Virgo and Sagittarius compatibility is read as a square. The two signs sit three signs apart on the wheel, which is 90 degrees. In the books, that is the angle of friction. But the sky does not turn at the same pace for every part of the wheel. Seen from a US city, this square takes far longer to rise than a square should.
We timed it. In New York, the stretch of sky from the start of Virgo to the start of Sagittarius takes 7 hours 36 minutes to come up over the horizon. On the sky’s equator, a square takes 6 hours and a trine takes 8. So, by the clock, this square rises almost like a trine, the angle the books call easy.
This page shows that measure, how common the pair is, what the old books say, and what a census of real marriages found. Read all of it as a lens, not a forecast.
The short answer, in six lines
| Question | What we found. |
|---|---|
| How common is the pair in the US? | About 1 random couple in 70, the 24th most common of 66 mixed pairs. |
| What angle links the signs? | A square, three signs or 90 degrees apart. |
| How long does that square take to rise in New York? | About 7 hours 36 minutes, close to the 8 hours of a trine. |
| How many New York couples have Suns that rise 8 hours apart or more? | About 35 percent, and only 6 percent rise 6 hours apart or less. |
| What did the old books say? | Ptolemy tied the force of an angle to how slowly its signs rise. |
| How did the pair do in the 2001 census? | 0.27 percent below chance, which is noise. |
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. So this page gives the pair no score. It uses the old symbols as a way to talk about two styles of life.
Your Sun sign is the slice of sky the Sun stood in when you were born. Each slice is 30 degrees wide. Virgo runs from about August 23 to September 22. Sagittarius runs from about November 22 to December 21. The exact hour shifts a little each year, as our guide to the zodiac signs shows.
How common is a Virgo and Sagittarius couple?
Start with real births. We used daily US birth counts for 2000 to 2014, about 62 million births in all. We matched each day to the minute the Sun changed sign.
Virgo is the second most common Sun sign in those births, at 8.94 percent. Sagittarius is well down the list, at 7.95 percent. Only Aquarius and Capricorn are rarer.
Now take two people at random. The pair can be a Virgo woman and a Sagittarius man, or the reverse. Both cases count. So the chance is two times 8.94 percent times 7.95 percent. That gives 1.42 percent, or about one couple in 70.
| Pair | Chance for a random US couple. |
|---|---|
| Gemini and Virgo, the most common square | About 1 couple in 65. |
| Virgo and Sagittarius | About 1 couple in 70. |
| Sagittarius and Pisces | About 1 couple in 78. |
| Aries and Capricorn, the rarest square | About 1 couple in 80. |
So Virgo and Sagittarius rank 24th of the 66 mixed pairs, and 6th of the 12 squares. The busy Virgo season lifts the pair. The quiet Sagittarius season pulls it down. Our page on Leo and Virgo, the most common couple of all shows how far Virgo births can carry a pair.
Three signs apart: the square on paper
Count forward from Virgo and you pass Libra and Scorpio. Sagittarius is the third sign on. Three signs make 90 degrees, a link called a square.
Ptolemy explains why the books call this link tense. In his Tetrabiblos, Book 1, chapter 12, he splits the signs into male and female in turn. Virgo is female and Sagittarius is male. In chapter 13 he writes that the trine and the sextile are harmonious because they join signs of the same kind. The square and the opposition, he says, are disharmonious “because they are composed of signs of opposite kinds.”
A square by sign is not always a square by degree. A Virgo born on the first day of the sign and a Sagittarius born on the last day sit almost 120 degrees apart. About 19 percent of these pairs fall within 3 degrees of an exact square, about 36 percent within 6 degrees, and just under half within 8. That share is the same for every square, as our page on Leo and Scorpio found.
The square that rises like a trine
Here is the part no sign book prints. The sky turns once a day. As it turns, each part of the zodiac climbs over the eastern horizon in turn. The sign coming up at your birth is your rising sign.
If the zodiac lay flat along the sky’s equator, every sign would take the same two hours to rise. It does not. The zodiac is tilted against the equator, by about 23.4 degrees. So some signs cross the horizon at a slant and rise fast. Others stand up straight and rise slowly.
From US cities, the slow signs run from Cancer to Sagittarius. Leo, Virgo, Libra and Scorpio are the four slowest of all, within a few minutes of each other. A Virgo and Sagittarius square spans three of them: Virgo, Libra and Scorpio. So the square is built from the slowest stretch of the whole sky.
| City and latitude | Time for Virgo, Libra and Scorpio to rise, one after the other. |
|---|---|
| Miami, 25.8 degrees north | 6 hours 45 minutes. |
| Houston, 29.8 degrees north | 6 hours 57 minutes. |
| Los Angeles, 34.1 degrees north | 7 hours 11 minutes. |
| New York, 40.7 degrees north | 7 hours 36 minutes. |
| Chicago, 41.9 degrees north | 7 hours 40 minutes. |
| Seattle, 47.6 degrees north | 8 hours 8 minutes. |
Compare that with the plain case. On the sky’s equator, 90 degrees rise in 6 hours and 120 degrees rise in 8. In New York, the Virgo and Sagittarius square takes 7 hours 36 minutes. That is closer to the 8 hours of a trine than to the 6 hours of a square. In Seattle it takes a bit more than 8 hours, the full time of a trine.
