Taurus and Sagittarius compatibility comes with a strange record. In the largest test of love signs ever run, this pair came last. A census of about 9.5 million married couples held fewer Taurus and Sagittarius pairs than chance predicts. No other mix of two signs fell further short.
Before you worry, read the size of the gap. It was 0.93 percent. That is about one couple in 107 that chance expected and did not find. The man who ran the test called gaps like this noise. This page shows why he was right, and why one pair had to finish last.
We add two counts of our own. About one random US couple in 76 is a Taurus and a Sagittarius. And in New York, Sagittarius takes 2 hours 22 minutes to rise, while Taurus takes 1 hour 26 minutes. Ptolemy tied this pair’s lack of a link to that very gap. Read all of 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 76, the 48th most common of 66 mixed pairs. |
| How did the pair do in the 2001 census? | Last of 66 mixed pairs, 0.93 percent below chance. |
| Does that mean the pair fails? | No, the gap sits inside the noise of a table this big. |
| What angle links the signs? | A quincunx, five signs or 150 degrees apart. |
| What did Ptolemy call them? | Disjunct, meaning the signs have no tie at all. |
| How long does each sign take to rise in New York? | Taurus takes 1 hour 26 minutes, Sagittarius 2 hours 22 minutes. |
| Can a Taurus have Venus in Sagittarius? | Never, and a Sagittarius never has Venus in Taurus. |
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. Taurus runs from about April 20 to May 20. 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 Taurus and Sagittarius 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 7.95 percent are Sagittarius.
Now pair two people at random. The couple can be a Taurus woman with a Sagittarius man, or the reverse. Both count. So the chance is two times 8.29 percent times 7.95 percent. That gives 1.32 percent, or about 1 couple in 76.
| Pair of signs | Chance for a random US couple. |
|---|---|
| Leo and Virgo, the most common mixed pair | About 1 in 62. |
| Taurus and Leo, the most common Taurus pair | About 1 in 67. |
| What an even split would give | 1 in 72. |
| Taurus and Sagittarius | About 1 in 76. |
| Capricorn and Aquarius, the rarest mixed pair | About 1 in 83. |
So Taurus and Sagittarius rank 48th of the 66 mixed pairs. Sagittarius pulls the pair down. It is the third rarest Sun sign in US births. Only Capricorn and Aquarius are rarer.
Why is Sagittarius rarer than Taurus?
Two things set a sign’s share: how long its season lasts, and how many babies are born each day of it. We split the two apart.
The Sun moves faster in winter, when Earth is closest to it. So the winter signs are short. From 2000 to 2014, the Sun spent about 30.96 days in Taurus. It spent only about 29.56 days in Sagittarius. That is 1.4 days less. These are the years of the birth file; over the site’s reference window, 1600 to 2400, the figures round the same.
The daily birth rate was close in both seasons. A Taurus day had about 2.2 percent fewer births than the average day of the year. A Sagittarius day had about 1.7 percent fewer. So Sagittarius is rarer mostly because its season is shorter, not because fewer babies are born each day.
Last of 66 pairs in a census of married couples
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. The test ran again 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. Some forms had one birthday typed in for both spouses. He removed those errors and built a clean table, his Table 7. It holds about 9.5 million couples.
The Taurus and Sagittarius cells
We read the two cells for this pair. Then we worked out what chance alone predicts for each one. Chance here means the count you would get if spouses paired up with no regard for sign.
| Couple | Found in the census | What chance predicts | Gap. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Taurus wife, Sagittarius husband | 65,322 couples | About 65,890 couples | About 568 fewer. |
| Sagittarius wife, Taurus husband | 65,343 couples | About 65,995 couples | About 652 fewer. |
| Both together | 130,665 couples | About 131,886 couples | About 1,221 fewer, or 0.93 percent. |
We did the same sum for all 66 mixed pairs. Taurus and Sagittarius came last. The next lowest were Sagittarius and Pisces, at 0.73 percent below chance, and Aries and Virgo, at 0.65 percent below. Voas printed his own table of gaps, his Table 8. The Sagittarius wife and Taurus husband cell is the lowest of all 144 cells there.
Our page on Pisces and Sagittarius compatibility reads the second-lowest pair, cell by cell.
Why the last place means nothing
Voas saw this coming. He wrote that in a table this big, one cell can drift about 450 couples from chance with no cause at all. A few cells went a bit further, down to about 680 below. He judged the whole spread to be noise. The largest gap in the table, he noted, was barely 1 percent.
Think of it like a race of 66 runners who all run at the same speed. Someone still crosses the line last. The gap between first and last tells you about luck, not skill. Here, the top mixed pair was Taurus and Cancer, at 0.62 percent above chance. So the same Taurus row holds both the best and the worst pair. That is what noise looks like.
