Zodiac Sign and Retrograde Statistics, 1930 to 2025

Which zodiac sign is most common?

It depends on what you count, and the three counts give different answers. The table below shows all three for every sign.

Calendar days. The Sun does not spend the same time in every sign. Earth is closest to the Sun in early January and moves fastest then, so the winter signs go by quickest: Capricorn lasts 29.4 days and Cancer 31.4. Over 35,064 dates, that gap makes Cancer the most common sign and Capricorn the rarest, 3,020 days against 2,826.

Births. People are not born evenly through the year. In 62,187,024 US births from 2000 to 2014 (Social Security Administration counts), Leo has the largest share, 8.97%, and Capricorn the smallest, 7.59%. The CDC count for 1994 to 2003, 39,722,137 births, puts the same two signs first and last.

Births per day. A sign with more days collects more births even if no single day is busier. Divide each sign's births by its days and Virgo leads, with 11,990 babies a day, while Capricorn stays last at 10,730.

What are the three rarest zodiac signs?

By US births: Capricorn, Aquarius and Sagittarius. By calendar days: Capricorn, Sagittarius and Aquarius. Capricorn is last either way: its season is the shortest of the year, and its days also have the fewest births per day of any sign.

Below Capricorn the order is less firm. In the SSA count, Sagittarius and Pisces are only 406 births apart out of 62,187,024, and the CDC count for 1994 to 2003 ranks the bottom three Capricorn, Sagittarius and Aquarius. The second and third places swap depending on the years you take.

Why websites name different signs

Popular articles disagree. Reader's Digest and HowStuffWorks name Leo or Virgo as the most common sign, and Aquarius or Capricorn as the rarest, each stated as fact. The sites disagree because they use different methods.

Months and signs do not line up. Monthly birth counts are the easiest data to find, but every sign straddles two months. Reader's Digest, for example, took a single year of CDC monthly counts and averaged the two months under each sign, which called Aquarius the rarest. Split by day, as in both of our birth files, Capricorn comes out last.

One year is a small sample next to fifteen. Birth seasons shift a little from year to year, so signs that sit a tenth of a percent apart can trade places. Our two birth files show it: SSA 2000 to 2014 puts Virgo above Cancer, and CDC 1994 to 2003 has them the other way round.

Totals and rates answer different questions. Virgo tops the per-day count, and Leo tops the total because its season is longer. Both statements are true.

Another Reader's Digest article ranks Virgo first. It summarizes a Washington Post analysis that combined surveys, census data and voter files. We could not check that data ourselves, so it stays out of our tables.

How long the Sun stays in each sign

The year is about 365.24 days, so twelve equal signs would last 30.4 days each. In practice the Sun crosses Capricorn in 29.4 days and Cancer in 31.4. The reason is Earth's orbit: it is slightly oval, Earth moves fastest in early January and slowest in early July, and the Sun's apparent speed against the zodiac follows.

These lengths barely change across the century: for any one sign, the shortest and longest stay over the 96 years differ by 0.03 days at most. What does move is the clock time of each sign change, which is why 16 calendar days, such as July 22 or November 22, belong to one sign in some years and the next in others.

From the moment the Sun enters a sign to the moment it enters the next, every year 1930 to 2025. Days that can fall in either of two signs: Jan 20, Feb 18, Feb 19, Mar 20, Mar 21, Apr 20, May 21, Jun 21, Jul 22, Jul 23, Aug 23, Sep 23, Oct 23, Nov 22, Dec 21, Dec 22. Sign dates year by year.

How often each planet is retrograde

A planet is retrograde when, seen from Earth, it seems to drift backward against the stars for a while. The effect comes from two moving viewpoints: Earth overtakes the outer planets and is overtaken by Mercury and Venus. The table shows how much of the time each one spends that way.

Mercury turns retrograde most often, 3.16 times a year on average, for about 22.2 days each time. The outer planets turn only once a year, but each run is long, so Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are retrograde more than a third of the time. Venus is retrograde on just 7.2% of dates, and not at all in 31 of the 96 years.

A date counts as retrograde when the planet's longitude 12 hours after noon UTC is lower than 12 hours before. Shares: all 35,064 dates. Days a year: average, lowest and highest over 1930 to 2025. Periods: retrograde spells that begin in a year. Other published runs over different spans, such as 1900 to 2100, land within about one percentage point of these shares; the span is the reason for the small differences.

How often is Mercury retrograde?

Three or four times a year. In our 96 years Mercury started three retrograde periods in 81 years and four in 15. That adds up to 70 days a year on average, or 19.2% of all dates: about one day in five.

