March zodiac signs: Pisces, then Aries at the equinox

Signs below are for New York time and hold for all 80 years from 1951 to 2030. March has three dates that have changed hands at least once, one more than January or February, and the table marks them. Alongside the sign is the decan, one of the three 10° divisions of each sign, with the planet that rules it as a face in the Chaldean order.

In the Pisces part of the month the Sun moves from Jupiter's decan into Mars's on 9 to 11 March. Aries opens in a decan that also belongs to Mars and passes to the Sun's on 30 or 31 March, so the last two dates of March show either decan. The section on Mars further down explains why the same planet sits on both sides of the equinox.

Aries does not begin near the equinox. It begins at the equinox, by definition. The tropical zodiac measures the Sun's position along the ecliptic from the point where it crosses the Earth's equator, projected onto the sky, heading north, and that crossing is the March equinox. Zero degrees of Aries is that point. Ptolemy says as much in the Tetrabiblos (I.10): astrologers "assume that the sign which begins with the vernal equinox, that of Aries, is the starting-point of them all". So the question "when does Aries start?" and the question "when is the spring equinox?" have the same answer to the minute.

That answer has been 20 March for a long time now. In New York local time the equinox fell on 20 March in 69 of the 80 years from 1951 to 2030, on 21 March in 8, and on 19 March in 3. Every one of the 21 March years came before 1980; the last was 1979, when the Sun crossed the equator at 12:22 am, twenty-two minutes into the day. For four whole decades after that, the 1980s to the 2010s, the date never moved off the 20th.

The 2020s add something new: three equinoxes on 19 March. Each of them is late in the evening and each is a leap year: 19 March, 11:50 pm in 2020, 19 March, 11:06 pm in 2024 and 19 March, 10:17 pm in 2028. March behaves the opposite way to January and February here. Its ingress comes after 29 February, so the leap day pulls that same year's equinox back, and leap years give the earliest Aries start of each four-year run. The latest come in the year before a leap year, which is where all eight 21 March equinoxes sat, from 1951 to 1979. The longer drift behind all of this, a calendar that runs slightly long between century corrections, is set out on the February zodiac signs page.

Britain followed later. By the equinox US clocks have gone forward and London is four hours ahead of New York, so an evening American equinox is an early-hours British one on the next date. The UK had Aries begin on 21 March in 22 of the 80 years, the most recent in 2007 at 12:07 am, and the 20th in all 10 years from 2021 to 2030. So "Aries starts on 21 March", still printed by many sites, was a reasonable British rule in the mid-20th century, right now and then as late as 2007, and an American one only before 1980.

Sydney is the exception that keeps the old date alive. About eleven hours ahead of London at the equinox, it saw Aries begin on 21 March in 57 years and on the 20th in 23, and since 2021 the split has been 5 and 5. There it is the autumn equinox, not the spring one. Tropical signs are tied to the equinox itself, so the start of Aries is the same instant in both hemispheres even though the seasons are reversed.

One footnote, since the equinox carries so much folklore: day and night are not exactly equal on it. Refraction lifts the Sun's image above the horizon before it has truly risen, and sunrise is timed from the top of the disc, so the day of equal light and dark comes a few days before the March equinox in the northern hemisphere. The astrological moment is the astronomical crossing, not the equal day. The dates and times on this page come from the DE442 ephemeris and agree with the US Naval Observatory's published equinox times in the years we checked.

This is the moment Aries began each year. Born at or after it in your zone, you are an Aries; earlier on the same date, a Pisces. Sydney is included because it is the one zone in the table where 21 March is still the usual answer.

Both on most 20 Marches, which is what makes it the date where the birth time matters most. In US Eastern time 20 March opened as Pisces and became Aries during the day in 69 of 80 years. It was Pisces from start to finish in 8 years, all before 1980, and Aries from midnight in 3, the 19 March years of the 2020s. Since 2021 every 20 March in New York has been a change day, apart from the two that were Aries all day.

2027 gives a clean example. The equinox is at 20 March, 20:25 UTC: 4:25 pm on 20 March in New York, 1:25 pm in Los Angeles and 8:25 pm in London, but 21 March, 7:25 am in Sydney. A baby born at 3 pm on 20 March 2027 in New York is a Pisces; one born at 3 pm on 20 March 2027 in Los Angeles, later in absolute time, is an Aries. If your birthday is 19, 20 or 21 March, enter the date, time and town into the zodiac sign calculator for the exact verdict.

19 March is Pisces for almost everyone. Only 3 New York years and 8 Los Angeles years have seen Aries begin on it, all late in the evening, and in the UK and Sydney it has been Pisces all day in every year. A Californian born after 8:06 pm on 19 March 2024 is the rare 19 March Aries.

21 March is now Aries everywhere except, sometimes, Sydney. In New York it has been Aries from midnight in 72 of 80 years and in all 10 years since 2021; it only began as Pisces in the eight early years when the equinox itself fell on the 21st. In the UK 21 March started as Pisces in 22 years, none after 2007. In Sydney it started as Pisces in 57 years and still does in about half of recent years.