There is one more reason for care. Voas found that his fix for the form errors was not perfect. Signs next to each other still had a small excess. By simple arithmetic, that excess pushes the far cells a little below chance. Taurus and Sagittarius are far apart on the wheel.
His verdict covered every cell: the signs had no effect on who married whom, or who stayed married. We agree with him. We print the last place because it is true, and because it shows how easily a small gap can be sold as a big claim.
Five signs apart: a quincunx
Place the twelve signs on a wheel. Count from Taurus to Sagittarius: Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius. That is seven steps one way. Count the other way: Aries, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, Sagittarius. That is five steps of 30 degrees, or 150 degrees. An aspect is a set angle between two points in the sky. The 150 degree angle is called a quincunx, or an inconjunct.
It is not one of the four classic aspects. The old books count only the opposition, the trine, the square and the sextile. Modern astrologers added the quincunx and read it as an awkward link. The two signs share no element and no mode. Taurus is earth and fixed, meaning it sits in the middle of a season. Sagittarius is fire and mutable, meaning it closes one.
A quincunx by sign is not always a quincunx by degree. A sign is 30 degrees wide, so two Suns in these signs can sit anywhere from 120 to 180 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 five apart, about 19 percent of couples fall within 3 degrees of 150. About 36 percent fall within 6 degrees, and about 56 percent within 10. The shape of the wheel sets those shares, not the signs.
What Ptolemy said: no tie of any kind
Claudius Ptolemy wrote the Tetrabiblos in Alexandria, around 150 AD. It shaped astrology for the next 1,500 years. In Book 1, he lists the ties that link two signs. First come the four aspects. Then come two more ties, which he builds from the length of the day and the time a sign takes to rise.
In chapter 16, he names the signs with none of those ties. He calls them disjunct, or alien. They are one or five signs apart. Five signs apart, he says, cut the circle into unequal parts. Taurus and Sagittarius are five signs apart, so the question is real. Is there a back door that links them? We checked both ways of reading him.
The whole sign reading
Frank Robbins translated the book in 1940. His notes list the pairs of signs that command and obey. Taurus pairs with Pisces there, and Sagittarius with Leo. His notes list the pairs that behold each other too. Taurus pairs with Virgo there, and Sagittarius with Aquarius. Neither list puts Taurus with Sagittarius. So by whole signs, the pair is disjunct. Modern writers such as Chris Brennan call this state aversion: two signs that cannot see each other.
The degree reading
Some astrologers read the same ties degree by degree. Each point then has a mirror point. William Lilly, in Christian Astrology in 1647, calls the mirror across the solstice line an antiscion. He calls the mirror across the equinox line a contra-antiscion.
Take 10 degrees Taurus. Its antiscion is 20 degrees Leo. Its contra-antiscion is 20 degrees Aquarius. Now take 10 degrees Sagittarius. Its mirrors fall in Capricorn and Cancer. No point in Taurus mirrors a point in Sagittarius. So the degree reading agrees with the whole sign reading. This is not true of every pair five apart. Cancer and Sagittarius, for one, are linked by degree, as our page on Cancer and Sagittarius, two signs that rise in the same time shows. For Taurus and Sagittarius, both readings say the same thing: no tie.
One sign rises fast, the other rises slowly
Here is the reason behind Ptolemy’s rule, and it can be measured. He says two signs command and obey when they rise in equal time. 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 all rise at the same pace. The tilt of Earth’s axis makes some climb fast and some climb slowly.
Taurus is one of the fast ones. Sagittarius is one of the slow ones. We worked out the rising time of each sign for five US cities.
| City | Taurus takes | Sagittarius takes | How much longer Sagittarius takes. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Miami | 1 hour 41 minutes | 2 hours 16 minutes | About 1.3 times as long. |
| Los Angeles | 1 hour 33 minutes | 2 hours 19 minutes | About 1.5 times as long. |
| New York | 1 hour 26 minutes | 2 hours 22 minutes | About 1.65 times as long. |
| Chicago | 1 hour 25 minutes | 2 hours 23 minutes | About 1.7 times as long. |
| Seattle | 1 hour 16 minutes | 2 hours 27 minutes | About 1.9 times as long. |
The further north the city, the wider the gap. In Seattle, Sagittarius takes almost twice as long as Taurus.
This changes how common each rising sign is. Suppose births were spread evenly over the hours of the day. Then in New York, about 6.0 percent of people would have Taurus rising. About 9.9 percent would have Sagittarius rising. Real births are not spread evenly, since hospitals plan many of them. Still, the tilt of the sky gives Sagittarius rising a clear head start.
Astrologers who follow the Greeks call Taurus a sign of short ascension and Sagittarius a sign of long ascension. Vettius Valens, in his Anthologies, gave tables of rising times for each band of latitude. Taurus rises in the same time as Aquarius. Sagittarius rises in the same time as Cancer. That is why Ptolemy pairs those signs, and not these two.
