What is the rarest zodiac sign? 710 million births in 55 countries

Key findings

• The rarest zodiac signs are Sagittarius and Capricorn. Across all 710 million births they take 7.75% and 7.71% of births, so close that they tie. The most common are Cancer and Leo with 8.89% and 8.82%: for every 100 babies born under Capricorn, 115 are born under Cancer.
• Aquarius is not the rarest sign. It is often named as such online; in this data it is the 4th rarest of the twelve, with 8.07%, and mostly because it is a short sign: per day it gets an average number of births. It is the rarest (or tied for rarest) in none of the 51 countries; in the United States it comes 2nd from the bottom.
• About half of the gap is astronomy. The signs are not equally long: Earth moves fastest in January, near the Sun, so the Sun crosses Capricorn in 29.4 days and Cancer in 31.5. With births spread evenly over the calendar the shares would already range from 8.06% to 8.61%, which is 47% of the real gap between the commonest and the rarest sign. The rest is the season of births: per day of the sign, Sagittarius and Capricorn get 4% fewer births than average and Cancer and Virgo 3% more.
• The pattern holds in most countries, but not all. Sagittarius or Capricorn is the rarest sign (or tied) in 45 of the 51 countries, and Cancer, Leo or Virgo the commonest (or tied) in 48. The exceptions follow the local calendar of births. In Brazil and Sweden (over 1960–2024; in the 2010s Gemini and Cancer led) births peak between March and May, so Aries or Taurus is the commonest sign. In Serbia (Aries and Pisces), Armenia (Aries and Pisces), Albania (Aries and Pisces), Cyprus (Aries and Taurus), Montenegro (Aries) and Malta (Aries and Taurus) a late-winter or spring sign is the rarest. In South Korea the commonest sign is Aquarius: births per day are highest in Aquarius and Pisces (late January to March) and lowest in Sagittarius. Part of that may be the record rather than the births: South Korea is one of the countries marked † for a year-end step (see the method).
• The answer changed since the 1960s. In the 14 European countries with every year from 1960–2019, the commonest signs moved from Aries, Taurus, Gemini and Cancer in the 1960s to Cancer, Leo and Virgo in the 2010s; Aries lost the most (−0.73 points) and Leo gained the most (+0.53).
• Holidays make Capricorn rarer. In the countries with daily counts, 18–38% fewer babies are born on Christmas Day than the season and the weekday predict (in Japan the dip is at New Year). The dips of the five days around Christmas and New Year take up to 0.13–0.27 points from Capricorn’s share (Japan 0.08); part of it is births moved to the days before, into Sagittarius.

How rare is your sign? Pick a country and decade

Each row is the share of births with the Sun in that sign. “If even” is the share the sign would get if births were spread evenly over the same calendar days, that is, its length. Rank 1 is the rarest of the twelve; signs that tie for the rarest or commonest place (within the measurement margin, or swapping places from year to year) are marked together.

All 51 countries, 1960–2024: 710,266,200 births · measurement margin ±0.09 points

Dates are the usual ones; the Sun enters each sign up to a day earlier or later depending on the year and the time zone, and every birth here is assigned by the real moment of ingress in its country’s civil time. Sidereal signs start about 24 days later (Lahiri ayanamsa).

The year of births, day by day

Births on each day of the calendar against the average day of the same year, averaged over all the years of the countries that publish births by day. Pick two lines to compare: the northern average (metropolitan France, England and Wales, the USA and Japan, equal weight) or any of the countries on its own. Brazil’s seasons are reversed. Each band is a sign.

Why winter signs are rare: sign length and season

Two things decide how common a sign is. The first is astronomy: Earth’s orbit is an ellipse, Earth is nearest the Sun in early January and moves fastest then, so the Sun takes less time to cross the winter signs. Capricorn lasts 29.44 days on average over 1960–2024 and Cancer 31.45, two days more. The second is the season of births: when people conceive, and when hospitals schedule caesareans and inductions.

Length: mean time from the Sun’s entry into the sign to its entry into the next, 1960–2024. “Share if even” weights each country-year by its births, so it is the length of the sign in exactly the years and countries counted. “Births per day vs average” divides one by the other: it is the season of births with the length taken out.

