Pisces dates18 February to 20 March, ending at the equinox

For a US birth, 18 February is the day the sign changes, so it is either, and the clock decides. In US Eastern time the Sun crossed from Aquarius into Pisces during 18 February 54 times in the 80 years from 1951 to 2030. In the remaining 26 years the whole of the 18th was Aquarius and the change came on the 19th. There was no year in which 18 February was Pisces from midnight to midnight, so a person born on that date who does not know the birth time cannot be sure of their Sun sign.

The balance has tipped in one direction. All 10 of the years 2021 to 2030 start Pisces on 18 February in Eastern time, and the same is true in Central and Pacific time. The 19th lasted longest as a leap-year start: since 2001 the Eastern years with a 19 February start were 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016, and the leap years since then begin on the 18th. Further west the 18th wins more often, because the same instant reads earlier on a Pacific clock: 62 of the 80 years began Pisces on 18 February in Los Angeles, against 54 in New York.

The Sun entered Pisces at 10:52 am Eastern on 18 February 2026 and at 4:33 pm Eastern on 18 February 2027. In 2028 it is 10:26 pm Eastern on 18 February, which is 3:26 am on 19 February in London. A baby born at 11 pm on 18 February 2028 in New York will be a Pisces; one born at 1 am on 19 February 2028 in London, three hours earlier in absolute time, will be an Aquarius. The sign follows the instant, and the date on the birth certificate follows the local clock.

Outside the US the picture differs. The UK still splits close to evenly, 37 years on the 18th and 43 on the 19th across 1951 to 2030, with 19 February starts as recent as 2024 and 2028. Sydney is eleven hours ahead of London in February, so Pisces there usually begins on 19 February (68 of 80 years), on 20 February in 1952, 1956, 1960, 1964, 1968 and 1972, and on 18 February only in 2009, 2013, 2017, 2021, 2025 and 2029.

Why the 18th has taken over: the calendar year of 365.25 days, which is what a plain four-year leap cycle averages, is slightly longer than the year of the seasons, so the Sun reaches each sign a little earlier on the calendar every century. The year 2000 kept its leap day, so the last reset was 1900. The tables most people grew up with, "Pisces, 19 February to 20 March", were a reasonable average for births in the 1950s and 1960s. For a US birth after 2020 the first day of Pisces is the 18th, and the zodiac sign calculator gives the minute for any date, time and place. The Aquarius page on the 18 February handover covers the same boundary from the other side, and the February zodiac signs page goes through the month day by day.

Find the birth year: born after the Pisces time and before the Aries time (the March equinox) in your zone means a Pisces Sun.

Pisces ends at the moment of the March equinox, when the Sun crosses the equator of the sky heading north and its longitude returns to 0°. That instant is the first point of Aries and the starting line of the tropical zodiac, so Pisces is the last stretch before the count begins again. In 2026 the equinox came on 20 March 2026 at 14:46 UTC, which was 10:46 am in New York and 1:46 am on 21 March in Sydney.

In US Eastern time Pisces ended on 20 March in 69 of the 80 years, on 21 March in 8 and on 19 March in 3. The 21 March endings all belong to the early part of the record (1951, 1955, 1959, 1963, 1967, 1971, 1975 and 1979), and the 19th has arrived in the 2020s. In Pacific time 19 March endings have been the rule in leap years since 2000: 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020, 2024 and 2028. The UK has not had a 19 March equinox in the data at all, and its last 21 March ones were 1991, 1995, 1999, 2003 and 2007. In Sydney, where the date marks the start of autumn, 21 March is still the usual ending (57 of 80 years).

For birthdays near the end: 19 March was wholly Pisces in 77 of 80 years in US Eastern time, 20 March was a changeover day in 69, and 21 March was wholly Aries in 72. A 20 March birth needs the time, which the zodiac sign calculator handles, and the Aries page, from the 20 March equinox, picks up where Pisces stops. The March zodiac signs page lists every date of the month.

Pisces is Jupiter's sign. In the scheme of houses in the Tetrabiblos (I.17), Jupiter receives the two signs next to Saturn's, which Ptolemy calls "windy and fecund": Sagittarius and Pisces. Each is a trine from one of the luminaries' houses, and Pisces is the trine to Cancer, the Moon's house. Neptune is the modern ruler, given to Pisces by later astrologers after Johann Galle found the planet in 1846. This page reads Jupiter first, because the traditional dignities in Pisces only make sense with him.

Those dignities are unusually kind. Venus has her exaltation here, which Ptolemy (I.19) explains by her moist nature and by Pisces being the sign "where the beginning of the moist spring is indicated"; the later tradition puts the exact degree at 27° Pisces, around 17 March. So both benefics are strong in the sign, Jupiter by house and Venus by exaltation. The loser is Mercury, which Ptolemy says "is depressed in Pisces". Mercury rules Virgo, the opposite sign, and is also exalted in Virgo, so Pisces is both Mercury's detriment and its fall. No other planet suffers both debilities in one sign, because no other planet has its house and its exaltation in the same place.

