Taurus and Pisces compatibility has one planet at its heart. Venus rules Taurus. Venus is also exalted in Pisces, which means it gets its seat of honor there. No other planet holds such high rank in both signs. So we asked a plain question. How many Taurus natives carry Venus in Pisces, and how many Pisces carry Venus in Taurus?
We counted the sky over 800 years. The answer is about 1 Taurus in 11, and about 1 Pisces in 11. Each partner has a small chance of holding the planet of love in the other’s sign. We show how we got those counts, and what they do and do not mean.
We add a second count. About 1 random US couple in 75 is a Taurus and a Pisces. Read all of it as a lens on two styles of love, not a forecast.
The short version
| Question | What we found. |
|---|---|
| What planet ties the two signs? | Venus, at home in Taurus and exalted in Pisces. |
| How many Taurus natives have Venus in Pisces? | About 9.0 percent, or 1 in 11. |
| How many Pisces natives have Venus in Taurus? | About 9.05 percent, or 1 in 11. |
| How many couples share a Venus sign? | In about 1 couple in 8, most of them in Aries. |
| How common is the pair in the US? | About 1 random couple in 75, the 47th of 66 mixed pairs. |
| What angle links the signs? | A sextile, two signs or 60 degrees apart. |
| What did Ptolemy call them? | A pair where Taurus commands and Pisces obeys, in the whole sign reading. |
First, what no one can promise
Astrology is not a science. No study has shown that a Sun sign predicts whether a couple will last. The largest test we know of found no effect at all. So this page gives the pair no score. It uses the old symbols as a way to talk about two ways of loving.
Your Sun sign is the slice of sky the Sun stood in when you were born. Each slice is 30 degrees wide. Taurus runs from about April 20 to May 20. Pisces runs from about February 19 to March 20. The exact hour shifts a little each year, as our guide to the zodiac signs shows.
One planet with rank in both signs
The old books give each planet a rank in each sign. The ranks are called dignities. Think of a planet as a guest who moves from house to house. In some houses it is the owner. In others it is an honored guest. In some it is a stranger, or even unwelcome.
A planet is at home in the sign it rules. Venus has two homes, Taurus and Libra. A planet is exalted in its sign of honor. For Venus, that sign is Pisces. Ptolemy gives both rules in the Tetrabiblos, written in Alexandria around 150 AD. William Lilly repeats them in Christian Astrology, printed in London in 1647. Lilly even pins the peak of honor at 27 degrees Pisces.
Lilly’s table shows a finer thread too. Each sign is cut into five unequal strips called terms, and each strip has a planet in charge. In both Taurus and Pisces, the first 8 degrees belong to Venus. So Venus owns Taurus, is honored in Pisces, and opens both signs.
| Rank | In Taurus | In Pisces. |
|---|---|---|
| Home, or ruler | Venus | Jupiter. |
| Sign of honor | The Moon, peak at 3 degrees | Venus, peak at 27 degrees. |
| First strip of terms | Venus, 0 to 8 degrees | Venus, 0 to 8 degrees. |
| Planet out of place | Mars, far from its own home | Mercury, both far from home and in its fall. |
A planet in its fall is at its low point, the reverse of its seat of honor. Pisces is the fall of Mercury, the planet of words and lists. That fits the old picture of Pisces as a sign that feels more than it sorts.
Our page on Pisces and Libra, the other pair tied by Venus counts how rare such ties are. Out of 66 pairs of signs, only 11 join a planet’s home to its sign of honor. Taurus and Pisces are one of the friendly ones, since they sit at an easy angle.
How many carry Venus into the other sign
Here is our own count. Venus never strays far from the Sun. Seen from Earth, the gap between them never passed 47.28 degrees in our check. So your Venus sign is always your Sun sign or one of the two signs on each side.