Long ascension matters for other pairs too: our page on Virgo and Sagittarius compatibility adds up the three slow signs between them and finds a square that rises almost like a trine.
The two rulers never trade places
Every sign has a ruler, a planet that owns it the way a host owns a house. Venus rules Taurus. Jupiter rules Sagittarius. The old books call these two planets the benefics, the ones that bring good things. Venus is the lesser one, Jupiter the greater. Our page on Libra and Sagittarius, a pair ruled by both benefics looks at the same two planets from another side.
Here is a fact special to this pair. A Taurus can never have Venus in Sagittarius. A Sagittarius can never have Venus in Taurus. Venus never strays more than about 47 degrees from the Sun. Taurus and Sagittarius sit at least 150 degrees apart. So Venus cannot reach the other sign.
We checked every six hours from 1600 to 2400, with the astronomy-engine library. The largest gap between the Sun and Venus came to 47.28 degrees. Here is where Venus sat for each sign.
| Sun sign | Where Venus can be | Share with Venus in the Sun’s own sign. |
|---|---|---|
| Taurus | Pisces, Aries, Taurus, Gemini or Cancer | 24.35 percent, with Venus at home. |
| Sagittarius | Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn or Aquarius | 23.89 percent, with Venus in Sagittarius. |
The Taurus figure matches the one on our Taurus sign page, which counts how many Taurus natives have their ruler at home. Our Sagittarius sign page does the same for Jupiter. Jupiter is a slow planet, so it can sit in any sign for either partner.
The Moon adds one more thread. The old books say the Moon is exalted in Taurus. Exalted means honored: a planet does its best work there. In Sagittarius, the Moon has no major rank, neither home nor exaltation. So Taurus hosts two planets with high rank, Venus and the Moon. Sagittarius hosts one, Jupiter. None of them has its home or its exaltation in the other sign.
Attraction and identity run on separate wires in a birth chart. Our page on Taurus and Sagittarius Venus placements reads the pair at the level of Venus.
Where the pair snags
The quincunx is read as a link between two people who speak different languages. Earth wants to keep what works. Fire wants to find what is next. Here are four snags from the sign books, each with a small step.
| Where it snags | What Taurus feels | What Sagittarius feels | A small step that helps. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pace | Rushed by sudden plans | Held back by a slow yes | Give each new plan one night before you decide. |
| Money | Safe with savings in the bank | Free with a fund for the next trip | Keep one shared pot and one travel pot. |
| Home | Happy in a known, cozy space | Restless in the same four walls | Plan one trip each season, and one quiet weekend. |
| Honest words | Hurt by a blunt remark | Blamed for simply telling the truth | Say the kind part first, then the true part. |
None of these steps needs a chart. Any two people with these styles can use them. That is the honest point. 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 fire as the element of spirit.
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 chases what they want. For this pair, add the rising sign. A Sagittarius Sun can have Taurus rising, and a Taurus Sun can have Sagittarius rising.
So a Taurus Sun can have an Aries Moon. A Sagittarius Sun can have Venus in Capricorn. Each of those says more than the Sun pair does. If you know both birth dates and times, the full comparison 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 Taurus 8.36 percent and Sagittarius 7.90 percent. The pair chance is then about 1 in 76 as well. For the season lengths, we summed the time between the Sun’s entries into each sign, 2000 to 2014.
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. That is the same method Voas used for Table 8.
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 two million moments of one turn of the Earth and counts the time in each sign. Both agree to within one hundredth of a degree. We used a tilt of 23.44 degrees for Earth’s axis.
For Venus, we used the astronomy-engine library, every six hours from 1600 to 2400. For the old rules, we read Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, Book 1, chapters 13 to 16, in the Robbins translation.
Frequently asked questions
Are Taurus and Sagittarius compatible?
Astrology reads them as a quincunx, an awkward link between earth and fire. Ptolemy calls them disjunct, with no tie at all. 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 Taurus and Sagittarius couple?
In US birth data from 2000 to 2014, about 1 random couple in 76 is one Taurus and one Sagittarius. That ranks 48th of the 66 mixed sign pairs.
Did Taurus and Sagittarius really come last in the marriage census?
Yes. In the 2001 census of England and Wales, the pair was 0.93 percent below chance, the lowest of 66 mixed pairs. David Voas judged gaps of this size to be noise, and one pair always has to finish last.
Can a Taurus have Venus in Sagittarius?
No. Venus stays within about 47 degrees of the Sun, and the two signs are at least 150 degrees apart. A Taurus has Venus in Pisces, Aries, Taurus, Gemini or Cancer.
Why does Sagittarius rise more slowly than Taurus?
Earth’s tilted axis makes some signs climb the horizon faster than others. In New York, Taurus rises in about 1 hour 26 minutes and Sagittarius in about 2 hours 22 minutes.
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