Pisces and Aquarius compatibility has a twist that no other pair of signs shares. The two signs sit side by side on the zodiac wheel. And each one has two rulers, an old one and a new one. No other two signs next door to each other can say that.
Then, from March 2003 to March 2011, the two new rulers swapped seats. Uranus, the modern ruler of Aquarius, sat in Pisces. Neptune, the modern ruler of Pisces, sat in Aquarius. So a Pisces born in those years has the ruler of their sign in Aquarius. An Aquarius born then has theirs in Pisces. Each partner’s ruler sits in the other one’s sign.
We counted who has it. About 31.7 million of the 62.2 million US babies born from 2000 to 2014 do. That is just over half. Over the 800 years from 1600 to 2400, the swap comes back only five times. And in all those years, the two new rulers are never at home at the same time. This page shows each number and how we got it. Read it as a lens, not a forecast.
The short version
| Question | What we found. |
|---|---|
| How common is the pair in the US? | About 1 random couple in 78, the 59th most common of 66 mixed pairs. |
| How far apart are the signs? | One sign, or 30 degrees: they are next door. |
| What is special about their rulers? | They are the only two neighbor signs with both an old and a new ruler. |
| When did the new rulers swap signs? | From March 10, 2003 to March 11, 2011, with two short breaks. |
| How many US babies were born in the swap? | About 31.7 million of 62.2 million born from 2000 to 2014. |
| When were the old rulers both at home? | Three stretches in 2021 and 2022, and next in 2081. |
| Did real marriages favor the pair? | No: 0.20 percent above 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. Aquarius runs from about January 20 to February 18. 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.
How common is a Pisces and Aquarius 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, 8.04 percent of babies are Pisces. Only 7.93 percent are Aquarius.
Now pair two people at random. The couple can be a Pisces woman with an Aquarius man, or the reverse. Both count. So the chance is two times 8.04 percent times 7.93 percent. That gives 1.28 percent, or about 1 couple in 78.
| 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. |
| Pisces and Sagittarius | About 1 in 78, a hair more common. |
| Pisces and Aquarius | About 1 in 78. |
| Capricorn and Aquarius, the rarest mixed pair | About 1 in 83. |
So Pisces and Aquarius rank 59th of the 66 mixed pairs. Both signs pull the pair down. Aquarius is the second rarest Sun sign in US births, after Capricorn. Pisces comes fourth from the bottom. Winter signs are short, since the Sun moves fastest in early January. Fewer US babies are born per day in winter, too. Our page on Pisces and Sagittarius compatibility splits those two causes in detail.
Next door: how close can the two Suns be?
Aquarius is the eleventh sign. Pisces is the twelfth and last. By sign, they are one step apart, or 30 degrees. Modern astrologers call that link a semisextile, a minor aspect. An aspect is an angle between two points that astrologers read as a link.
But two Suns in these signs can sit anywhere from 0 to 60 degrees apart. An Aquarius born on February 17 and a Pisces born on February 20 have Suns only three degrees apart. An Aquarius born on January 21 and a Pisces born on March 19 are close to 60 degrees apart. We ran every pair of birth days in the US file, weighted by births.
| How the two Suns line up | Share of Pisces and Aquarius couples. |
|---|---|
| A true semisextile, within 3 degrees of 30 | About 19 percent. |
| A true semisextile, within 6 degrees of 30 | About 36 percent. |
| A true semisextile, within 10 degrees of 30 | About 56 percent. |
| Suns within 8 degrees of each other | About 3.5 percent, or 1 couple in 28. |
That last row is the odd one. When two points sit that close, astrologers call it a conjunction, a blend of the two. So about 1 couple in 28 is two signs by name, yet almost one point by degree. The same shares hold for any two signs next door. Our page on Leo and Virgo compatibility found the same 1 in 28.
Ptolemy, who wrote the Tetrabiblos in the second century, gave such signs no aspect at all. In Book 1, chapter 16, he calls signs one apart “disjunct.” He says they are “as it were averted from one another.” In plain words, they turn their backs.
His other two links do not help either. Signs that “command and obey” are mirror pairs across the line from Aries to Libra. Signs that “behold” each other are mirror pairs across the line from Cancer to Capricorn. There are two ways to read those rules. One goes sign by sign. The other goes degree by degree, as William Lilly did in 1647. Pisces and Aquarius miss both ways. Pisces mirrors Aries and Libra. Aquarius mirrors Taurus and Scorpio.
Two signs, four rulers
In the old scheme, each planet rules one or two signs. Ptolemy set out the plan in chapter 17. The Sun and the Moon take Leo and Cancer, the signs of high summer. The other planets follow in order of speed, on both sides. Saturn, the slowest, gets the signs across from the Sun and the Moon: Capricorn and Aquarius. Jupiter, next in speed, gets the signs beside those: Sagittarius and Pisces.