A Taurus can have Venus in Pisces, Aries, Taurus, Gemini or Cancer. A Pisces can have Venus in Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces, Aries or Taurus. The two lists overlap in three signs: Pisces, Aries and Taurus. We checked the sky every six hours from 1600 to 2400. Then we counted where Venus sat each time the Sun was in each sign.
| Venus sign | Share of Taurus natives | Share of Pisces natives. |
|---|---|---|
| Capricorn | None, out of reach | 9.23 percent. |
| Aquarius | None, out of reach | 29.29 percent. |
| Pisces, where Venus is honored | 9.00 percent | 23.60 percent. |
| Aries, where Venus is weak | 29.23 percent | 28.83 percent. |
| Taurus, where Venus is at home | 24.35 percent | 9.05 percent. |
| Gemini | 29.01 percent | None, out of reach. |
| Cancer | 8.41 percent | None, out of reach. |
Read the Pisces row first. About 1 Taurus in 11 is born with Venus in Pisces. Now read the Taurus row. About 1 Pisces in 11 is born with Venus in Taurus. The two figures match almost to the decimal. Each sign sits one step from Aries, and Venus runs the same short leash in both directions.
The 24.35 percent figure matches our Taurus sign page, which counts how many Taurus natives have Venus at home. The figures for Pisces are new to this page. Our Pisces sign page does the same count for Jupiter, the old ruler of Pisces.
A third of each sign has Venus in top form
Add the two good places together. A Taurus has Venus at home or honored about 33.4 percent of the time. A Pisces has it about 32.7 percent of the time. So about one native in three, on each side, carries Venus in one of the two signs of this pair.
A Taurus paired with a Capricorn can share a Venus sign only in Pisces, the seat of honor, as our page on Taurus and Capricorn compatibility counts.
There is a twist. The sign with the most Venus in top form sits between them. An Aries has Venus in Taurus or Pisces about 59 percent of the time. Aries is flanked by the home and the seat of honor, so Venus lands in one or the other more than half the time.
What the couple shares
Now pair a random Taurus with a random Pisces. We treated the two births as separate events and multiplied the shares.
| What happens in the couple | Share of couples. |
|---|---|
| At least one partner has Venus in the other’s Sun sign | About 17 percent, or 1 couple in 6. |
| Both partners do | About 0.8 percent, or 1 couple in 123. |
| Both have the same Venus sign | About 12.8 percent, or 1 couple in 8. |
| The shared Venus sign is Aries | About 8.4 percent of all such couples. |
| Both have Venus at home or honored | About 10.9 percent. |
The Aries line is the honest surprise. When a Taurus and a Pisces share a Venus sign, two times in three it is Aries. Aries is a sign where the old books call Venus weak, or in its detriment. Detriment means the planet sits across the wheel from its own home. So the shared ground is not always the grand one.
Venus is one wire in a chart, and the Sun is another. Our page on Taurus and Pisces Venus placements reads the pair at the level of Venus itself.
How common is a Taurus and Pisces couple?
The signs are not the same size in the birth count. We use one reference for all our pair pages. It holds 62.2 million US births from 2000 to 2014, counted day by day. In that count, 8.29 percent of babies are Taurus. Only 8.04 percent are Pisces.
Now pair two people at random. The couple can be a Taurus woman with a Pisces man, or the reverse. Both count. So the chance is two times 8.29 percent times 8.04 percent. That gives 1.33 percent, or about 1 couple in 75.
| Pair of signs | Chance for a random US couple. |
|---|---|
| Leo and Virgo, the most common mixed pair | About 1 in 62. |
| What an even split would give | 1 in 72. |
| Taurus and Pisces | About 1 in 75. |
| Taurus and Sagittarius, just below | About 1 in 76. |
| Capricorn and Aquarius, the rarest mixed pair | About 1 in 83. |
So Taurus and Pisces rank 47th of the 66 mixed pairs. Pisces pulls the pair down a little. Fewer US babies arrive in late winter than in late summer.
Two signs apart: the sextile
Place the twelve signs on a wheel. Count from Pisces to Taurus: Aries, then Taurus. That is two steps of 30 degrees, or 60 degrees. An aspect is a set angle between two points in the sky. The 60 degree angle is called a sextile. It is the mildest of the four classic aspects.
Ptolemy says why he likes it. In Book 1, chapter 13, he calls the trine and the sextile harmonious. Both join signs of the same kind, all feminine or all masculine. Taurus and Pisces are both feminine signs in his scheme. Taurus is earth, and Pisces is water. Earth and water are the two feminine elements.
They differ in mode. Taurus is fixed, meaning it sits in the middle of a season and holds its ground. Pisces is mutable, meaning it closes a season and gets ready to change. So one partner keeps, and the other lets go.
