Venus sign calculator: what is my Venus sign?

Venus is the planet astrology gives to attraction, pleasure and taste. Its sign in your chart describes how you show affection, what draws you to a person, what you want to be given in return and what you find beautiful in a room, an outfit or a piece of music. Many readers also look to Venus for the way you handle money and comfort, since both are about what you value.

Your Sun sign speaks to who you are becoming; Venus speaks to what you want to hold close. Two people with the same Sun sign can love in completely different ways, and the Venus sign is usually where that difference shows. For the full picture, with every planet, house and aspect, open your chart in the birth chart calculator.

Seen from Earth, Venus never strays far from the Sun. Our engine puts its greatest distance from the Sun at a little over 47 degrees, so your Venus sign is always your Sun sign or lies up to two signs to either side of it, five possible signs in all. Over the years 1900 to 2099, Venus shares the Sun's sign on about a quarter of all days, sits one sign away on well over half of them and two signs away on the rest.

That is why a Leo can have Venus in Leo, Cancer, Virgo, Gemini or Libra, but never in Aquarius.

About every nineteen months Venus slows down, stops and seems to move backward through the zodiac for around six weeks. From 1900 to 2099 our engine finds Venus retrograde on a little over seven days in every hundred, so roughly one person in fourteen is born with it. The calculator marks it next to the degree, and the retrograde planets calendar lists every period.

Astrologers read a retrograde Venus at birth as affection that turns inward before it goes out: someone who takes longer to trust, returns to old loves, or revisits what they value until it feels truly theirs. A retrograde loop can also keep Venus in one sign for up to about four months instead of four weeks, which is why the dates Venus spent in your sign can be much longer than usual. The retrograde entry in our glossary explains why the backward motion is only apparent.

Venus enters a new sign on about one day in thirty. If you leave out your birth time and your birthday was one of those days, the calculator shows both signs and the minute of the change in your birthplace's local time, with the daylight saving rules that applied that year. We would rather show the choice than pick noon for you. A birth certificate, or simply knowing whether you arrived in the morning or at night, usually settles it.

The result also gives the date Venus entered your sign and the date it left, so you can see how much of that stretch sat on either side of your birthday.

With a birth time and place the calculator also finds the house Venus occupied, using the house system of our birth chart: Placidus by default, with whole sign, Koch and equal houses one tap away. The sign says how you love; the house says where in life that love shows up most: at home, at work, among friends or in the way you present yourself. Very far north or south, where Placidus and Koch break down, equal houses from the Ascendant are used and the result says so.

In relationship astrology your Venus is read against the other person's chart, above all their Mars and Moon. Once you know both Venus signs, the compatibility calculator compares two whole charts aspect by aspect.

Venus is placed with the VSOP87 theory of the planets, corrected for light time, aberration and nutation, to give its apparent position against the tropical zodiac of Western astrology. Our checks compare the result with the Swiss Ephemeris for dates from 1900 to 2099, and the difference stays under one arcsecond. The minute of a sign change is found by narrowing the search down to the second.

Your local clock time is turned into Universal Time with the historical rules of your birthplace's time zone. The whole calculation runs in your browser. To show the first line of today's reading, your birth details are sent once to our server, which does not store them; the place search sends only the place name you type.

Your birth date and birthplace are enough on almost every date; add the birth time for the house, and for the rare day when Venus changed sign. The calculation runs in your browser and the tool is free.

Venus is the love planet, so the compatibility calculator shows how two charts meet, and compatibility and synastry explained explains the method. The Mars sign calculator and the big three calculator round out the picture.