In New York, Virgo takes 2 hours 31 minutes to rise, and so does Libra. Scorpio takes 2 hours 33 minutes. Sagittarius itself takes 2 hours 22 minutes, as our page on Taurus and Sagittarius timed it.
Which squares rise slowest?
We did the same count for all 12 squares, from each degree of the first sign to the matching degree of the second. Here is New York.
| Square | Average time to rise in New York. |
|---|---|
| Leo and Scorpio | 7 hours 36 minutes, the slowest. |
| Virgo and Sagittarius | 7 hours 32 minutes, tied for second. |
| Cancer and Libra | 7 hours 32 minutes, tied for second. |
| Gemini and Virgo | 7 hours 11 minutes. |
| Taurus and Leo | 6 hours 18 minutes. |
| Aries and Cancer | 5 hours 6 minutes. |
| Aquarius and Taurus | 3 hours 45 minutes, the fastest. |
So the Virgo and Sagittarius square rises about twice as slowly as the Aquarius and Taurus square, from the same city. Both are called squares in every book. On the clock, they are not the same thing at all.
What it means for a real couple
Now apply this to two real birthdays. Take a Virgo and a Sagittarius. Each day, the sky brings the Virgo’s Sun degree over the horizon first. Some hours later, it brings up the Sagittarius’s Sun degree. How long is that gap?
We worked it out for every pair of real US birth dates, weighted by how many babies were born on each day.
| City | Average gap | Couples with a gap of 8 hours or more | Couples with a gap of 6 hours or less. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Miami | 6 hours 48 minutes | 11 percent | 20 percent. |
| Houston | 6 hours 59 minutes | 16 percent | 16 percent. |
| Los Angeles | 7 hours 11 minutes | 22 percent | 12 percent. |
| New York | 7 hours 34 minutes | 35 percent | 6 percent. |
| Chicago | 7 hours 38 minutes | 37 percent | 6 percent. |
| Seattle | 8 hours 4 minutes | 53 percent | 2 percent. |
In New York, about one Virgo and Sagittarius couple in three has Suns that rise at least 8 hours apart. That is the gap a trine would give on the equator. Only one couple in 16 has a gap as short as a plain square. In Seattle, the trine gap is the rule, not the exception.
What does a gap like this change? Say the Virgo’s Sun degree is rising right now over New York. The Sagittarius’s Sun degree is still below the horizon. It will not come up for another seven or eight hours. This is a fact about the sky. What it means for love is a matter of reading, not of proof.
What Ptolemy said about slow signs
The old writers knew the signs rise at different speeds. Ptolemy wrote tables of rising times in his Almagest. In the Tetrabiblos, Book 3, chapter 10, he used them in a technical rule on timing. There he wrote that “among the signs that ascend slowly the sextile aspect destroys,” and “among the signs that ascend rapidly the trine.”
In plain words, Ptolemy let the clock stretch an angle. A sextile in slow signs could act with the force of a square. A trine in fast signs could do the same. Robbins, his translator, notes the split: Capricorn to Gemini rise fast, and Cancer to Sagittarius rise slow.
Ptolemy did not write the reverse. He never said a square in slow signs softens into a trine. That step is ours, and it is only a step about time. We measured the clock. We did not measure love.
What else the old books tie, or do not tie
Ptolemy gives two more links between signs, in Book 1, chapters 14 and 15. Signs “command and obey” when they rise in equal time. Signs “behold” each other when the days are the same length while the Sun is in them.
These rules can be read by exact degree or by whole sign, and books use both. By degree, Virgo commands Libra and beholds Aries. By whole sign, Robbins’s notes pair Virgo with Scorpio and with Taurus. Sagittarius pairs with Cancer and Capricorn by degree, and with Leo and Aquarius by whole sign. Under either reading, Virgo and Sagittarius get neither tie. Their only link in the old scheme is the square itself.
They do share a mode. In chapter 11, Ptolemy calls Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces the bicorporeal signs, which means double-bodied. He says they “share, as it were, at end and beginning” the weather of two seasons. Virgo closes the summer. Sagittarius closes the fall. Modern books call this group mutable, the signs of change.
Two rulers, each weak in the other’s sign
Each sign has a ruling planet. Mercury rules Virgo. Jupiter rules Sagittarius. William Lilly, in Christian Astrology in 1647, lists where each planet is weak. That rank is called detriment, the sign across from a planet’s home.
