What zodiac season are we in?
23 July to 22 August · peak summer
The strategy this stretch runs on: be seen on purpose, because it is the hottest, brightest part of the year and there is nowhere to hide.
Virgo season starts 23 August.
The short answer is at the top of this page and I update it when the season turns. The longer answer is that a zodiac season is not a mood or a horoscope. It is a real, datable stretch of the solar year, roughly thirty days long, and we are all inside the same one at the same time regardless of when you were born.
Below you will find every zodiac season with its dates, what comes after each one, and what each stretch of the year is actually asking of people living through it.
What a zodiac season actually is
A zodiac season is the period the sun spends passing through one twelfth of the year. Aries season starts at the spring equinox, Cancer season at the summer solstice, Libra season at the autumn equinox, Capricorn season at the winter solstice. The other eight fill the gaps between them.
That is it. There is nothing mystical in the definition. The zodiac is a symbolic system humans built by watching what the earth does as the sun moves through the year, and then developing language for how each phase of that cycle shapes what living through it is like. The dates are astronomy. The meanings are the system built on top of the observation.
Which is why the season we are in is the same for everybody. You do not get your own zodiac season. Your birth chart tells you which stretch of the year your particular wiring was built out of. The current season tells you what stretch everyone is standing in together right now.
If you want the exact minute the sun changes sign in your time zone, timeanddate.com publishes the equinox and solstice times for every year.
The solar year, all twelve zodiac seasons
One turn of the wheel is one year. The four corners are the equinoxes and solstices.
The full zodiac season calendar
Twelve seasons, in order, with the strategy each stretch of the year runs on.
| Season | Dates | Phase | What it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aries | 21 March to 19 April | Early spring | Begin before you are ready |
| Taurus | 20 April to 20 May | Mid spring | Build something that holds |
| Gemini | 21 May to 20 June | Late spring | Stay liquid |
| Cancer | 21 June to 22 July | Early summer | Build the shelter during the surplus |
| Leo | 23 July to 22 August | Peak summer | Be seen on purpose |
| Virgo | 23 August to 22 September | Late summer | Decide what to save |
| Libra | 23 September to 22 October | Early autumn | Run the trade-offs |
| Scorpio | 23 October to 21 November | Mid autumn | Let what is ending end |
| Sagittarius | 22 November to 21 December | Late autumn | Keep faith without proof |
| Capricorn | 22 December to 19 January | Early winter | Endure with no relief in sight |
| Aquarius | 20 January to 18 February | Deep winter | Redesign the arrangement |
| Pisces | 19 February to 20 March | Late winter | Dissolve so something can re-form |
Dates move by a day in either direction depending on the year, because the solar year is not exactly 365 days. If your birthday sits on a boundary, the only way to know for certain which side you fall on is to check the exact moment the sun changed signs in your birth year.
What comes after each zodiac season
What comes after Leo season is the single most searched version of this question, and people ask it about every sign, so here is every answer in one place. Each zodiac season hands straight over to the next with no gap in between, which is why what comes after Leo season is simply Virgo season, starting the day Leo season ends.
After Aries season comes Taurus season, starting 23 March.
After Taurus season comes Gemini season, starting 21 May.
After Gemini season comes Cancer season, starting 21 June.
After Cancer season comes Leo season, starting 23 July.
After Leo season comes Virgo season, starting 23 August.
After Virgo season comes Libra season, starting 23 September.
After Libra season comes Scorpio season, starting 23 October.
After Scorpio season comes Sagittarius season, starting 22 November.
After Sagittarius season comes Capricorn season, starting 22 December.
After Capricorn season comes Aquarius season, starting 20 January.
After Aquarius season comes Pisces season, starting 19 February.
After Pisces season comes Aries season, starting 21 March.
Why zodiac season dates shift by a day
Almost every calendar you find will give you slightly different dates, and it makes people think somebody is wrong. Nobody is. The solar year is about 365.24 days long, not 365, and that spare quarter day has to go somewhere.
It accumulates across four years and gets absorbed by a leap day, which means the exact moment the sun crosses from one sign into the next drifts forward and back by up to roughly a day depending on the year. So a zodiac season that started on 22 August in one year can start on 23 August in the next.
