ days, and the seasons come round about eleven minutes faster than that. Each solar ingress therefore arrives a little earlier on the calendar every four years, roughly three quarters of a day per century. The Gregorian rule cancels that by dropping the leap day in century years not divisible by 400. It dropped one in 1900, kept 2000, and will next drop one in 2100, so for the whole of the 20th and 21st centuries the ingresses have been sliding earlier with nothing to stop them. A February table compiled in the 1950s was honest when it said the 19th. It is a day out for a child born in Ohio today.

Within the four-year cycle February behaves like January, because the ingress comes before the leap day. Leap years give the latest Pisces starts and the following years the earliest: 18 February, 11:13 pm in 2024, then 18 February, 5:07 am in 2025. The earliest start in the whole series is 18 February, 4:08 am, in 2029; the latest is 19 February, 11:56 am, in 1952.

So "Pisces day" is still a day with two halves. A New York birth at 9 am on 18 February 2027 is an Aquarius; at 5 pm, after the Sun's ingress at 4:33 pm, a Pisces. Anyone born on the 18th who wants a firm answer needs the birth time and place, and the zodiac sign calculator turns those into the sign from the same ingress data.

Pisces, always. A leap day falls ten or eleven days after the change, and it was Pisces in every leap year from 1952 to 2028 in every zone on this page. The margin is so wide that the answer holds anywhere on Earth: the latest the Sun entered Pisces in the whole run was 19 February, 16:56 UTC, which is still only the morning of 20 February on the clocks furthest ahead of UTC.

The leap-day Sun sits at about 10° Pisces, at the join of the Saturn and Jupiter decans, so the decan rather than the sign is what varies from one leap year to the next. People who celebrate on 28 February or 1 March in ordinary years are keeping a Pisces birthday either way; both dates are Pisces in every year, and the chart is cast for the moment of birth, not for the party.

Leap-day births are also scarcer than the date alone would suggest. Per occurrence, 29 February averaged 10,467 US births between 2000 and 2014 in the daily birth data used for our rarity study, −7.8% against the average date and 351st of 366, and only four leap days fall in that window. This file cannot say why, and with so few occurrences the figure carries more noise than most.

The leap day also explains a February pattern most readers never notice. Because 29 February comes after that year's Pisces ingress, the day it adds pulls the next year's change back by about eighteen hours: 10:26 pm on 18 February in 2028, 4:08 am in 2029.

Pisces, for a US birth in any recent year. In New York 19 February was Pisces from midnight in 54 of the 80 years and began as Aquarius in 26, none of them after 2016. Britain is different: London's clock runs five hours ahead of New York's, so a late-evening American ingress on the 18th becomes an early-morning British one on the 19th, and 19 February began as Aquarius in 43 UK years. In Sydney the 19th is the ordinary change day (68 years), and in 6 years Pisces arrived as early as the 18th there.

The 20 February row is Pisces everywhere except Sydney, where the Sun reached Pisces during that day in 6 of the years, every one of them before 2000.

Compare your birth time with the entry for your year and zone. At or after that time the Sun was in Pisces; earlier in the day it was still in Aquarius. Central time is included because the 18 February ingress in leap years has been falling close to midnight in the eastern US, and an hour can move it.

Of all the February birthdays people search for on this site, the 12th comes up most. 12 February is Aquarius in every year and every zone, in the Moon's decan, the last ten degrees of the sign. The same goes for 13, 14 and 15 February: all fixed Aquarius, all third decan.

Valentine's Day stands out in the US births-by-date data. Over 2000 to 2014, 14 February averaged 11,999 US births, +5.7% against the average date, the 48th busiest of 366. The day before it, 13 February, ranks 325th. A 2011 Yale study of US birth certificates by Levy, Chung and Slade (Social Science & Medicine) found a similar Valentine's rise in both spontaneous and caesarean births, and a fall around Halloween, though its explanation of why is still debated.

Taken as a month, February sits in the middle: 11,152 births a date, −1.7%, 8th of 12 months. The quietest February date is 19 February at 327th.

February holds the larger half of Aquarius and both of its later decans. From the start of the month to about the 8th the Sun is in the second decan, the face of Mercury; from the 8th or 9th to the handover it is in the third, the face of the Moon. Saturn rules the sign under the older scheme and Uranus under the modern one, and the Sun itself is in detriment here, opposite Leo.

Mercury's face is often read as the argumentative, curious stretch of the sign, the Moon's as the softer and more domestic one, though the difference is a matter of emphasis. Pictures from ordinary life: the volunteer who keeps the food bank's rota in a spreadsheet nobody else can open; the brother who will talk politics with anyone at dinner and leaves the room when a relative cries. Neither is a forecast. Aquarius says nothing about being cold or clever, and the Sun is one placement among ten. The rest of the sign, including its January start and the slow planets in Aquarius, is on Aquarius dates and the 19 January drift.

Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos gives Pisces to Jupiter, with Sagittarius, as the "windy and fecund" pair (I.17), and places Venus's exaltation there (I.19): she "has her exaltation in Pisces and her depression in Virgo". He lists Pisces among the bicorporeal signs (I.11), the four that close a season, and by the traditional rule Mercury is both in detriment and in fall in Pisces. Neptune is its modern ruler.

Every February Pisces is a first-decan Pisces, the face of Saturn, except the last day or two of the month, when the Sun reaches Jupiter's decan. Saturn's face inside Jupiter's sign is usually read as the most self-contained part of Pisces: imagination with a fence round it.

In daily life: the nurse who absorbs a ward's mood and still files the handover notes precisely; the friend who cannot say no to a stray cat and keeps the vet's bills in a labelled folder. Pisces does not mean gullible or lost, and none of these pictures says what anyone will do. A Pisces with a Capricorn Moon looks nothing like the stereotype. For the March half of the sign and the equinox that ends it, see Pisces dates.

Neptune, the modern ruler, spent 3 February 2012 to 30 March 2025 in Pisces (with a return from 22 October 2025), so every February Pisces from 2012 to 2025 has it in their own sign. Those born in February 2024 and 2025 have Saturn there too, after Saturn's ingress on 7 March 2023. Dates are DE442 ingresses in UTC.

Neither is common. The Shymea rarity study, which assigns 62.2 million US births from 2000 to 2014 to the exact ingress instants, put Pisces 9th of 12 at 8.04% and Aquarius 11th at 7.93%. The order flips in Canada, where Aquarius (7.92%, 9th) edged Pisces (7.91%, 10th) in 2024. In England and Wales in 2025 Pisces was 8th at 8.21%. Both are short signs, 29.59 and 29.96 days of Sun on average, because Earth is still moving quickly after its January perihelion.

The annular solar eclipse of 6 February, 10:56 am Eastern falls at 17°38′ Aquarius, in the Mercury decan, so Aquarians born around 6 or 7 February have it on their Sun degree. Mercury stations retrograde at 5°59′ Pisces on 9 February and backs into Aquarius at 18 February, 7:16 am, the same day the Sun moves the other way, into Pisces at 18 February, 4:33 pm. The penumbral lunar eclipse of 20 February sits at 2°06′ Virgo, opposite the first degrees of Pisces. The Aquarius 2027 horoscope and the Pisces 2027 horoscope carry these through the year.

The month before opens in Capricorn and turns Aquarius on 19 or 20 January: January zodiac signs. The month after closes Pisces at the equinox, usually 20 March, when Aries begins: March zodiac signs. Every boundary of the year is on zodiac signs by date.