Leo and Virgo compatibility is one of the most searched sign pairs in the US, and there is a plain reason. Leo and Virgo are the two most common Sun signs among US births. So of all 78 ways to pair up the signs, Leo with Virgo is the pair you are most likely to meet.
We counted it. About 1 random US couple in 62 is a Leo and a Virgo. That puts the pair first out of 78. We also checked what the old books say about two signs that sit side by side, and how close the two Suns really are in the sky.
This guide shows every step, so you can check it. Read it as a lens, not a forecast. Astrology is not a science, and no study has shown that a sign predicts how a couple will do.
The short answer, in six lines
| Question | What we found. |
|---|---|
| How common is a Leo and Virgo couple? | About 1 random US couple in 62, or 1.60 percent. |
| Where does it rank among the 78 pairs? | First, just ahead of Cancer and Leo. |
| Did real marriages favor the pair? | By about 0.3 percent, a gap the author traced to form errors. |
| How far apart are the signs? | One sign, or 30 degrees, a link called a semi-sextile. |
| How many pairs have Suns side by side? | About 1 pair in 28 has Suns within 8 degrees of each other. |
| What did Ptolemy call signs one apart? | Signs that are turned away from each other. |
How many couples are Leo and Virgo?
Your Sun sign is the slice of the sky the Sun stood in when you were born. Each slice is 30 degrees wide. Leo season runs from about July 22 to August 22. Virgo season follows right after, to about September 22. The exact hour moves a little each year, which is why our zodiac signs guide checks each date against the real sky.
The twelve signs are not the same size in births. Two things decide the count. The first is the length of each season. The second is how many babies are born per day in that part of the year.
Leo and Virgo win on both. The Sun moves slowest in early July, when the Earth is farthest from it. So the summer signs last longer. The Sun spends about 31.3 days in Leo and 30.9 days in Virgo, against about 29.4 in Capricorn. On top of that, US births peak in late summer. In the US file, August and September have the most births per day of any month.
| Source of the births | Share born Leo | Share born Virgo | Chance a random couple is Leo and Virgo. |
|---|---|---|---|
| US births 2000 to 2014, 62.2 million, by exact date | 8.96 percent | 8.94 percent | 1.60 percent, or 1 in 62. |
| US births 1994 to 2003, 39.7 million, by exact date | 8.96 percent | 8.89 percent | 1.59 percent, or 1 in 63. |
| If all twelve signs were equal | 8.33 percent | 8.33 percent | 1.39 percent, or 1 in 72. |
Why multiply by two? A couple can be a Leo woman with a Virgo man, or the other way round. Both count. So the chance is two times the Leo share times the Virgo share.
First of 78: where Leo and Virgo rank
There are 78 ways to pair the twelve signs. Twelve pairs join a sign with itself, like Leo and Leo. The other 66 join two different signs. We ranked all 78 by how likely a random US couple is to be that pair.
| Rank | Sign pair | Chance for a random US couple. |
|---|---|---|
| 1st of 78 | Leo and Virgo | 1.60 percent, or 1 in 62. |
| 2nd of 78 | Cancer and Leo | 1.58 percent, or 1 in 63. |
| 3rd of 78 | Cancer and Virgo | 1.58 percent, or 1 in 63. |
| 4th of 78 | Gemini and Leo | 1.53 percent, or 1 in 65. |
| 66th of 78, the rarest mixed pair | Capricorn and Aquarius | 1.21 percent, or 1 in 83. |
| 78th of 78, the rarest of all | Capricorn and Capricorn | 0.58 percent, or 1 in 172. |
So a Leo and Virgo couple is about 15 percent more common than an even split would give. It is about 32 percent more common than a Capricorn and Aquarius couple. Same-sign pairs sit at the bottom of the list for a simple reason. A Leo and Leo couple can only happen one way, so it gets no times two.
Even so, our page on Leo and Leo compatibility finds that pair first among the twelve same sign couples.
At the other end of the list, the rarest couple of two different signs has its own guide to Capricorn and Aquarius compatibility.
The third pair on that list has a twist of its own: in Cancer and Virgo compatibility, the two Mercury signs can only meet in Leo.
The lead is small. In the older file, from 1994 to 2003, Leo and Virgo still come first, but Cancer and Leo trail by a hair. What stays true in both files is the top group. The five most likely pairs are all drawn from Gemini, Cancer, Leo and Virgo, the signs of early and high summer.
Our page on Cancer and Leo compatibility shows what ties the second pair on that list: the Sun and the Moon, its two rulers.
None of this comes from the stars. It comes from the calendar and from when US babies are born. A pair that is common is not a pair that is better. It is a pair you are more likely to meet at a party.
What ten million marriages showed
A birth count tells you how common the pair is. It does not tell you if the pair works. For that, the best test we know is a British one.
