A Sun in Aquarius is a winter Sun. It shines from about January 20 to February 18, when days in the US are short and nights are long. That one fact shapes where the Sun sits in your birth chart.
We counted it. With real US birth hours, 47.5 percent of people with a Sun in Aquarius are born while the Sun is below the horizon, the line where sky meets ground. In astrology that makes them night births. For all US births, the figure is 40.8 percent. If babies came at the same rate every minute, it would be 57.2 percent.
This page is about the Sun as a placement: the hour, the house and the planets near it. For the sign itself, its traits and its border dates, read our guide to the Aquarius sign. All figures here come from our own count, and the method is at the end.
The dates, in New York time
The Sun enters Aquarius when it reaches 300 degrees along its yearly path. It leaves at 330 degrees. The moment is the same all over the world, but the clock reading is not.
Here are the recent entries and exits in New York time. A birth on the East Coast between these two moments has the Sun in Aquarius.
| Year | Sun enters Aquarius, New York time | Sun leaves Aquarius, New York time. |
|---|---|---|
| Year 2018 | Jan 19, 10:09 p.m. | Feb 18, 12:18 p.m. |
| Year 2019 | Jan 20, 3:59 a.m. | Feb 18, 6:03 p.m. |
| Year 2020 | Jan 20, 9:54 a.m. | Feb 18, 11:56 p.m. |
| Year 2021 | Jan 19, 3:39 p.m. | Feb 18, 5:43 a.m. |
| Year 2022 | Jan 19, 9:39 p.m. | Feb 18, 11:43 a.m. |
| Year 2023 | Jan 20, 3:29 a.m. | Feb 18, 5:34 p.m. |
| Year 2024 | Jan 20, 9:07 a.m. | Feb 18, 11:13 p.m. |
| Year 2025 | Jan 19, 3:00 p.m. | Feb 18, 5:06 a.m. |
| Year 2026 | Jan 19, 8:44 p.m. | Feb 18, 10:51 a.m. |
| Year 2027 | Jan 20, 2:29 a.m. | Feb 18, 4:33 p.m. |
| Year 2028 | Jan 20, 8:21 a.m. | Feb 18, 10:26 p.m. |
| Year 2029 | Jan 19, 2:00 p.m. | Feb 18, 4:07 a.m. |
| Year 2030 | Jan 19, 7:54 p.m. | Feb 18, 9:59 a.m. |
All times are Eastern Standard Time, since no daylight saving applies in these weeks. For Chicago, take one hour off. For Los Angeles, take three hours off. The stay lasts 29.6 days each year.
Look at the pattern. The entry moves about six hours later each year, then jumps back about a day after each leap year. So if you were born on January 19 or 20, or on February 18, you need the year and the time. Our Aquarius sign guide counts, year by year, which side those border days fall on.
A few degrees of difference in the birth chart produce Sun in Capricorn, built on discipline and the long climb.
Houses: where the Sun sits on the day you were born
Your sign tells you where the Sun stood among the stars. Your house tells you where it stood in your own sky, at your hour and your place.
Astrologers cut the sky into twelve slices called houses. Think of a home with twelve rooms. Each room covers one part of life, such as work, friends or home. The Sun in a room lights up that part of life.
The rooms are fixed to the ground, not to the stars. So the Sun moves through all twelve of them each day. It rises into the 12th house, climbs through the 11th and 10th to its high point at noon, then sinks through the 9th, 8th and 7th until it sets. At night it passes the 6th house down to the 1st, then rises again.
Houses 7 to 12 are the sky above you. Houses 1 to 6 are the sky below the ground. That is why the house of your Sun depends on your birth hour.
Two ways to draw the rooms
Placidus houses split the day by time. The Sun’s hours above the ground are cut into six equal parts, and so are its hours below. Most US apps use this system.
Whole sign houses are the oldest system. The sign rising in the east at your birth becomes your whole 1st house, and the next signs fill the next rooms in turn. The Greek writers used only this. Our guide to the whole sign house system shows how it works.
Short days make short day rooms
Take February 3, in the middle of the season. In New York the Sun rises at 7:09 a.m. and sets at 5:12 p.m. That is ten hours of daylight and fourteen hours of dark.
Under Placidus, each of the six day rooms gets one sixth of those ten hours. That is one hour and forty minutes. Each night room gets two hours and twenty minutes. So on the clock, the night rooms are wider.