So Aquarius and Pisces are where the two slowest old planets meet. Saturn holds one side of the line. Jupiter holds the other. Lilly kept the same table in Christian Astrology.
Then came three new planets. Uranus was found in 1781. Neptune was found in 1846. Pluto was found in 1930. Over the next hundred years, astrologers gave each one a sign. Uranus took Aquarius. Neptune took Pisces. Pluto took Scorpio. The old rulers stayed on as well. So three signs now have two rulers each.
Two of those three signs are Aquarius and Pisces. They sit side by side. Scorpio sits far off, with no double-ruled sign next to it. That makes Pisces and Aquarius the only neighbor pair where both signs have two rulers. Our Aquarius sign guide and Pisces sign guide each trace how the new ruler came in.
The swap of 2003 to 2011
Uranus takes about 84 years to go round the sky. Neptune takes about 165. Each one spends years in a sign. Neptune entered Aquarius in 1998 and stayed until 2011. Uranus left Aquarius for Pisces in 2003. For about eight years, then, each new ruler sat in the other’s sign.
Lilly had a word for two planets in each other’s signs: reception. When it runs both ways, he calls it mutual reception. He read it as a sign of help, where each planet hosts the other. Here, it lines up with a couple. The Aquarius partner’s ruler is a guest in Pisces. The Pisces partner’s ruler is a guest in Aquarius.
Here are the edges, in New York time. Neptune sat in Aquarius from late 1998 to April 4, 2011, so Uranus sets every border.
| What moved | Date, New York time. |
|---|---|
| Uranus enters Pisces, and the swap starts | Afternoon of March 10, 2003. |
| Uranus backs into Aquarius, a break | Late evening of September 14, 2003. |
| Uranus returns to Pisces, and the swap resumes | Early morning of December 30, 2003. |
| Uranus steps into Aries, a break | Evening of May 27, 2010. |
| Uranus backs into Pisces, and the swap resumes | Late evening of August 13, 2010. |
| Uranus leaves Pisces for good, and the swap ends | Evening of March 11, 2011. |
Add up the three stretches and you get about 2,739 days, or 7.5 years. Anyone born from December 30, 2003 to May 27, 2010 has the swap. At the edges, check the hour. Our page on Uranus in Aquarius gives the 2003 crossings to the minute.
How many people have it?
We laid the three stretches over the daily US birth counts. The file runs from 2000 to 2014. About 31.7 million of its 62.2 million babies were born inside the swap. That is 51 percent.
This is a trait of a birth year, not of a sign. A Leo born in 2006 has the swap too. But for a Leo, it means little. Neither planet rules Leo. For a Pisces or an Aquarius, the swap touches the ruler of their own sign. And in a couple of the two, it touches both rulers at once.
The pair gets its fullest form when both partners were born in the swap. For a couple born from 2004 to 2009, that is a sure thing. Each Sun sign’s new ruler then sits in the partner’s sign.
How rare is the swap?
We checked every day from 1600 to 2400. The swap comes back only five times in those 800 years.
| Swap | Years it spans. |
|---|---|
| First | From 1670 to 1676. |
| Second | From 1835 to 1844. |
| Third, the recent one | From 2003 to 2011. |
| Fourth, still ahead | From 2170 to 2176. |
| Fifth, short and broken up | From 2338 to 2340. |
In all, the swap holds for 3.35 percent of those 800 years. The gaps run about 165 to 168 years. So the next swap starts in 2170, long after anyone alive today.
The reverse is stranger still. Suppose Uranus sits in Aquarius while Neptune sits in Pisces. Then both new rulers are at home at once. In our 800 years, that never happens, not for one day. Uranus left Aquarius in 2003. Neptune reached Pisces in 2011. They missed by eight years. Our Pisces sign guide notes that Neptune left Pisces in January 2026 and returns only in 2175.
The old rulers: at home together in 2021 and 2022
Now take the old rulers, Saturn and Jupiter. They move faster, so their meetings come round sooner. We ran the same check for them.
First, a date worth knowing. On December 21, 2020, Jupiter and Saturn met in the sky. Astrologers call their meeting a great conjunction. It comes about every 20 years. This one fell at 0 degrees 29 minutes of Aquarius, right at the door of the sign. It was early afternoon in New York.
Then both rulers stood at home. Saturn sat in Aquarius from December 2020 to March 2023. Jupiter came into Pisces three times in that span.
| Both old rulers at home | Dates, New York time. |
|---|---|
| First stretch | From the evening of May 13 to the morning of July 28, 2021. |
| Second stretch | From late on December 28, 2021 to the evening of May 10, 2022. |
| Third stretch | From just after midnight on October 28 to the morning of December 20, 2022. |
That comes to about 262 days. Over 1600 to 2400, both old rulers sit at home 0.73 percent of the time. It comes back about every 59 years. The one before was 1962 to 1963. The next is 2081 to 2082.