In 2007, the sociologist David Voas, then at the University of Manchester, looked at every married couple in the 2001 census of England and Wales. That was 10.3 million couples, with the birth date of both partners. He asked a simple thing. Do some sign pairs marry more than chance would predict, and do others marry less?
His answer was no. The one clear excess was couples of the same sign. He traced it to form errors, such as one birthday typed in for both partners. Once he took those out, the table matched chance. His paper is titled “Ten million marriages: a test of astrological love signs.” The Skeptical Inquirer ran a version of it in March 2008.
We pulled the Leo and Virgo cells from his cleaned table, Table 7. The expected count is what you get if people pick partners with no regard to sign.
| Couples in the 2001 census | Found | Expected by chance | Gap. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leo husband, Virgo wife | 65,960 couples | 65,781 couples | 0.3 percent more. |
| Virgo husband, Leo wife | 66,044 couples | 65,818 couples | 0.3 percent more. |
| Both ways together | 132,004 couples | 131,599 couples | 0.3 percent more, about 400 couples. |
So Leo and Virgo married a hair more than chance. Is that a sign of fate? Voas says no, and he says why. In his cleaned table, the cells right next to the same-sign line are almost all a bit above chance. Leo and Virgo is one of those cells. He reads it as the last trace of the same form errors. A husband born in late August and a wife typed in with his month can land one sign apart.
The size agrees with him. With 9.5 million couples over 144 cells, a cell can drift up to about 450 couples by chance alone. Each Leo and Virgo cell sits about 200 over, well inside that band. The fair reading is simple. Leo and Virgo do not seek each other out any more than the calendar makes them meet.
Next-door signs: how close are the two Suns?
Place the twelve signs on a wheel. Leo and Virgo sit side by side. One sign apart means 30 degrees. Modern astrologers call that link a semi-sextile, and they rank it as a minor aspect. An aspect is an angle between two points in a chart that astrologers read as a link.
The semi-sextile is not an old idea. William Lilly wrote in 1647, in Christian Astrology, that he “seldom” used more than the classic aspects. He then noted that “one Kepler, a learned man,” had lately added new ones. The first on his list is the semi-sextile, “consisting of thirty degrees.” Lilly listed it only so readers would know the term if they saw it.
Here is the catch with any aspect by sign. A Leo Sun can sit anywhere from 0 to 30 degrees of Leo. The same goes for a Virgo Sun. So the true angle between two such Suns runs from almost 0 degrees to almost 60 degrees. The leeway astrologers allow around an exact angle is called the orb.
So we measured it. We took the Sun’s place for every hour of Leo and Virgo season, weighted by real US births. Then we paired every Leo with every Virgo.
| What the two Suns form, in degrees | Share of Leo and Virgo pairs. |
|---|---|
| A semi-sextile within 3 degrees | 19 percent, about 1 pair in 5. |
| A semi-sextile within 6 degrees | 36 percent, about 1 pair in 3. |
| A semi-sextile within 8 degrees | 46 percent, just under half. |
| Suns within 8 degrees of each other | 3.6 percent, about 1 pair in 28. |
| Suns within 10 degrees of each other | 5.6 percent, about 1 pair in 18. |
| Suns within 8 degrees of a sextile, at 60 degrees | 3.7 percent, about 1 pair in 27. |
The row that stands out is the fourth one. When two planets sit close together, astrologers call it a conjunction, and they read it as a blend. About 1 Leo and Virgo pair in 28 has Suns that close. By sign they are neighbors. By degree they are almost one point.
This fits what we found for other pairs, such as Leo and Scorpio as a Sun sign pair, where 36 percent had a true square with a 6 degree orb. The share is the same for any two signs a set number of steps apart. It comes from the shape of the problem, not from these two signs.
A quick test for your own pair
You can check your own couple in a minute. Look up the degree of each Sun. Any free chart site shows it. Then take the Virgo degree, add 30, and subtract the Leo degree.
| Leo Sun | Virgo Sun | True angle, and what it is. |
|---|---|---|
| 16 degrees Leo, born about August 8 | 16 degrees Virgo, born about September 8 | 30 degrees, an exact semi-sextile. |
| 27 degrees Leo, born about August 20 | 3 degrees Virgo, born about August 26 | 6 degrees, close to a conjunction. |
| 1 degree Leo, born about July 24 | 28 degrees Virgo, born about September 21 | 57 degrees, near a sextile. |
There is a rule of thumb too. The Sun moves about one degree a day. So if the two birthdays fall within a week of each other across the August 22 line, the Suns sit close together. If they fall about a month apart, the angle is near 30 degrees.