Jupiter is in detriment in Virgo. Mercury is in detriment in Sagittarius. So each sign is a weak seat for the other partner’s ruler. Only two squares have this cross tie, and our page on Pisces and Gemini names both.
The tie stays in the sky, though. Mercury never strays more than about 28 degrees from the Sun. So a Virgo has Mercury in Leo, Virgo or Libra, never in Sagittarius. A Sagittarius has Mercury in Scorpio, Sagittarius or Capricorn, never in Virgo. Our Virgo sign guide counts where a Virgo’s Mercury lands. Jupiter moves on its own 12 year loop, and our Sagittarius sign guide shows how few Archers have it at home.
What ten million marriages showed
Do sign pairs change who marries whom? The best test is a British census. In 2007, the sociologist David Voas studied the 2001 census of England and Wales. It held about 10 million married couples with the birth date of both partners.
He found no effect of Sun signs. An early excess of same sign couples came from data entry errors, a story our page on Virgo and Virgo tells. Voas then built a corrected count, his Table 7.
We read the Virgo and Sagittarius cells in that table. It holds 122,196 couples made of one Virgo and one Sagittarius. Pure chance, based on how many people had each sign, predicts 122,529. So the pair came in 333 couples short, or 0.27 percent below chance. That puts it 47th of the 66 mixed pairs.
The gap is tiny. Voas judged gaps of this size to be noise. A Virgo wife and a Sagittarius husband came in at 61,111 couples. The reverse came in at 61,085. Both sat a hair under chance.
How the pair can play out, as a lens
Here is how the tradition reads the two signs. None of this is a rule for your own life.
Virgo is a mutable earth sign, ruled by Mercury. Later books give it to craft, study and careful work. In the old picture, it closes the harvest and sorts the grain. Sagittarius is a mutable fire sign, ruled by Jupiter. Later books give it to travel, teaching and belief. In the old picture, it closes the fall and looks ahead to a long road.
Stephen Arroyo, in Astrology, Psychology and the Four Elements, reads each element as a kind of energy. Earth builds form. Fire moves toward what is new. Read that way, a Virgo and Sagittarius couple joins a builder and a traveler. Both like to learn. One learns by fixing the detail. The other learns by crossing the map.
The square gives the friction. The slow rise gives the pair room. That is one way to say what the clock shows: two points that the books set at a hard angle, which the sky keeps hours apart.
Look past the Sun signs
The Sun is one point in a chart of many. For love, astrologers look hard at Venus, the Moon and the rising sign.
Venus never strays more than about 47 degrees from the Sun. So a Virgo has Venus in Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra or Scorpio. A Sagittarius has Venus in Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn or Aquarius. The two lists share only Libra and Scorpio. Our page on Virgo and Sagittarius Venus placements reads that side of the pair.
A Virgo can have a Sagittarius Moon, and a Sagittarius can have Virgo rising. Each of those says more than the Sun pair does. If you know both birth dates and times, the full chart is where the detail lives.
How we measured
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 Virgo 8.89 percent and Sagittarius 7.90 percent. The pair chance is then about 1 in 71.
For the rising times, we used two routes. Route one used the standard formula for oblique ascension, the point of the sky’s equator that rises with a given point of the zodiac. Route two swept the whole turn of the sky in tiny steps, worked out the rising degree at each step, and timed the stretch from Virgo to Sagittarius. The two routes agree to the minute. We set the tilt of Earth’s axis at 23.44 degrees and turned star time into clock time.
For the couple gaps, we took the Sun’s place for every hour of every birth day from 2000 to 2014, with the astronomy-engine library. We paired every Virgo date with every Sagittarius date, weighted by births, and timed the rise from one Sun degree to the other.
For the census, we read Table 7 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 in the Robbins translation, Book 1, chapters 11 to 17, and Book 3, chapter 10, with Lilly’s table of dignities.
Frequently asked questions
Are Virgo and Sagittarius compatible?
Astrology reads them as a square, a tense link between earth and fire. They share the mutable mode. No study has shown that this or any sign pair lasts longer, so treat it as a lens, not a forecast.
How common is a Virgo and Sagittarius couple?
In US birth data from 2000 to 2014, about 1 random couple in 70 is one Virgo and one Sagittarius. That ranks 24th of the 66 mixed sign pairs.
Why does this square rise like a trine?
It spans Virgo, Libra and Scorpio, the three slowest rising signs seen from the US. In New York that stretch takes 7 hours 36 minutes to rise, near the 8 hours of a trine on the equator.
Did Virgo and Sagittarius do badly in the marriage census?
No. In the 2001 census of England and Wales, the pair came in 0.27 percent below chance. David Voas judged gaps of this size to be noise.
Can a Virgo have Venus in Sagittarius?
No. Venus stays within about 47 degrees of the Sun. A Virgo has Venus in Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra or Scorpio.
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