May zodiac signs: Taurus or Gemini

The signs below are for US Eastern time and hold for every year from 1951 to 2030. Two rows need your birth year and time, and the table says which. The decan is the 10° third of the sign the Sun is in; it is a refinement, not a different sign.

So every date up to 19 May is Taurus, every date from 22 May is Gemini, and only the two dates between them are shared.

In the UK the same split holds, with 20 May leaning further to Taurus (see below). In Sydney, ten hours ahead of UTC in May, the change slides later: 21 May is the usual day there (66 of the 80 years), and in 11 of the 80 years Gemini did not begin until 22 May.

It depends on the year, the time zone and the hour, and the answer has been moving. In US Eastern time, between 1951 and 2030, Taurus covered the whole of 20 May in 41 years and Gemini began partway through it in the other 39. Since 2000 the balance has tipped: Gemini began during 20 May in 22 of the years 2000 to 2030.

By decade, US Eastern time, the number of years Gemini began on 20 May:

The cause is the calendar, not the sky. The Gregorian calendar keeps a four-year leap cycle between its century corrections, and that cycle runs about 11 minutes a year longer than the tropical year, so every solar ingress drifts earlier through a century. The skipped leap day in 1900 pulled the dates back; 2000 was a leap year, so nothing has pulled them back since. A table printed in 1965 that said "Gemini, 21 May to 21 June" was right then. For a US birth in the 2020s, 20 May is the more usual first day of Gemini.

The time zone matters as much as the year. Here is 20 May across the 80 years 1951 to 2030:

In Los Angeles, Gemini began during 20 May in more years than not (48 of 80); in London, 20 May is usually Taurus all day (58 of 80). The Sun crossed 0° Gemini at the same instant for both.

Usually Gemini, sometimes Taurus in the morning. In US Eastern time 21 May was Gemini from midnight in 39 of the 80 years and began as Taurus, changing during the day, in the other 41. Since 2000 it has been Gemini all day in 22 of the years 2000 to 2030. In the UK the change happened during 21 May in 58 of 80 years, so for a British birth on 21 May the birth time matters more often than not.

If you were born on 20 or 21 May, find your year below and compare your birth time with the time in your zone. Born at or after that time, you are a Gemini; before it, a Taurus. The zodiac sign calculator does the comparison for any birth date, time and zone.

Times are rounded to the minute and include daylight saving. The four-year rhythm is visible: the change comes earliest in leap years (2024, 2028) and latest in the year before one; the earliest of the whole 1951 to 2030 run is 2028, at 20 May, 8:10 am US Eastern. 2026 shows why US and UK readers disagree: Gemini began at 8:37 pm on 20 May in New York and at 1:37 am on 21 May in London, the same moment.

Taurus is the second sign, and in Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos one of the four "solid" signs (I.11) that follow the equinox and solstice signs, the ones later astrologers call fixed. It falls in the middle of spring in the northern hemisphere, when the season has settled. Ptolemy gives it to Venus as one of her two houses, Taurus and Libra, signs he calls "extremely fertile" (I.17), and he places the Moon's exaltation there, in "the first sign of her own triangle, Taurus" (I.19). That pairing, Venus's sign and the Moon's best placement, is the textbook reason Taurus is read as steady and hard to hurry.

The May part of Taurus is its second half. Birthdays from 1 May until the Sun reaches 20° Taurus, on a date from 9 to 11 May (usually 10 May), fall in the second decan, whose face ruler in the Chaldean order is the Moon. From then until Gemini begins the Sun is in the third decan, ruled by Saturn. That gives the May Taurus a slightly different reputation from the April one: the April decan belongs to Mercury, and the May decans to the Moon and then Saturn, which is the drier, more patient end of the sign. The difference is a matter of emphasis, and plenty of astrologers ignore decans altogether.

What a May Taurus looks like in ordinary life: the friend who will not be rushed into a decision about a flat, and then lives in it for fifteen years; the colleague who is slow to take on a project and impossible to dislodge from it once they have; the person who knows exactly how they like their coffee and is mildly offended by any other way. None of that is a prediction. A Sun in Taurus says what the person values and how they hold on to it, and a Gemini Moon or an Aries rising will change how it shows.