The Chaldean faces assign the seven classical planets to the 36 decans in a fixed order, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, the Moon, starting with Mars at 0° Aries and cycling round. Thirty-six is one more than five sevens, so when the sequence reaches the last decan of Pisces it lands on Mars, and the first decan of Aries is Mars again. That is the only place in the zodiac where two neighbouring decans share a ruler, and it straddles the equinox.

For March birthdays it means everything from about 10 March to 29 or 30 March falls under a Mars face, whichever sign the Sun is in. Aries adds Mars as the sign's ruler as well: in Ptolemy's scheme of domiciles (I.17) Mars receives "the two signs, contiguous to the former, Scorpio and Aries". The Sun is exalted in Aries (I.19), and Saturn has its "depression" there, the condition later astrologers call the fall.

March Pisces is the back half of the sign. The first week or so is in Jupiter's own decan, a double dose of the sign's traditional ruler, and from about 10 March the Sun is in the Mars decan, the end of the zodiac and the end of winter. Ptolemy counts Pisces among the bicorporeal signs, the ones that close a season, and the tradition reads the last stretch of a season as the time when things are being finished and handed on.

Ordinary pictures: the stage manager who absorbs every actor's nerves and still calls the cues on time; the accountant who paints at weekends and never mentions it at work; the partner who forgives too quickly and then, years later, leaves all at once. These describe a style, not a fate. Pisces does not make anyone vague or a victim, and the Mars decan is usually read as the Pisces with the firmest edges. The February half of the sign and its rulers are on Pisces dates, 18 February to the equinox.

Everyone born from the equinox to about 30 March has the Sun in the first decan of the first sign, under Mars as both ruler and face. Ptolemy calls Aries equinoctial (I.11), one of the two signs that begin at an equinox, Libra being the other, and it is the sign the tradition starts counting from.

In daily life the late-March Aries looks like the colleague who answers the email before finishing reading it, or the runner who signs up for the marathon in January and the triathlon in February. It can be the sibling who starts the argument and has forgotten it by dinner. None of these is a forecast, and Aries is no licence for rudeness: the sign describes speed and directness, and a Cancer Moon or a Libra rising softens both. The April half of the sign is on Aries dates and the equinox.

Slightly fewer than average. Across the US births by date for 2000 to 2014, March averaged 11,125 births a date, −2.0% on the typical day and 10th of 12 months. The busiest March date was, oddly, the cusp: 21 March, with 11,540 (+1.7%, 130th of 366). The quietest was 31 March, at 339th.

As signs, the two are close to the middle of the table. The Shymea rarity study, which counts 62.2 million US births against the exact ingress instants, put Aries 8th at 8.14% and Pisces 9th at 8.04%. In England and Wales in 2025 Aries ranked 7th at 8.27%, and in Australia in 2023 it was 8th at 8.27%. The Sun stays longer in Aries (30.46 days) than in Pisces (29.96), as Earth slows on its way from January's perihelion.

Two slow planets have just crossed the same boundary the Sun crosses every March. Neptune entered Aries on 30 March 2025, slipped back on 22 October 2025 and returned for good on 26 January 2026; it stays until 22 May 2038. Saturn followed on 25 May 2025, retreated on 1 September 2025, and re-entered on 14 February 2026, leaving for Taurus on 13 April 2028. Every March Aries born in 2026 or 2027 therefore has the Sun, Saturn and Neptune together in Aries, and in March 2028 the same holds until Saturn leaves.

The Pisces side has its own generation. Neptune was in Pisces from 3 February 2012, so every March Pisces from 2012 to 2025 has it in their sign, and Saturn's entry on 7 March 2023 means a Pisces born from that day to 20 March 2023, or in March 2024 or 2025, has three bodies there. Earlier, Uranus was in Aries from 12 March 2011 to 15 May 2018, so the March Aries of 2011 to 2018 carry it. All dates are DE442 ingresses in UTC; the Aries 2027 horoscope follows Saturn and Neptune through the year.

Mercury ends its retrograde on 3 March, 7:32 am Eastern at 20°55′ Aquarius. The New Moon falls at 17°35′ Pisces on 8 March, 4:29 am. The equinox comes at 20 March, 4:25 pm, and less than two days later the Full Moon at 1°35′ Libra sits opposite the new Aries Sun, degree for degree. Venus reaches Pisces, the sign of its exaltation, on 26 March, 4:17 am. The Pisces 2027 horoscope has the rest of that sign's year.

February holds Aquarius and turns Pisces on 18 February in most recent years, with every leap day Pisces: February zodiac signs. April carries Aries until it hands over to Taurus on 19 or 20 April, one of the most evenly split cusps of the year: April zodiac signs. The whole year, boundary by boundary, is on zodiac signs by date.