Here are the Placidus windows on February 3, 2026, in local clock time. We checked the house of the Sun every thirty seconds with the Swiss Ephemeris, a star table used by many chart apps.
| House of the Sun | New York | Chicago | Los Angeles. |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12th house, just risen | 7:09 to 8:49 a.m. | 7:06 to 8:45 a.m. | 6:53 to 8:37 a.m. |
| 11th house | 8:49 to 10:29 a.m. | 8:45 to 10:25 a.m. | 8:37 to 10:22 a.m. |
| 10th house, up to noon | 10:29 a.m. to 12:10 p.m. | 10:25 a.m. to 12:04 p.m. | 10:22 a.m. to 12:07 p.m. |
| 9th house | 12:10 to 1:50 p.m. | 12:04 to 1:44 p.m. | 12:07 to 1:52 p.m. |
| 8th house | 1:50 to 3:31 p.m. | 1:44 to 3:24 p.m. | 1:52 to 3:36 p.m. |
| 7th house, about to set | 3:31 to 5:12 p.m. | 3:24 to 5:04 p.m. | 3:36 to 5:21 p.m. |
| 6th house, just set | 5:12 to 7:31 p.m. | 5:04 to 7:24 p.m. | 5:21 to 7:37 p.m. |
| 5th house | 7:31 to 9:50 p.m. | 7:24 to 9:44 p.m. | 7:37 to 9:52 p.m. |
| 4th house, up to midnight | 9:50 p.m. to 12:10 a.m. | 9:44 p.m. to 12:04 a.m. | 9:52 p.m. to 12:07 a.m. |
| 3rd house | 12:10 to 2:29 a.m. | 12:04 to 2:25 a.m. | 12:07 to 2:22 a.m. |
| 2nd house | 2:29 to 4:49 a.m. | 2:25 to 4:45 a.m. | 2:22 to 4:37 a.m. |
| 1st house, before sunrise | 4:49 to 7:09 a.m. | 4:45 to 7:06 a.m. | 4:37 to 6:53 a.m. |
Other days in the season move these times by a few minutes. By February 18 the day is about an hour longer than on January 20, so the day rooms grow a little.
How many are born at night? We counted
If births came at the same rate at every minute, each night room would get 9.5 percent of Aquarius Suns. Each day room would get only 7.1 percent. The Sun would be below the ground in 57.2 percent of charts.
Real births do not come at the same rate. Hospitals book planned C-sections in the morning, and induced births peak from noon to 5 p.m. We used the CDC natality file 2024, the US public record of 3,638,436 births, with the clock minute of each one.
With those real hours, the night share falls to 47.5 percent. The day share climbs to 52.5 percent. Here is the full split under Placidus, next to the whole sign count.
| House of the Sun | Placidus, even clock | Placidus, real 2024 hours | Whole sign, real 2024 hours. |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st house | 9.5 percent | 7.2 percent | 6.2 percent. |
| 2nd house | 9.5 percent | 7.0 percent | 5.9 percent. |
| 3rd house | 9.5 percent | 7.2 percent | 7.2 percent. |
| 4th house | 9.5 percent | 7.9 percent | 8.0 percent. |
| 5th house | 9.5 percent | 8.7 percent | 8.8 percent. |
| 6th house | 9.5 percent | 9.6 percent | 9.6 percent. |
| 7th house | 7.1 percent | 8.0 percent | 11.3 percent. |
| 8th house | 7.1 percent | 8.2 percent | 11.3 percent. |
| 9th house | 7.1 percent | 9.3 percent | 10.4 percent. |
| 10th house | 7.1 percent | 8.7 percent | 7.6 percent. |
| 11th house | 7.1 percent | 8.8 percent | 6.5 percent. |
| 12th house | 7.1 percent | 9.4 percent | 7.0 percent. |
Three things stand out.
First, the 6th house leads under Placidus, at 9.6 percent. That room covers the two hours after sunset. In February, sunset comes around 5 p.m., right in the busy slot for induced births.
Second, the 12th house is a close second, at 9.4 percent. In winter the 8 a.m. hour falls in that room, and 8 a.m. is the peak for planned C-sections. Our guide to the Sun in the 12th house gives that clock window month by month.
Third, the day of the week matters. On weekdays, 54.1 percent of Aquarius Suns are day births. On weekends, only 46.5 percent are, because few C-sections are booked then.
The 11th house puzzle
The old books pair Aquarius with the 11th house, the room of friends and groups. So you might expect an Aquarius Sun to sit there more than most. It does not.
Under Placidus with real hours, 8.8 percent of Aquarius Suns land in the 11th house. Our guide to the Sun in the 11th house puts the figure for all US births at 10.5 percent. The short winter morning makes the room small. The link between sign and house is a theme, not a count.
Why whole sign houses give another answer
Under whole sign houses, the 7th and 8th rooms lead, at 11.3 percent each. The 11th falls to 6.5 percent. The reason is the rising sign.
In whole sign houses, your Sun’s room is set by the sign that was rising in the east. Some signs rise fast and some rise slow. In New York, Pisces and Aries each rise in about 70 minutes. Cancer and Leo take well over two hours.
On a February afternoon, Cancer and Leo are the ones rising. With Leo rising, an Aquarius Sun sits in the 7th room. With Cancer rising, it sits in the 8th. On February 3 in New York, those two rooms cover 1:33 p.m. to 6:28 p.m., close to five hours. So the two systems can put the same Sun in different rooms, and you should know which one your app uses.
Day birth or night birth: why it matters
Greek astrologers sorted every chart into one of two teams, called sects. If the Sun is above the ground, it is a day chart and the Sun leads it. If the Sun is below, it is a night chart and the Moon leads it. Chris Brennan explains this rule in his book Hellenistic Astrology, and Demetra George uses it in her own work.