Holidays: the calendar inside the season

In the countries that publish births by day the holiday dips are measurable. The table compares each holiday with the same season and weekday on ordinary days. Scheduled caesareans and inductions are moved away from holidays; the deeper dips of the later US series are consistent with that, though the two US series also come from different sources.

Births on the day against a smooth seasonal curve with the series’ own weekday effect. “Without the dips” puts the five days back at that curve but keeps the births that were moved to neighbouring Capricorn days, so they count twice: it is an upper bound of what the holidays cost Capricorn, not an exact figure. Japan’s dip is at New Year, not at Christmas.

Every country at a glance

Births per day of each sign against the country’s average day, in %: gold above average, blue below, the deeper the further (full colour at ±8%). Per day rather than share, so the lengths of the signs do not hide the season. A ring marks the rarest and the commonest sign by share of births. Click a sign to sort the countries by it, click a country to open it in the explorer above.

Tropical zodiac, each country over all its years in the data. † year-end step: births per day jump from December to January far more than the season explains (see the method). Hover a cell for the exact value and the share of births; the explorer above has every decade.

By region and hemisphere

The southern hemisphere here is Australia, Brazil, Chile and New Zealand, and Brazil has 86% of its births, so the hemisphere row is mostly Brazil. The rarest signs are the same as in the north, for partly different reasons: the short winter signs everywhere, the Christmas dip in Capricorn, and in Brazil a low season of births from October to December (per day, Scorpio and Sagittarius are lowest). Brazil’s commonest sign stands apart (Taurus); in Australia, Chile and New Zealand several signs tie for the commonest place.

How the answer changed since 1960

The same 14 countries in every decade (Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Spain, Finland, France (metropolitan), Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway and Sweden), so the change is not a change in which countries are counted. Births per day of each sign against the average day. By default the two signs that lost the most and the two that gained the most are drawn in colour; switch any sign on or off (gold: gained from the 1960s to 2020–2024, blue: lost; the figure is the change per 100).

Sidereal zodiac (Lahiri)

In the sidereal zodiac used in Vedic astrology every sign begins about 24 days later, so each sign covers a different stretch of the calendar. The rarest sidereal signs in all 51 countries are Scorpio and Sagittarius (7.73% and 7.69%) and the commonest Gemini and Cancer (8.85% and 8.86%). Sidereal Capricorn, which runs from mid-January to mid-February, gets an average number of births per day; by share it is the 4th rarest (8.06%).

Lahiri ayanamsa of each date. Other ayanamsas move every sign boundary by up to about a day and a half (Raman); the CSV has Lahiri only.