Ptolemy (I.11) counts Pisces among the four bicorporeal or double-bodied signs, with Gemini, Virgo and Sagittarius. They come at the end of each season and "share, as it were, at end and beginning, the natural properties of the two states of weather": Pisces is late winter that already holds the start of spring. Later astrologers call these signs mutable. In the triangles (I.18) Pisces belongs to the water trine with Cancer and Scorpio, governed by Mars, with Venus by day and the Moon by night as co-rulers.

The modern words for Pisces are intuition and empathy, and the tradition supports something like them for a plain reason: a mutable sign adapts to what is around it, and water signs were read as receptive. In everyday terms that is the nurse who remembers which patient hates the cold side of the ward, or the friend who can tell from the punctuation of a text that something is wrong. At work it can be the person everyone brings their problems to, which is valuable and also how a Pisces ends up doing three people's emotional admin by Thursday.

Mercury's double weakness shows up too. Pisces tends to understand by impression rather than by lists, which can mean an accurate sense of a room and a poor memory for where the receipts went. In a marriage, a Pisces partner may agree in the moment to avoid a scene and raise the real objection two days later, which is adaptability doing its job at the wrong time. A Pisces with Mercury in Aquarius, which is common for February birthdays, can be much more blunt than the stereotype allows.

The "Pisces curse" is an internet label rather than a teaching, and it gets used for several things: that Pisces attract people who use them, that they soak up everyone else's moods, or that as the last sign they carry the weight of all the others. None of those appears in the tradition. No classical text calls Pisces cursed. If anything the old rules point the other way, with both benefics dignified in the sign. Being the twelfth sign is an ordering from the equinox, not a rank, and it says nothing about the age of anyone's soul.

What the sign cannot do: it cannot measure how empathetic a person is, diagnose a low mood, or explain a run of bad relationships, all of which have ordinary human causes. The Sun is one placement among many. A Pisces Sun with a Capricorn Moon is often the most practical person in the family. Your moon sign usually says more about emotional habits than the Sun sign does.

Neptune first touched Pisces on 4 April 2011, retreated, and returned on 3 February 2012 for a thirteen-year stay that ended on 30 March 2025. It made one last visit from 22 October 2025 and left for good on 26 January 2026. Everyone born inside those windows has Neptune in Pisces, in its modern home sign, and the planet will not be back in Pisces until the 2170s, one Neptune orbit of about 165 years after its 1840s arrival.

For Pisces Suns the practical consequence is that every Pisces Sun season from 2012 to 2025 had Neptune in the sign, and the Pisces born in February and March 2026 are the first since 2011 without it. Saturn also left Pisces on 14 February 2026, three weeks after Neptune, so the 2026 Pisces season had neither. During the passage Neptune crossed every Pisces Sun degree, usually three times:

A few birth seasons carry several slow planets at once. Uranus was in Pisces from 30 December 2003, so the Pisces seasons of 2004 to 2010 had it. Jupiter came in on 29 December 2021 and stayed until 10 May 2022, putting the Sun, Jupiter and Neptune together for the 2022 Pisces, with Jupiter and Neptune meeting in the sign that April. The 2024 and 2025 Pisces have the Sun, Saturn and Neptune together. The stellium guide covers how a cluster like that is read.

No, Pisces sits a little under the middle. The Shymea rarity study assigned 62,187,026 US births from 2000 to 2014 to their Sun signs by exact ingress time and counted 4,998,350 Pisces, 8.04% of the total and ninth of the twelve. By days alone Pisces would hold 8.20%; the observed 2014 share was 8.05%, a ratio of 0.982, so births in late February and March run only slightly below what the calendar predicts. England and Wales had 8.21% Pisces in 2025 (eighth), Canada 7.91% in 2024 (tenth) and Australia 8.25% in 2023 (ninth).

Under the Chaldean faces the decans of Pisces go to Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, which closes the sequence that began with Mars at 0° Aries and so hands straight back to Mars at the start of the zodiac. The modern triplicity scheme gives the decans to Pisces, Cancer and Scorpio instead, and through them to Jupiter or Neptune, the Moon, and Mars or Pluto.

Mercury enters Pisces on 1 February and turns retrograde on 9 February at 5°59′ Pisces, backing into Aquarius before returning on 18 March, so the early-degree Pisces birthdays get Mercury more than once. The Sun arrives on 18 February 2027 at 21:33 UTC (1:33 pm Pacific). The New Moon in Pisces is on 8 March at 17°35′, Venus enters on 26 March, and the Full Moon in Pisces on 15 September falls at 22°53′, on the Sun of people born around 13 to 15 March. The Pisces 2027 horoscope runs through the year, and the Pisces horoscope covers this week.

The opposite sign is Virgo, where Mercury rules and is exalted and Venus falls: Pisces mirrored point for point. Virgo and Pisces is the classic pairing of the list-maker and the person who knows how everyone feels. The Virgo page has the other half of the axis. Cancer and Scorpio share the water trine. Aquarius and Aries are neighbours and make no classical aspect to Pisces, so Aquarius and Pisces share a birthday boundary but little else in the old scheme. All twelve signs are on the zodiac signs by date page.