Taurus dates20 April to 21 May, and lately from 19 April

As a summary it is fair, and as a rule it is out of date at one end. "20 April to 20 May" means the first day of Taurus is 20 April and the last is 20 May. Both claims can be tested against the Sun's actual entry into Taurus, at 30° of ecliptic longitude, for each of the 80 years from 1951 to 2030.

The start is where the range has slipped. In US Eastern time Taurus began on 20 April in 41 of those years and on 19 April in 39, close to an even split. The split hides a trend. In the 1950s it began on 20 April in 8 years out of 10; from 1980 onwards the 19th has been more common (31 years against 20); and from 2021 to 2030 only 2023 and 2027 start on the 20th. For an American born this decade, Taurus usually begins on 19 April. Further west it is starker: in Pacific time the 19th won 47 of the 80 years.

The reason is the leap-year rule. Each year's ingress lands about six hours after the last, a leap day pulls it back, and because the plain four-year cycle overshoots the solar year slightly, every ingress creeps earlier through the century. The year 2000 was a leap year, so nothing has reset the drift since 1900. Every sign is affected; Taurus just happens to sit where the creep has tipped the usual US date from one day to the one before.

The end of the range holds up better. In US Eastern time 20 May was a whole Taurus day in 41 of the 80 years and the day Gemini arrived in the other 39. It was never wholly Gemini. So "to 20 May" is right as a last day in about half of all years, and in the rest a 20 May birthday is Taurus until the hour of the change. The same drift is at work, though: Gemini began on 20 May in 8 of the 10 years 2021 to 2030, against 2 in the 1950s.

British readers can keep the textbook start a little longer. In London time Taurus began on 20 April in 61 of the 80 years and on the 19th in only 19, all of them since 1980; for 2021 to 2030 it is 5 each way. In Sydney the usual date is 20 April (66 years), with 21 April in 13 years up to 1991 and 19 April only once, in 2028.

What "Western zodiac" adds to the question

The query that brings many readers here asks for the Western zodiac range, and the qualifier matters. Western astrology uses the tropical zodiac, in which Taurus is the second 30° of the year counted from the March equinox, so its dates are tied to the seasons. Sidereal astrology, the system used in Indian practice, measures from the stars and currently runs about 24° behind, which moves its Taurus to roughly mid-May to mid-June. The Chinese zodiac assigns animals to whole lunar years and has no month signs at all, so a Taurus can be any of its twelve animals.

The stars themselves are different again. Using the official International Astronomical Union borders, the Sun entered the constellation Taurus at about 14:00 UTC on 14 May 2026, a week before the sign ended, and was among the stars of Aries for most of tropical Taurus. None of this changes a Western Taurus: the sign is a slice of the seasonal year, which is what Ptolemy and the tradition after him meant by it.

May. Taurus covers the last ten or eleven days of April and the first twenty of May, so 65% of the sign falls in May and 35% in April. Every birthday from 22 April to 19 May is Taurus in every year and every zone on this page. The Sun takes 30.97 days to cross the sign, among the longer stays of the year, because Earth is heading towards aphelion, its slowest point, in early July. Day-by-day lists for both months are on the April zodiac signs and May zodiac signs pages.

At the edges of Taurus, these six birthdays are the only ones that ever change sign. The table counts what each one was over 1951 to 2030, in four places:

Take 2026 as a worked case. The Sun entered Taurus at 9:39 pm Eastern on 19 April, which is 6:39 pm in California, so a baby born in Los Angeles at teatime on 19 April 2026 is an Aries and one born after supper is a Taurus. In London the same moment fell at 2:39 am on 20 April, so for a British birth all of 19 April 2026 was Aries. One instant, two calendar dates. That is why the zodiac sign calculator asks for the birthplace as well as the time, and why a cusp question cannot be settled from the date alone.

A Sun in the last degree of Aries or the first of Taurus is still one sign or the other; the tradition has no blended cusp sign. The neighbours' pages, Aries and the 19 April cusp and Gemini from 20 or 21 May, take the other side of each boundary.