The old swap is far rarer in our age. Saturn in Pisces with Jupiter in Aquarius last came in 1937 and 1938. It does not return until 2258. For each old ruler on its own, see our pages on Saturn in Aquarius and Jupiter in Pisces.
What ten million marriages showed
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. A short version 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 clean table, his Table 7. It holds about 9.5 million couples. Chance here means the count you would expect if people chose partners with no regard to sign.
| Couples in the 2001 census | Found, against chance. |
|---|---|
| Aquarius wife, Pisces husband | 66,286 found, about 66,135 expected. |
| Pisces wife, Aquarius husband | 66,096 found, about 65,977 expected. |
| Both cells added | About 270 more, or 0.20 percent. |
That puts the pair 23rd of the 66 mixed pairs. Voas wrote that any cell could drift up to 450 couples from chance in a random world. Both cells sit well inside that band. So the census shows no pull between these two signs, and no push either.
What the pair means in a reading
Here is how astrologers read the two signs, with no promise attached. Aquarius is air and fixed. It reads as cool, steady and drawn to the group. Pisces is water and mutable, the kind of sign that closes a season. It reads as soft, porous and drawn to the inner world. Stephen Arroyo, in Astrology, Psychology and the Four Elements, treats air and water as two ways to take in life. Air sorts. Water soaks.
The rulers add a second layer. Saturn and Uranus both rule Aquarius, one for order and one for change. Jupiter and Neptune both rule Pisces, one for faith and one for dreams. Liz Greene, in her 1976 book Saturn, reads Saturn as the part of us that builds walls. Pisces is the sign with the fewest walls. That contrast shows up in the sign books again and again. Four snags come up, each with a small step.
| Snag | A small step. |
|---|---|
| Aquarius steps back to think, and Pisces reads it as cold. | Aquarius says how long the pause will be. |
| Pisces feels a mood, and Aquarius wants a reason. | Aquarius asks what would help, not why. |
| Aquarius fills the week with friends and causes. | Keep one night a week for just the two of you. |
| Pisces says yes to keep the peace. | Pisces names one real wish each week. |
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 lies in a plain talk.
The Sun is one point of many
A Sun sign is one point out of at least ten in a birth chart. Comparing two full charts is called synastry. For love, three points matter more than the Sun.
The Moon shows what each person needs to feel safe. Our page on Aquarius and Pisces Moon signs reads the pair at that level. Venus shows what a person finds lovely. Mars shows how each one goes after what they want.
Venus never strays more than about 47 degrees from the Sun. Since these signs are neighbors, an Aquarius can have Venus in Pisces, and a Pisces can have Venus in Aquarius. Our page on Pisces and Aquarius Venus placements reads the pair at that level. 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 almost the same shares.
For the rulers, we found each planet’s sign once a day from 1600 to 2400 with the astronomy-engine library. Then we ran it again with a step of 0.37 days. Both runs gave the same shares to the second decimal. For the exact edges, we found each crossing by halving the time step over and over. We then checked each one against JPL Horizons, the NASA service for planet positions. The two agreed to within a few hours, and on the date in every case.
For the count of babies, we laid the three swap stretches over each day’s births, in Central time. A day cut by a border counts in part.
For the angles between the two Suns, we paired every Aquarius birth day with every Pisces birth day in the US file. Each pair was weighted by the births on both days. We used the Sun’s place at noon, Central time.
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, Book 1, chapters 13 to 17, in the Robbins translation, and Lilly’s table of dignities.
Frequently asked questions
Are Pisces and Aquarius compatible?
Astrology reads them as neighbors with no classic aspect, air beside water. They are the only neighbor signs where both have an old and a new ruler. No study has shown that any sign pair lasts longer, so treat this as a lens, not a forecast.
How common is a Pisces and Aquarius couple?
In US birth data from 2000 to 2014, about 1 random couple in 78 is one Pisces and one Aquarius. That ranks 59th of the 66 mixed sign pairs.
What is the ruler swap of 2003 to 2011?
From March 10, 2003 to March 11, 2011, with two short breaks, Uranus sat in Pisces while Neptune sat in Aquarius. So each sign’s modern ruler sat in the other sign. About 31.7 million US babies born from 2000 to 2014 have it.
When will it happen again?
The next swap of the modern rulers starts in 2170. The old rulers, Saturn and Jupiter, were both at home in 2021 and 2022, and will be again in 2081.
Did Pisces and Aquarius do well in the marriage census?
They came out 0.20 percent above chance in the 2001 census of England and Wales, 23rd of 66 mixed pairs. David Voas judged gaps of this size to be noise.
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