Born near August 22? Check which side you are on
A Leo and Virgo couple has a special trap. The line between the two signs moves from year to year. Someone born on August 22 or 23 can be either sign, and the printed tables do not always agree with the sky.
Our zodiac signs guide checked 91 years. It found that a birth on August 23 falls in Leo in 31 percent of those years, even though most tables say Virgo. So before you read a Leo and Virgo page, make sure you are one. A couple born the same week in late August can turn out to be Leo and Leo, or Virgo and Virgo.
What Ptolemy said: signs that turn away
The Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy wrote the Tetrabiblos around 150 AD. It is one of the first full textbooks of Western astrology. In Book 1, chapters 13 to 16 in the Robbins translation, he lists the ways two signs can be linked. Many web pages get these wrong, so we read them there.
He names four aspects: the opposition, the trine, the square and the sextile. Signs one apart share none of them. He then lists two more ties. Signs that “command and obey” take the same time to rise. Signs that “behold” each other have days of the same length.
Leo and Virgo share neither tie. There are two ways to read these rules, and we checked both. The first counts whole signs, as the notes in the Robbins edition do. Those notes pair Leo with Gemini and Virgo with Taurus as the behold pairs. The second counts degree by degree, the way Lilly works out his mirror points. That reading pairs Leo with Taurus and Virgo with Aries. Neither reading pairs Leo with Virgo.
So Ptolemy puts them in his last group, chapter 16. He calls such signs “disjunct” and “alien.” Here is his reason for signs one apart. They “are as it were averted from one another and, though they are two, bound the angle of one.” In plain words, the two signs face away from each other. Together they fill just one twelfth of the circle, a slice too thin to make a shape.
Later writers kept the idea. Today it goes by the name aversion, from a Latin word for turning away. Chris Brennan explains the idea in his book Hellenistic Astrology. Signs in aversion cannot see each other, so they do not deal with each other directly. That is a label for the geometry, not a verdict on a couple.
The rulers: the Sun and Mercury
In the old books, each sign has a planet that rules it, as a host rules a home. The Sun rules Leo. Mercury rules Virgo, and Gemini too.
Ptolemy gives a reason for that layout in chapter 17. The Sun and Moon took the two warmest signs, Leo and Cancer. Mercury, he writes, “never is farther removed from the sun than one sign in either direction.” So it was given “the remaining signs, Gemini and Virgo, which are next to the houses of the luminaries.” In other words, Virgo sits next to Leo on purpose. Mercury never strays far from the Sun, so its home was placed right beside the Sun’s home.
That link is easy to measure. We counted which sign Mercury was in for every Leo and every Virgo born from 1600 to 2400.
| Birth group | Where Mercury sits | Share of that group. |
|---|---|---|
| Virgo Suns | In Virgo, at home | About 49.5 percent, close to half. |
| Virgo Suns | In Leo, the partner’s sign | About 14 percent, or 1 Virgo in 7. |
| Leo Suns | In Virgo, the partner’s sign | About 36 percent, more than 1 Leo in 3. |
| Leo Suns | In Leo | About 48 percent, close to half. |
So the two signs share a planet more than you would guess. More than a third of Leos carry Mercury, the Virgo planet, in Virgo itself. In the old style of reading, that Leo speaks and thinks in a Virgo key. About 1 Virgo in 7 has it the other way round, with the ruling planet in Leo. Our Virgo sign guide gives the full Mercury count for Virgo, and the Leo sign guide does the same for Leo.
Ptolemy adds one more tie in chapter 19. Mercury is exalted in Virgo, which means it is at its strongest there. In the Mercury in Virgo guide, that shows up as a mind built for detail. His reason is that Mercury is dry, and Virgo marks the dry fall season.
Fire and earth, fixed and mutable
The old books sort each sign three ways. Here is how Leo and Virgo line up.
| Trait on the usual lists | Leo | Virgo. |
|---|---|---|
| Element | Fire, hot and dry in the old theory | Earth, cold and dry in the old theory. |
| Mode | Fixed, a sign that holds | Mutable, a sign that adapts. |
| Gender in the old books | Masculine, of the day | Feminine, of the night. |
| Ruler | The Sun | Mercury, which is also exalted here. |
| Place in the season | The height of summer | The end of summer, harvest time. |
Signs next to each other never share an element or a mode. That is how the wheel is built. The one thing Leo and Virgo share is the quality the old theory called dry. Both signs are dry, one hot and one cold.
The mode tells more. Fixed signs sit in the middle of a season and hold a course once it is set. Mutable signs close a season and adjust to what comes next. So the old picture of this pair is a sign that holds beside a sign that tunes.
What the pair looks like in daily life
These are sign portraits, not facts about any person you know. They describe two styles, drawn from the sign books.