The yearly total ranges from 66 days (1932) to 84 (1944). It varies because a Mercury cycle, retrograde to retrograde, takes about 116 days, which does not divide evenly into a calendar year.

Retrogrades by year, and how 2026 compares

Mercury is retrograde on 68 days of 2026, just under the 70-day average; 56 of the 96 years since 1930 had fewer. 2027 is close behind at 67.

The bigger difference is between Venus and Mars. 2026 has a Venus retrograde (42 days) and no Mars retrograde at all. 2027 swaps them: no Venus retrograde, and Mars retrograde for 81 days, as many as the highest year in our 1930 to 2025 run.

Pluto is retrograde 162 days in 2026, tying the longest years in our 1930 to 2025 run (7 of them reached 162). Its yearly total has stayed between 154 and 162 days the whole time, so 2026 sits at the top of a narrow range.

Days retrograde at noon UTC in each calendar year. A period that crosses New Year counts in both years. For exact turning dates see Mercury retrograde 2026 and Venus retrograde 2026.

How many planets are retrograde at once

Most days have one, two or three. Two is the most common count (24.1% of dates). On 10.8% of dates every planet from Mercury to Pluto moves forward, so being born with no retrograde planet is less common than being born with four.

Seven at once happened on 12 dates in the whole span: January 6 to 9, 1944; April 30 to May 5, 1984; July 13 to 14, 1986. All eight never lined up.

Method and limits

Every figure on this page comes from our own run of the same code our calculators use. Positions are from Astronomy Engine 2.1.19, an open-source ephemeris library, in the tropical zodiac: geocentric ecliptic longitude of date, signs as 30° sections counted from the March equinox point.

Each of the 35,064 calendar dates from January 1, 1930 to December 31, 2025 is checked once, at noon UTC. On a day when the Sun changes signs, the noon position decides, so a person born at another hour that day may have the neighboring sign. That matters only on the 16 calendar days that can fall in either sign, which account for about 4.4% of births.

The date shares describe the sky. They would match the share of people only if births were spread evenly, which they are not. For people, use the births columns, which come from US counts only and say nothing about other countries.

To check our numbers, a second script, written separately from ours by a different helper with only the definitions above, recomputed five of them: the Cancer and Capricorn date counts, Mercury's retrograde share, its 2026 total, the share of dates with no retrograde planet, and the most and least common sign by SSA births. All five matched exactly.

Birth counts: FiveThirtyEight, U.S. births data, which republishes daily counts from the Social Security Administration and from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. Current US totals by year are on the CDC National Vital Statistics System page.

Download the data

Four CSV files, free to reuse with a link back. Each starts with a comment line naming the method and data version.

• Sun signs by calendar days 12 rows: dates, share, days the Sun stays in each sign
• US births by Sun sign SSA 2000 to 2014 and CDC 1994 to 2003, 24 rows
• Retrogrades by planet 8 rows: share of dates, days a year, periods, 2026
• Retrogrades by year 98 rows, one per year, days and periods for each planet

Data: CC BY 4.0 — free to use with a link to this page.

Data version 1.0, computed October 18, 2026. If we fix an error or extend the years, the version number goes up and the change is listed here.

How to cite this

Plain text:

The Zodiac Atlas Editorial Team (2026). Zodiac sign and retrograde statistics, 1930 to 2025 (data version 1.0, October 18, 2026). The Zodiac Atlas. https://thezodiacatlas.com/research/zodiac-sign-statistics/

HTML link:

<a href="https://thezodiacatlas.com/research/zodiac-sign-statistics/">Zodiac sign and retrograde statistics, 1930 to 2025</a> (The Zodiac Atlas, data version 1.0)

Questions about zodiac sign statistics

Related

All twelve signs with dates and traits: zodiac signs. Born near a sign change: zodiac sign dates by year; by birth month (zodiac signs by month): January zodiac signs · February zodiac signs · March zodiac signs · April zodiac signs · May zodiac signs · June zodiac signs · July zodiac signs · August zodiac signs · September zodiac signs · October zodiac signs · November zodiac signs · December zodiac signs. Current retrogrades: retrograde planets now · Mercury retrograde · Venus retrograde. Your whole chart: birth chart calculator. From the same run of dates: how often three or more planets share a sign. Today's sky: current planets.

Written by The Zodiac Atlas editorial team with the help of AI and edited by a person. Every number on this page is computed by our own code, not copied from other sites. Astrology is a symbolic tradition, not a science; the astronomy behind these counts is ordinary orbital geometry.