Look up your birth year. Born after the Taurus time in your zone and before the Gemini time, your Sun is in Taurus. The Central column covers Chicago, Dallas and Mexico City time as it was then; Pacific covers California and the West Coast.

No. Taurus is about as average as a sign can be. In the Shymea rarity study, which places 62.2 million registered US births from 2000 to 2014 in their exact sign, 5,155,811 were Taurus: 8.29%, sixth of twelve, a hair under the 8.33% an even split would give. In a school year group of 180 you would expect about fifteen.

Taurus does a little better on the clock than in the maternity ward. Its 30.97-day Sun stay would give it 8.48% of births on astronomy alone (the 2014 figure), but the recorded share that year was 8.29%, a ratio of 0.978. Late April and May are slightly under-supplied with US births compared with late summer. Elsewhere Taurus ranks higher: fourth in England and Wales in 2025 (8.53%), fifth in Canada in 2024 and fifth in Australia in 2023 (8.60%).

For seven years almost every Taurus baby shared the sign with Uranus. The planet first crossed into Taurus on 15 May 2018, retreated into Aries that November, returned on 6 March 2019 and stayed until 7 July 2025. A last retrograde visit ran from 8 November 2025 to 26 April 2026. In birth terms: every Taurus born from 2019 to 2025, plus those born from 15 to 21 May 2018 and from 20 to 26 April 2026. Uranus needs about 84 years for a full circuit, so the previous Uranus-in-Taurus births were in the 1930s and early 1940s.

The tradition predates Uranus and says nothing about it. Some modern authors give it an exaltation in Scorpio and therefore a fall in Taurus, but that is a twentieth-century proposal without the seasonal reasoning behind the classical exaltations. More useful for an adult Taurus is the date Uranus crossed their own Sun, since that transit is the usual explanation astrologers give for a period of upheaval in a Taurus life. The table gives the years Uranus spent crossing each 5° band of the sign, loops included:

The next shared-sign cohort is already scheduled. Saturn enters Taurus on 13 April 2028 and stays until 1 June 2030, so the Taurus Suns of 2028, 2029 and 2030 will be born with it, as were those of 1969 to 1971 and 1999 to 2000.

The Chaldean faces give Taurus Mercury, the Moon and Saturn, continuing the planetary order that started at the beginning of Aries. The middle decan is the Moon's face inside the Moon's own sign of exaltation. The modern triplicity scheme reads the same three slices as Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn, and so as Venus, Mercury and Saturn. Ask which scheme a source uses before comparing two decan descriptions.

Taurus season 2027 begins on 20 April 2027 at 07:18 UTC, which is 3:18 am on 20 April in New York and 12:18 am in Los Angeles, one of only two years this decade (2023 and 2027) when the Eastern start falls on the 20th. It ends on 21 May at 06:18 UTC. Chiron enters Taurus a few days earlier, on 14 April, and turns retrograde on 8 August at 4°40′, so from mid-April it sits on the Sun of people born around 20 to 24 April.

The Taurus New Moon is on 6 May at 15°43′, matching birthdays around 6 May, and Venus comes home to Taurus on 14 May. The Full Moon in Taurus falls on 14 November UTC, which is the evening of 13 November in the US (10:26 pm EST). Month-by-month dates are in the Taurus 2027 horoscope, and this week's sky in the Taurus horoscope.

Scorpio is the opposite sign, and the pairing is fixed sign facing fixed sign: Venus's comfort across from Mars's intensity, and the Moon's exaltation across from her depression. Taurus and Scorpio is famous for staying power and for arguments neither side will concede; Scorpio dates has the other half. Virgo and Capricorn share the earth triangle a trine away, which is the classic easy match: see Taurus and Virgo and Taurus and Capricorn.

The odd case is Libra. Both signs belong to Venus, yet they sit 150° apart, and in the tradition signs that far apart are in aversion, unable to see each other by aspect. Taurus and Libra share tastes and disagree about pace. For a real answer about two people, synastry compares the whole charts. All twelve signs, with the same year-by-year data, are on the zodiac signs by date hub.