Leo, as a fixed fire sign, likes warmth that shows. Praise out loud. Big plans with a clear lead. Loyalty that is stated, then kept. Leo wants to be seen, and wants the partner to be proud of it.
Virgo, as a mutable earth sign, likes care that works. Help given in small, useful ways. A plan with the steps written down. Loyalty that is shown in chores done well. Virgo wants to be useful, and wants the effort to be noticed.
Both want the same thing in the end: to be valued. They ask for it in different ways. Leo asks for praise. Virgo asks for its work to count. The pair runs well when each one learns the other’s way of saying thanks.
| Where it snags | What Leo feels | What Virgo feels | A small step that helps. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Praise | Unseen when thanks is quiet | Uneasy when thanks is loud | Leo names one small thing Virgo did, each day. |
| Feedback | Stung by a list of fixes | Unheard when a fix is waved off | Start with what works, then give one fix at a time. |
| Plans | Held back by too many steps | Worried by too few | Leo picks the goal, Virgo draws the route. |
| Rest | Wants a night out | Wants a quiet night in | Swap turns, and put both on the calendar. |
None of these steps needs a chart. Any two people with different styles can use them. That is the honest point: the sign gives a name to a pattern, and the fix lives in plain talk.
Values around money, beauty and ease belong to Venus, mapped for this combination in Leo and Virgo Venus placements. On the wheel, signs that follow each other in order rarely repeat a quality.
The rest of the chart counts for more
A Sun sign is one point in a chart with at least ten. Astrologers who compare two charts, a method called synastry, look at all of them. Three matter most for love.
The Moon shows what makes a person feel safe. The Venus sign shows what they find lovely and how they show care. Mars shows how they chase what they want and how they argue. For this pair, Mercury counts too, since it rules Virgo and sits in Virgo for so many Leos.
Voas saw this reply coming. He answers that the Sun sign is the part of astrology most people use. Any real effect, however small, would still show up in ten million couples. If you know both birth dates and times, the full chart is where the detail lives. If you only know the Sun signs, treat this page as a starting map, not the ground.
To go past the Sun, our guide to birth chart compatibility walks through the Moon, Venus and Mars in order.
How we measured
You can redo every number on this page.
For birth shares, we used US births for every date from 2000 to 2014, 62.2 million in all, from the Social Security file compiled by the site FiveThirtyEight. We checked them against the National Center for Health Statistics file for 1994 to 2003. We placed each birth day on the sky using the real hour the Sun enters each sign, in US Central time. A day on the cusp was split by the share of hours on each side. The chance for a pair of two signs is two times the product of their shares. For a sign with itself, it is the share squared.
For the angle, route one used the astronomy-engine code. It placed the Sun every hour of each Leo and Virgo day from 2000 to 2014. Each slot got the births of that day, split evenly over the day. We paired every Leo slot with every Virgo slot and summed the shares by angle. Route two used different code, the solar formula from Jean Meeus. It placed the Sun every 3 hours from 1600 to 2400, with no birth weights. Both routes gave the same shares to within 0.1 points.
For Mercury, we placed the Sun and Mercury every 3 hours from 1600 to 2400 with astronomy-engine. We then ran it again with a step of 5 hours and 17 minutes and a different start. The two runs agree to within 0.03 points. The Virgo at home figure, 49.50 percent, matches the one on our Virgo page.
The marriage counts come from Table 7 of the Voas paper, built from census table C0792. The expected count for each cell is the row total times the column total, divided by the grand total. The limits are real. Birth shares are not the same as shares of adults who date, and many couples meet across borders. The US figures are a close guide, not a census of couples.
Questions people ask
Are Leo and Virgo compatible?
No study has found that Sun signs predict how a couple does. The largest test, 10.3 million marriages in England and Wales, found Leo and Virgo couples within 0.3 percent of chance. As a symbol, the pair joins a fixed fire sign and a mutable earth sign that sit side by side.
What percentage of couples are Leo and Virgo?
About 1.60 percent of random US pairings, or 1 in 62, based on 62.2 million US births from 2000 to 2014. That is the highest of all 78 sign pairs. An even split of signs would give 1 in 72.
Why is Leo and Virgo the most common pair?
Leo and Virgo are the two most common Sun signs in US births, at 8.96 and 8.94 percent. Their seasons are long, and US births peak in late summer. The calendar does the work, not the stars.
What aspect do Leo and Virgo form?
By sign, a semi-sextile of 30 degrees, a minor aspect. Ptolemy called signs one apart “averted.” By degree, the Suns can sit anywhere from almost 0 to almost 60 degrees apart. About 1 pair in 28 has Suns within 8 degrees.
What should a Leo and Virgo couple compare next?
The Moon, Venus and Mars signs of both partners. Look at Mercury too, since it rules Virgo and sits in Virgo for more than a third of Leos.
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