A sextile by sign is not always a sextile by degree. A sign is 30 degrees wide, so two Suns in these signs can sit anywhere from 30 to 90 degrees apart. A chart reader counts an aspect only when the angle is close. The room they allow is called the orb. For any two signs two apart, about 19 percent of couples fall within 3 degrees of 60. About 36 percent fall within 6 degrees, and about 56 percent within 10. Our page on Virgo and Scorpio, another sextile pair explains that count in full.
Taurus commands, Pisces obeys, but only by whole signs
Ptolemy lists more ties than the four aspects. In chapter 14, he names signs that command and obey. They sit at the same distance from an equinox sign, where day and night are equal. He says they rise in the same time and lie on matching paths north and south. The sign in the summer half commands. The sign in the winter half obeys.
Read that by whole signs, and you get the list in Frank Robbins’s notes to his 1940 translation. Taurus and Pisces are the first pair on it. Each sits one sign from Aries. Taurus is in the summer half, so Taurus commands. Pisces is in the winter half, so Pisces obeys. Aries and Libra are left out, since the count starts from them.
Keep this in its place. Command and obey is a label for the length of the day. It is not a rule for who leads in a home.
The degree reading
Now read Ptolemy’s own reason degree by degree. Take 10 degrees Taurus. The point that mirrors it across the equinox is 20 degrees Aquarius, not a point in Pisces. William Lilly calls this mirror a contra-antiscion. So by degrees, Taurus commands Aquarius, as our page on Taurus and Aquarius shows. Pisces mirrors Aries.
We checked this with a clock. The Earth turns once a day, so each sign climbs over the eastern horizon in turn. The sign on that horizon at your birth is your rising sign. But the signs do not rise at the same pace. The tilt of Earth’s axis makes some climb fast and some climb slowly. We worked out the time for five US cities.
| City | Taurus takes | Pisces takes | How much longer Taurus takes. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Miami | 1 hour 41 minutes | 1 hour 29 minutes | About 1.14 times as long. |
| Los Angeles | 1 hour 33 minutes | 1 hour 20 minutes | About 1.17 times as long. |
| New York | 1 hour 26 minutes | 1 hour 11 minutes | About 1.21 times as long. |
| Chicago | 1 hour 25 minutes | 1 hour 10 minutes | About 1.22 times as long. |
| Seattle | 1 hour 16 minutes | 1 hour 0 minutes | About 1.26 times as long. |
So the two signs do not rise in the same time. Taurus rises in the same time as Aquarius, and Pisces in the same time as Aries. That is why degree readers pair them that way. Still, both are fast risers. Pisces and Aries are the two fastest signs in the US sky, and Taurus and Aquarius come next. The Greeks called all four signs of short ascension.
So the two readings split. By whole signs, Taurus commands Pisces. By degrees, the tie goes to their neighbors. We print both, because the old books do not settle it.
A last tie is missing too. In chapter 15, Ptolemy names signs that behold each other, with days of equal length. Taurus pairs with Virgo there, and Pisces with Scorpio. So this pair does not behold each other.
What a census of married couples shows
The biggest test of love signs we know of was run by David Voas, a British sociologist, in 2007. He used the 2001 census of England and Wales. It held the birth dates of about 10.3 million married couples. He found that the signs had no effect on who married whom. A summary ran in the Skeptical Inquirer in March 2008.
His raw count showed too many couples with the same sign. He traced most of them to errors on the forms. He removed those errors and built a corrected table, his Table 7, with about 9.5 million couples. We read the two cells for this pair.
| Couple | Found in the census | What chance predicts | Gap. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Taurus wife, Pisces husband | 72,216 couples | About 71,801 couples | About 415 more. |
| Pisces wife, Taurus husband | 71,732 couples | About 71,817 couples | About 85 fewer. |
| Both together | 143,948 couples | About 143,618 couples | About 330 more, or 0.23 percent. |
That puts Taurus and Pisces 20th of the 66 mixed pairs, a little above the middle. Voas wrote that in a table this big, one cell can drift about 450 couples from chance with no cause. Both cells here sit inside that range. One even points the other way. So the census says nothing either way about this pair. The same table put Taurus and Sagittarius, last of the 66 pairs, and that gap was noise as well.