For the full sign, with Taurus start times in April and the Uranus-in-Taurus years, see Taurus dates and traits.

Gemini is one of Ptolemy's four "bicorporeal" signs (I.11), Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces, which close each season and are now called mutable. Its ruler is Mercury, which in Ptolemy's scheme takes "the remaining signs, Gemini and Virgo, which are next to the houses of the luminaries" (I.17). It is the first air sign of the zodiac, and the handover changes element and quality at once, as every handover does: a fixed earth sign that keeps things gives way to a mutable air sign that moves them on.

Every May Gemini is a first-decan Gemini. The Sun is in the first 10° of the sign from 20 or 21 May until the Sun reaches 10° Gemini, on a date from 30 May to 1 June (usually 31 May), a decan whose Chaldean face ruler is Jupiter. A June Gemini, from about 31 May, is in the second decan, ruled by Mars.

In ordinary life the late-May Gemini is the person who has three tabs open on the subject you mentioned in passing, who is better at the first conversation than the fortieth, and who can be talked out of a plan by a good enough argument. It does not mean shallow, two-faced or unreliable, which are the lazy readings of a "twin" sign. It means a mind that likes to keep options open. Gemini dates and traits covers the June half of the sign and Uranus's arrival there.

Neither May sign is rare. In the Shymea rarity study, which assigns 62.2 million US births from 2000 to 2014 to the exact ingress instants, Gemini was the 4th most common sign and Taurus the 6th. In England and Wales in 2025 Gemini was the most common sign of all, at 8.83% of registered births, and it also led Australia's 2023 figures at 8.77%. Part of the reason is astronomical: as Earth heads towards its July aphelion the Sun slows, and it spends 31.33 days in Gemini against 29.44 in Capricorn.

The same study's daily counts give each May date its own figure. Across 2000 to 2014 an average May date saw 11,173 US births, −1.6% against the all-year average of 11,350, which puts May 6th of the 12 months. The busiest May date was 23 May (11,926, 60th of 366 dates) and the quietest 26 May (10,330, 354th). Memorial Day falls in the last week of May, and the likeliest explanation for the late-May dip is that scheduled deliveries avoid the holiday weekend.

The two cusp dates sit either side of the line: 20 May at −1.4% and 21 May at +1.1%. The always-Taurus dates averaged 11,175 births and the always-Gemini dates 11,137, close enough that the month's birthdays split between the signs almost exactly as the calendar does.

Two runs of years give May birthdays a generational signature, both from Uranus. Uranus entered Taurus on 15 May 2018, slipped back into Aries on 6 November 2018, and returned to Taurus on 6 March 2019. It left for Gemini on 7 July 2025, came back into Taurus on 8 November 2025, and left Taurus for good on 26 April 2026. So a Taurus born in May 2018 from 15 May 2018 onwards, or in any May from 2019 to 2025, has Uranus in their own sign.

From May 2026 the same applies to Gemini: Uranus is in Gemini until 3 August 2032, returns briefly from 12 December 2032, and leaves on 22 May 2033. Every late-May Gemini from 2026 to 2032 will have Uranus in their sign. All dates are DE442 ingresses in UTC.

In 2027 the change to Gemini comes in the early hours of 21 May in New York, at 2:18 am; at 11:18 pm on 20 May in Los Angeles; and at 7:18 am on 21 May in London. A child born at 11:30 pm on 20 May 2027 is a Gemini in Los Angeles and a Taurus in New York. The Taurus 2027 horoscope and Gemini 2027 horoscope take the year in dates.

April begins in Aries and changes to Taurus in the second half of the month: see April zodiac signs. June begins in Gemini and changes to Cancer at the June solstice: see June zodiac signs. All twelve months and signs are on the zodiac signs by date page, and the zodiac sign calculator settles a 20 or 21 May birthday once you add the birth time.