Natal charts
What is my Venus sign if I'm a Scorpio (or any other Sun sign)?
Your Venus sign is always one of five, and your Sun sign tells you which five. Venus never strays more than about 47° from the Sun in our sky, so it sits in your Sun sign, in one of the two signs beside it, or in one of the two signs beyond those. For a Scorpio that means Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius or Capricorn, and in our calculation of 100,000 birth times from 1950 to 2008 Scorpio itself comes up most often, for 33.6% of Scorpios. Across all signs Venus shares the Sun's sign only about one time in four (24.4%), which is why a love horoscope written for your Sun sign usually describes a Venus you do not have. The table below gives the odds for every Sun sign. Your birth date alone fixes your exact Venus sign on all but 3.5% of days, the ones when Venus changes sign, and the free sexuality birth chart calculator will show it with no sign-up. Once you know it, you can see how your Venus meets a partner's Mars in the compatibility calculator for couples, which works from both birth dates.
Why Venus stays close to the Sun
Venus orbits inside Earth's orbit, so from here we always see it on the Sun's side of the sky, as an evening star after sunset or a morning star before dawn. Its greatest angular distance from the Sun, called greatest elongation, is about 47°. Each zodiac sign spans 30°, so that is a little over one and a half signs. The Sun and Venus therefore travel through the zodiac together, and the sign Venus occupies can never be more than two signs away from yours.
The odds for every Sun sign
We calculated the Sun and Venus for 100,000 random birth times between 1950 and 2008 using Swiss Ephemeris, the same astronomical library our calculators run on. Each row adds up to 100%.
| Sun sign | Two signs before | One sign before | Same sign | One sign after | Two signs after |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aries | Aquarius 10.7% | Pisces 25.5% | Aries 32.1% | Taurus 22.0% | Gemini 9.7% |
| Taurus | Pisces 7.0% | Aries 34.5% | Taurus 22.8% | Gemini 29.0% | Cancer 6.6% |
| Gemini | Aries 9.9% | Taurus 28.5% | Gemini 24.4% | Cancer 27.1% | Leo 10.1% |
| Cancer | Taurus 9.7% | Gemini 35.3% | Cancer 20.3% | Leo 25.9% | Virgo 8.9% |
| Leo | Gemini 8.1% | Cancer 26.2% | Leo 21.8% | Virgo 35.1% | Libra 8.8% |
| Virgo | Cancer 6.2% | Leo 32.2% | Virgo 26.7% | Libra 25.7% | Scorpio 9.1% |
| Libra | Leo 9.8% | Virgo 29.6% | Libra 20.6% | Scorpio 32.7% | Sagittarius 7.3% |
| Scorpio | Virgo 9.3% | Libra 23.1% | Scorpio 33.6% | Sagittarius 25.2% | Capricorn 8.8% |
| Sagittarius | Libra 7.8% | Scorpio 31.6% | Sagittarius 21.7% | Capricorn 28.9% | Aquarius 10.0% |
| Capricorn | Scorpio 9.2% | Sagittarius 23.6% | Capricorn 21.5% | Aquarius 36.7% | Pisces 8.9% |
| Aquarius | Sagittarius 8.0% | Capricorn 29.7% | Aquarius 26.6% | Pisces 25.7% | Aries 10.1% |
| Pisces | Capricorn 7.4% | Aquarius 33.7% | Pisces 20.5% | Aries 33.7% | Taurus 4.7% |
The two outer columns are the long shots: Venus reaches two signs away only near its greatest elongation, so each of those cases covers roughly one person in ten or fewer.
Can your Venus be in the same sign as your Sun?
Yes, and it happens to about a quarter of people. The chance depends on the sign, from 20.3% for Cancers to 33.6% for Scorpios. Aries is also high at 32.1%. For ten of the twelve Sun signs the single likeliest answer is a neighbouring sign: a Leo is more likely to have Venus in Virgo (35.1%) than in Leo (21.8%), and a Capricorn more likely to have Venus in Aquarius (36.7%) than in Capricorn.
Why the odds are lopsided
If Venus simply moved alongside the Sun, the numbers would be symmetrical. They are not, because every 19 months or so Venus appears to stop and move backwards through the zodiac for about six weeks, the phase astrologers call retrograde. It crosses the stretch of sky where that happens three times and so spends extra weeks there.
Between 1950 and 2008 Venus was retrograde for 289 days in Aries and 288 in Scorpio, but not for a single day in Libra or Pisces. That is why Pisces people have Venus in Aries or Aquarius a third of the time each and in Pisces only a fifth of the time, and why Scorpios get Venus in Scorpio more often than any other Sun sign keeps its own Venus. The retrograde phases repeat in nearly the same places every eight years, so these odds also shift between generations.
What your Venus adds to your Sun sign
In astrological tradition the Sun describes character and will, and Venus describes attraction: what catches your eye, what feels romantic, which setting and pace you enjoy. The two can pull in different directions. A Leo with Venus in Virgo, the most likely combination for Leos, is read as a person who likes to shine but is drawn to care, order and people who show love through small practical acts. A Taurus with Venus in Aries, the likeliest option for Taurus, gets a slow, steady temperament paired with a taste for boldness and quick starts.
The element of Venus sets the broad tone. A fire Venus (Aries, Leo, Sagittarius) is drawn to brightness and excitement, an earth Venus (Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn) to reliability and physical ease, an air Venus (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius) to conversation, and a water Venus (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces) to feeling and emotional safety. Our calculator pairs it with the element of Mars, which describes how you act on attraction, and calls the combination your element of desire. For the full picture of Venus, Mars, the Moon and Black Moon Lilith (the farthest point of the Moon's orbit, which astrologers link with hidden desire) together, see what your birth chart says about your sexuality.
Why Sun-sign love horoscopes miss your Venus
A love horoscope for Scorpios assumes the Scorpio way of loving. By our numbers, two in three Scorpios have Venus somewhere else, and for the average sign it is three people in four. The Venus of a Pisces is more likely to be in Aquarius or Aries than in Pisces. Reading your own Venus instead takes less than a minute once you know your birth date.
What this cannot tell you
The Venus sign is an astronomical fact, known to a fraction of a degree from your birth date. What it means is astrological tradition, and tradition has not held up in blind tests: in Shawn Carlson's double-blind study published in Nature in 1985, astrologers matched charts to personality profiles at chance level, and a review of more than forty studies by Geoffrey Dean and Ivan Kelly in 2003 reached the same result.
Use your Venus sign to put your tastes into words and check them against experience. It does not predict who you will be with, and it says nothing about gender or orientation.