Where the pair snags
The sign books read this pair as a calm one. Earth gives water a bank to flow in. Water keeps earth from drying out. The snags come from the gap between fixed and mutable. Here are four, each with a small step.
| Where it snags | What Taurus feels | What Pisces feels | A small step that helps. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plans | Uneasy when a plan stays vague | Boxed in by a fixed plan | Fix the date, and leave the details open. |
| Money | Safe with savings in the bank | Glad to give on a whim | Keep one shared pot and one gift pot. |
| Hard talks | Ready to name the problem | Keen to drift away from it | Pick a calm time, and keep it short. |
| Care | Shows love with things you can touch | Shows love with mood and presence | Say out loud what each gesture meant. |
None of these steps needs a chart. Any two people with these styles can use them. The signs give a name to a pattern. The fix lives in plain talk.
The rest of the chart counts for more
A Sun sign is one point in a chart with at least ten. Comparing two whole charts is called synastry. Robert Hand’s 1975 book, Planets in Composite, goes further and blends two charts into one. Stephen Arroyo, in his 1975 book on the four elements, reads earth as the element of the senses and water as the element of feeling.
For love, three points carry more weight than the Sun. The Moon shows what makes a person feel safe. Venus shows what a person finds lovely. Mars shows how each one goes after what they want. For this pair, Venus deserves the first look, since the two signs are its home and its seat of honor.
The Moon adds one more thread. The Moon is exalted in Taurus, at 3 degrees. Our page on the Moon-sign comparison of Pisces and Taurus reads the pair at that level. If you know both birth dates and times, the full comparison is where the detail lives.
How we measured
For Venus, we used the astronomy-engine library. We took the Sun and Venus as seen from Earth every six hours from 1600 to 2400, and counted Venus’s sign for each Sun sign. A second route used a different method. We found every moment the Sun or Venus changed sign, by halving the time step down to one second. Then we summed the exact time each Sun sign spent with each Venus sign. The two routes agree to 0.01 percent. A third run, every seven hours, gave the same result.
For the couple figures, we treated the two partners’ births as separate events. Each couple figure is the product of the two shares. We used shares of time, not of births, as our sign pages do.
For the birth shares, we used daily US Social Security birth counts for 2000 to 2014, published by FiveThirtyEight. We matched each day to the exact minute the Sun changed sign, in Central time. A second file, from the National Center for Health Statistics for 1994 to 2003, gives Taurus 8.36 percent and Pisces 8.09 percent. The pair chance is then about 1 in 74, close to our reference.
For rising times, we used two formulas. The first uses the oblique ascension, the point on the sky’s equator that rises with each degree. The second computes the rising degree for many moments of one turn of the Earth and counts the time in each sign. Both agree to within one hundredth of a degree.
For the census, we read Tables 7 and 8 in the paper by David Voas. We took the chance count for each cell as the row total times the column total, divided by the grand total. For the old rules, we read Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, Book 1, chapters 13 to 19, in the Robbins translation, and the table of dignities in Lilly’s Christian Astrology.
Frequently asked questions
Are Taurus and Pisces compatible?
Astrology reads them as a sextile, an easy link between earth and water. Venus rules Taurus and is exalted in Pisces, so the two signs share a planet. No study has shown that this or any sign pair lasts longer, so treat it as a lens, not a forecast.
How many Taurus natives have Venus in Pisces?
About 9.0 percent, or 1 Taurus in 11, over the years 1600 to 2400. In the same way, about 9.05 percent of Pisces natives have Venus in Taurus.
How common is a Taurus and Pisces couple?
In US birth data from 2000 to 2014, about 1 random couple in 75 is one Taurus and one Pisces. That ranks 47th of the 66 mixed sign pairs.
Which sign commands, Taurus or Pisces?
In Ptolemy’s scheme, read by whole signs, Taurus commands and Pisces obeys. Read by degrees, Taurus pairs with Aquarius instead. The label is about the length of the day, not about who leads.
Do Taurus and Pisces couples marry more than chance predicts?
In the 2001 census of England and Wales, the pair was 0.23 percent above chance, 20th of 66 mixed pairs. David Voas judged gaps of this size to be noise.
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