Method

• Sign of each birth. The moment the Sun enters each sign is computed with Swiss Ephemeris 2.10.03 for every year, tropical and sidereal, and converted to the civil time of the country (one IANA zone per country, the most populous one; for the USA the Central zone, nearest the population-weighted mean; the tz database handles summer time). On the day of an ingress, that day’s births are split by the share of the day before and after the ingress.
• Countries with daily counts (metropolitan France 1968–2024, the USA 1969–1988, the USA 1994–2014, Brazil 1997–2024 and Japan 2015–2024): the count is exact up to that split. Together they are 290 million births, 41% of the total. England and Wales 1995–2024 is used to learn and test the method only: the UK row comes from monthly data for the whole UK.
• Countries with monthly counts: each month’s births are spread over its days along a smooth curve through the monthly totals (a monotone cubic through the cumulative count, which keeps every month’s total exact and runs on across year ends), then adjusted by a calendar-day and weekday pattern learned from the daily countries and rescaled to the month’s total. The sign is then assigned as above. The pattern carries Christmas and New Year; it is validated only on the five daily countries, and in a monthly country the order of Sagittarius and Capricorn can depend on it, which is why they are usually listed as tied there.
• Measurement margin. Each daily country was reduced to monthly totals, run through the same method with a pattern learned from the other countries only, and compared with its exact daily answer. Over a country’s whole period the largest error of any sign was 0.11 points (tropical; sidereal 0.15), for a single decade 0.12, for a single year 0.43 (bounds rounded up). To this is added, where Eurostat and the Human Fertility Database disagree on the same years, the difference between the two (up to 0.16 points: Lithuania, Italy and Ireland).
• Ties. A sign is listed as tied for the rarest or the commonest place when it is within that margin of the extreme, in the data or in at least 25% of resamples of the years within each country. Complete birth counts have no sampling error, but an order that flips from year to year is not a property of the country.
• Other checks. Moving the clock of every daily series by three hours changes no share by more than 0.012 points. Splitting ingress days by Brazil’s recorded hours of birth (2006–2024) instead of evenly changes a single year by at most 0.06 points and the whole period by 0.002.
• Rejected data. A monthly series counted by the month a birth was registered instead of born shifts births by weeks. Series documented that way are not used (Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Taiwan; Russia after 2020, Slovakia from 2016 and HFD’s preliminary latest years). The others are tested: a registry office works Monday to Friday, so registration counts grow with the number of working days in the month almost one for one, while births barely do. Series that follow working days more than 0.40 to 1 are not used: Moldova 2005–2024, San Marino 2005–2017 and Kosovo 2005–2021. Also dropped: years with more than 2% of births of unknown month (Albania 1997 and 1998, Belarus 2005, Croatia 1995, Liechtenstein 1981 and Türkiye 2004), and years in which one month breaks from the neighbouring years by more than 20% beyond chance (Albania 2019, Armenia 2016 and 2020, Bosnia and Herzegovina 2005, Iceland 1986, Montenegro 2009, Malta 2012 and Poland 1995). In all, 66 country-years, 5,149,301 births.
• Year-end step. Where births per day jump from December to January by much more than the season explains, part of December’s births are either timed into January or recorded there; monthly counts cannot tell which, so these years are kept and the countries marked †: Türkiye (2010s, ×1.33), South Korea (every decade, ×1.29, ×1.41 and ×1.49), Greece (1970s, ×1.31), Belarus (2000s, ×1.31) and Georgia (2000s, ×1.25). No decade of any daily series steps by more than 5%; the mark starts at 22%. In these countries Sagittarius may be rarer in the record than in reality.

Sources

• Eurostat, live births by month (demo_fmonth), CC BY 4.0: European countries, from 1960 for the longest series.
• Human Fertility Database, Short-Term Fertility Fluctuations series (STFF), CC BY 4.0: from 2000, preferred over Eurostat where both exist, and only years its documentation calls final and gives by date of occurrence. Eurostat’s monthly table carries a few years that look like registration months (Germany and Ireland 2002, Slovakia 2008).
• INSEE, births by day, metropolitan France 1968–2024 (T79JNAIS), Licence Ouverte. ONS, Births in England and Wales, table 12, births by day 1995–2024, OGL.
• United States: NCHS natality, births by day 1969–1988, via the Google BigQuery natality sample (a 50% sample, weighted, in some years and states) as published with A. Vehtari’s Birthdays case study; CDC births by day 1994–2003 and SSA 2004–2014 (FiveThirtyEight, CC BY 4.0); HFD monthly from 2015. There is no US data for 1989–1993.
• Brazil: SINASC, Ministry of Health / DATASUS, every live birth 1997–2024 by date (CC BY-ND 3.0: only aggregates are published here; 1996, the system’s first and incomplete year, is left out). Japan: Vital Statistics, e-Stat table 0003411915, births by day 2015–2024; HFD monthly for 2000–2014.

Limits

• These are births in 55 countries that publish births by month or day: mostly Europe, plus Armenia, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Georgia, Greenland, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Türkiye and United States. Africa, South Asia, most of Southeast Asia, China and most of Latin America are not covered. Countries enter in different years (most between 1994 and 2005, only 14 cover every year from 1960–2019); the pooled figures weight countries by births, so large countries and recent decades count most.
• They describe births, not people alive today: mortality and migration are not modelled. For “how common is my sign among people around me” the decade and country of birth in the explorer are the right question.
• Only the Sun sign. The Moon, the Ascendant and the planets need the time of birth, which most countries do not publish (see the rising-sign study and the study of real birth times).
• The calendar pattern used for monthly countries is learned from countries that keep Christmas on 25 December; in countries of the Orthodox calendar (Russia, Serbia, Belarus, Georgia, North Macedonia, Montenegro) the holiday dip falls on 7 January instead, still inside Capricorn.
• Nothing here says anything about people born under a sign, only how many of them there are.