How Often Is Venus in the Same Sign as Your Sun?

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People often assume Venus usually shares the Sun's sign. In a measured sample it does not: sharing the sign is only the third most common of the five possible arrangements. This page sets out the counts, taken from the routines that drive the free chart. What a Venus sign is said to describe belongs on the Venus signs page; here the only subject is how often each arrangement turns up.

Main findings:

• Venus shared the Sun's sign on 23.7% of sampled dates, fewer than one in four.
• One sign away was the most common position: 29.3% one sign behind the Sun's sign and 29.2% one sign ahead, so 58.5% between them.
• Two signs away happened on 17.8% of dates, 8.9% on each side.
• No Sun sign stands far apart. With each Sun sign taken alone, the same-sign share stayed between 20.2% and 26.7%.
• On 6.7% of local dates the offset changed during the day, because the Sun or Venus crossed into a new sign between one midnight and the next.

All of these are shares of dates in one sample, never shares of people.

Calculator note: the planet table of the free birth chart shows the Sun's sign and Venus's sign separately; it does not count the signs between them. For an unknown birth time its sign-change warning covers the Moon only, not Venus or the Sun. Ask the Astrologist does not work out these frequencies.

Recap: the five possible positions

Venus keeps within roughly 47° of the Sun as seen from Earth. With 30° to a sign, that is enough to carry Venus two signs from the Sun's sign but never three. The degree measurements, and the short list of aspects the two can actually form, are on Sun, Mercury and Venus: which aspects are possible.

The position is written as a signed offset: the number of whole signs from the Sun's sign to Venus's, counted in zodiac order and wrapping from Pisces back to Aries.

A shared sign and a conjunction are two separate conditions. Sign membership uses fixed 30° slots; the free chart's conjunction uses an 8° orb, which can bridge two signs. Venus at 29° Taurus with the Sun at 2° Gemini is conjunct yet in a different sign, while Venus at 1° Gemini with the Sun at 25° Gemini shares the sign without a conjunction.

The sample

All figures come from a single offline run of the free chart's routines, code version 75f5b77, set to London (51.5074° N, 0.1278° W) and 12:00 local clock time for every date between 1 January 1920 and 31 December 2059, which makes 51,135 synthetic noon charts. Signs and the retrograde marker are taken from those routines as they stand. No houses, angles, Nodes or Chiron enter the count. London is simply the fixed clock and place convention of this series of base-rate pages. The noon moment is a sampling choice, not an assumed birth time, and future dates are computed positions rather than predictions.

Share of dates for each offset

Every sampled date fell into one of the five classes.

Why does a shared sign lose out to the neighbours? Venus spends much of its cycle more than 30° from the Sun, a full sign's width, and at that distance a shared sign is impossible. A shared sign needs Venus fairly close to the Sun, which happens for only part of the cycle. The rest of the time the neighbouring signs, and sometimes the ones beyond them, take the count.

Split by Sun sign

For each row, only dates with the Sun in the named sign were counted, so the row totals 100% give or take rounding. Row sizes vary slightly because the Sun takes a little longer to cross some signs than others.

Compared with Mercury, the rows are much flatter. In every row a neighbouring sign beats or roughly ties the shared sign, and the two-sign positions stay between 7.6% and 10.6%. The remaining ups and downs reflect the orbital and seasonal geometry of Venus and the Sun across this particular window. They are not traits of the signs and carry no meaning about anyone born with the Sun there.

Retrograde Venus within each class

Each share here is the proportion of dates in that offset class on which Venus carried the retrograde marker.

Venus was retrograde on 3,662 of the 51,135 dates (7.2%). Its backward phases centre on the passage between Earth and the Sun, when it is close to the Sun in the sky, which is why they gather in the shared-sign class. In this sample not one two-sign date had a retrograde Venus; that is a result for these 140 years, not a rule proven here. Venus retrograde as a natal feature is covered on Venus retrograde in the natal chart.

Unknown birth time

The noon chart freezes one instant. Across a whole local date the Sun advances about a degree and Venus up to about 1.3°, so a sign change by either can make the offset differ between the start and the end of the day.

For this check every London date was traced across the entire local day, starting at 00:00 and running up to the following midnight, with clock-change days kept at their true 23 or 25 hours. Wherever the Sun or Venus crossed a sign line, located to the minute, the day was cut, and each stretch was classified separately.

• 3,414 of the 51,135 dates (6.7%) contained more than one offset. For the remaining 93.3%, any birth time on that date gives the noon result.
• Each of the eight one-step changes, such as 0 to +1 or −1 to −2, turned up on between 429 and 434 dates.
• On 39 dates the offset moved away and came back again before the day ended, so the morning and evening agree even though the middle of the day differs. A check of only the first and last minute would treat these as certain.
• One date, 20 April 1929, passed through three offsets: +1, then 0, then −1.

Without a birth time, look at how close the Sun and Venus sit to the edge of a sign. If either is within a degree or so, the offset may be uncertain for that date. Comparing early morning with late evening is not a reliable check, because, as the 39 dates above show, the offset can change and return between them. The real question is whether the offset changes at any point across the full local calendar day, and the free chart does not automate that full-day check for Venus. With an unknown time, then, treat a near-boundary case as potentially uncertain instead of assuming that noon or the ends of the day decide it. The page on a birth chart without a birth time covers the noon default.

Worked example: Ruben

Ruben's chart, London, 5 January 1993 at 12:00, is the fictional example first used on how to find aspect patterns. It was chosen for this page before any of its figures were worked out.

• Offset +2. From Capricorn, Aquarius is one sign on and Pisces two, so Ruben is in the +2 class. That is one of the less common positions, 8.9% of all dates and 8.9% of the sampled Capricorn dates.
• How far apart. Venus is 46.48° ahead of the Sun, close to the outer edge of its range.
• Direct. No retrograde marker, matching the 0.0% for this class in the sample.
• Same answer all day. The Sun at 15° Capricorn is far from a sign line, and Venus, moving forward at 1°39' Pisces, stays in Pisces from midnight to midnight on 5 January 1993, so his offset is +2 for the whole date.

A less common position is just that. It does not make his Venus stronger, special or more significant, and nothing about his relationships follows from it.

Keeping the numbers in proportion

These shares describe how the sky was arranged on sampled dates. A Venus outside the Sun's sign is the usual case, not a split or a conflict, and a Venus two signs away is not a signature of anything. The figures carry no information about attraction, compatibility, relationships, health, money or events.

Checking your own chart

1. Open the free birth chart and note the signs listed for the Sun and Venus.
2. Count from the Sun's sign to Venus's in zodiac order: same sign 0, one before −1, two before −2, one after +1, two after +2.
3. Find your Sun sign's row in the table above.
4. If the birth time is unknown and the Sun or Venus is near a sign edge, treat the offset as potentially uncertain for that date; testing both ends of the day is not sufficient.
5. Mercury's version of this question, with only three possible positions, is on how often Mercury is in your Sun sign.

Related articles

• How Often Is Mercury in the Same Sign as Your Sun?
• Venus Signs: What Your Venus Sign Means in Love
• Sun, Mercury and Venus: Which Aspects Are Actually Possible?
• Sun Conjunct Venus
• Venus Retrograde in the Natal Chart
• How Long Does Each Planet Stay in a Sign?