Most published date ranges just pick the most common day and print that. It is right about three years in four, which is fine unless your birthday lands on the boundary.
Then there is the time zone problem. The sun changes sign at one single instant worldwide, but that instant lands at a different local time everywhere. A season change at 11pm Eastern is already the next day in London. So two perfectly accurate calendars can print different dates and both be telling the truth.
Which zodiac season is my birthday in
Find your birthday in the calendar above and read across. That gives you your sun sign and the stretch of the year your identity is built out of, which is the single most useful thing a zodiac season tells you about yourself.
If your birthday falls on the first or last day of a range, do not guess and do not average it. Being told you are on the cusp is not a real answer, because there is no cusp. The sun is in one sign or the other at the moment you were born, with no overlap, and the only way to know which is to check your actual birth year rather than a generic calendar.
Any free chart calculator will do it if you enter your birth date, birth time and birth city. The birth time matters here specifically because on a boundary day the sign can change partway through the day.
And worth saying plainly: your sun sign is one of three placements that do the most work. Your moon and your rising come from a different part of the sky and often a completely different season, which is usually the reason a sun sign description only ever half fits.
What being in a season means for you
Here is the part people get backwards. Being in Leo season does not make you a Leo, and it does not mean the month belongs to Leos. It means the conditions the zodiac describes as Leo are the conditions everybody is currently living in.
So a Capricorn in the middle of Leo season is not having a Leo month. They are a person built for early winter, standing in peak summer, using early winter strategies in a stretch of the year that rewards something else entirely. That gap is usually what the friction is.
The useful question is never what does this season mean about me. It is what is this stretch of the year good for, and does my usual approach match it or fight it.
How to actually use the season you are in
Read the strategy line for the current season in the calendar above, and then ask one question: is what I am currently doing the thing this phase is good at?
In practice that is less mystical than it sounds. Trying to launch something in late autumn is harder than launching it in early spring, and not because the sky is against you. It is harder because the light is going, energy is lower, and everyone you need is winding down. Trying to do a big clear-out in June is harder than doing it in September, because in June there is still more coming in than you can process.
Working with the season is mostly a matter of not fighting the obvious. If you want the version of this that is about your chart specifically rather than the season everyone shares, that is a different question and there is a link for it at the bottom.
The zodiac season reference cards
Four cards covering the whole year. Save or pin whichever is useful.
Common questions about zodiac seasons
How long is a zodiac season?
About thirty to thirty one days. Twelve of them make a solar year. The exact length varies slightly because the earth’s orbit is not a perfect circle, so the sun spends a few more days in some signs than others.
Is the current zodiac season the same as my star sign?
Only for about a month a year, around your birthday. The rest of the time you are living in somebody else’s season. That is normal and it is most of the point.
Do zodiac seasons change at the same time everywhere?
The moment the sun changes sign is a single instant worldwide, but it lands at a different clock time depending on your time zone. So a season can start on the 22nd where you are and the 23rd somewhere else.
Why do the dates shift by a day some years?
Because the solar year is roughly 365.24 days, not 365. That quarter day accumulates and gets corrected by leap years, which nudges the sign change forward and back by up to about a day.
What zodiac season is it in the southern hemisphere?
The same one. The sign the sun is in does not change based on where you stand. The seasonal experience is inverted, which is a genuinely interesting problem for a seasonal framework, and it is the question I get asked most often that does not have a tidy answer.
Is a zodiac season the same as a horoscope?
No. A horoscope is a prediction about you. A zodiac season is a description of a stretch of the year that everyone is in. Nothing here predicts anything and none of it decides what you do.
Which zodiac seasons line up with the solstices and equinoxes?
Four of them. Aries season opens at the spring equinox, Cancer season at the summer solstice, Libra season at the autumn equinox, and Capricorn season at the winter solstice. Those four are the structural corners of the year and the other eight sit between them.
If you want the version that is about your chart
Everything above is the season we are all in. Your chart is the separate question: which stretch of the year is your particular wiring built out of, and what strategy does that phase run on.
The Seasonal Blueprint Mini answers that for your sun, moon and rising for $29. If you would rather read a full sample before spending anything, the Resource Vault is free and has complete readings in it.