The team changes how the whole chart is read. In a day chart, Jupiter and the Sun do the most good, and Saturn is easier to live with. In a night chart, Venus and the Moon take that role, and Mars is calmer.
For an Aquarius Sun this matters more than for most. The Sun is a guest here, not a host. Ptolemy, in his Tetrabiblos of the 2nd century, gives the sign to Saturn. William Lilly, in Christian Astrology of 1647, lists Aquarius as the Sun’s detriment, or exile, and takes five points away from a Sun placed there.
Both writers also give the air signs a second ruler by team. Saturn rules them by day, and Mercury rules them by night. So in a day chart, Saturn owns this sign twice over. In a night chart, Mercury gets a voice.
That gives a simple way to read your own chart. If you were born by day, look at where Saturn sits. If you were born by night, look at Saturn and Mercury both. Our Aquarius sign guide explains how detriment works. It does not mean a weak person. It means a self that is shaped by the group, the rules and the long view, more than by the spotlight.
Where this sign pushes one way, the Sun in Pisces answers with a soft and open self.
Which planets can sit next to it
An aspect is an angle between two planets, such as 60, 90, 120 or 180 degrees. The Sun’s aspects are what connect it to the rest of the chart. Some planets can never form most of them with the Sun.
Mercury never strays more than about 28 degrees from the Sun. So Mercury can only join it, never face it across the chart. Our page on Mercury in Aquarius finds that only about half of Aquarius Suns share their sign with Mercury, the planet of thought. Its count over eight hundred years gives 52.8 percent with Mercury in Aquarius too.
Venus stays within about 47 degrees. So Venus can join the Sun, but it can never form a 60 or 90 degree angle with it. The full give and take of aspects comes from Mars, the Moon and the slow planets.
The slow planets set the tone of whole birth years. Uranus, the modern ruler of Aquarius, sits in this sign for only about 9 percent of Aquarius Suns over ten of its orbits. Our guide to the Moon in Aquarius shows how much that share swings with the window you pick.
How to read your own Aquarius Sun
You need three things: a date, a clock time and a place.
First, check the date. If you were born on January 19 or 20, or on February 18 or 19, use the table above or a chart app to be sure of the sign.
Second, find the house. Use the time on your birth record, not a family memory. A birth between sunrise and sunset gives a day chart, with the Sun in houses 7 to 12. A birth at night puts it in houses 1 to 6.
Third, check your app’s house system. If the Sun sits near the edge of a room, the two systems can split. That is most common in the afternoon, when whole sign houses stretch the 7th and 8th rooms.
Then read the Sun as a theme in its room. In the 10th, the Aquarius way of thinking shows up in your work and your name. In the 4th, it shows up at home and in your roots. In the 7th, it shows up in your partners.
For one partner pairing read sign by sign, our page on the Scorpio and Aquarius match measures the real angle between the two Suns.
How we counted
We want you to be able to check this, so here is the full method.
Places: every US county, placed at its 2020 center of people and weighted by its head count, in 303 cells with their own time zones. Dates: every day of the Aquarius season from 1940 to 2030. Each clock time was turned into world time with the official time zone rules, war time included.
Birth hours: the CDC natality file 2024, split by month, day of the week and minute of birth. We used that 2024 pattern for every year. Births in the 1970s had far fewer planned C-sections, so for older readers the true share sits between the even clock and the 2024 value.
Route one was a full grid. We checked every day and every two minutes, with our own formulas for the Sun and the rising sign. For Placidus we used the Sun’s own day and night arcs. This gave 47.5 percent night births and every figure in the tables.
Route two drew 400,000 random charts with a fixed seed, and built each one with the Swiss Ephemeris. We kept only those with the Sun truly in Aquarius, about 296,000 charts. It gave 47.7 percent night births, with each house within 0.2 points of route one. On an even clock the two routes gave 57.2 and 57.1 percent.
The same grid run on all twelve signs gives 40.8 percent night births for all US babies. It gives 10.5 percent for the Sun in the 11th house, which matches our 11th house guide. The entry and exit times come from two separate star tables, and they agree to within one minute.
Questions people ask
What are the dates of a Sun in Aquarius?
About January 20 to February 18. In New York time the Sun enters on January 19 or 20 in recent years, and leaves on February 18. The table above gives the exact minute for each year from 2018 to 2030.
Is a Sun in Aquarius a day or a night birth?
It can be both. With real US birth hours, 52.5 percent are day births and 47.5 percent are night births. On an even clock, night births would win, at 57.2 percent, because winter nights are long.
Which house is most common for a Sun in Aquarius?
Under Placidus, the 6th house leads at 9.6 percent, just ahead of the 12th at 9.4 percent. Under whole sign houses, the 7th and 8th lead at 11.3 percent each.
Is the Sun weak in Aquarius?
The old books call it exile, since the sign belongs to Saturn. Lilly takes five points away. Modern writers read it as a self that shines through groups and ideas more than through personal fame.
Does the Sun in Aquarius mean the 11th house?
No. The sign and the house are two separate things. Only 8.8 percent of US Aquarius Suns sit in the 11th house under Placidus, less than the 10.5 percent for all US births.
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