♌ Leo

Leo is the sun of the zodiac: warm, radiant and generous. It creates, performs, and shines brightest when it's truly seen.

Leo at a glance

• DatesJuly 23 – August 22
• ElementFire
• ModalityFixed
• Ruling planetthe Sun
• PolarityPositive
• ArchetypeThe Performer / The Sovereign

Leo dates, to the minute

The Sun is in Leo from about 23 July to 22 August. The exact moment moves by up to a day from one year to the next, because a year is not a whole number of days. These are the moments the Sun crosses into Leo and out again, computed by the same engine that casts every chart on this site.

Times are Universal Time (UTC). Your own clock can put the change on the day before or the day after. Born on one of these days? The Sun sign then depends on the minute, and a chart cast with your birth time settles it.

What Leo is like

Leo is ruled by the Sun, and it is the only sign that is. Everything else in a chart borrows its light from somewhere. Leo is the sign of the thing at the centre that the rest of it goes around.

It is warm before it is anything else. The generosity is real and it arrives first, and it is usually what people remember about a Leo long after they have forgotten what was actually said.

It needs to be seen, and that is the part worth being careful with. Wanting to be seen is not vanity. It is the difference between doing the work and doing the work in a room where it counts, and Leo simply cannot pretend that difference does not exist.

Fixed fire. It keeps burning, and it warms whatever is nearest.

In the body, Leo is linked to the heart, spine and upper back.

What it costs

Pride makes small things expensive. A Leo will hold a position long past believing in it rather than be seen to fold, and the position almost always costs more than the folding would have.

And the need to be seen has a price of its own: the performance can start running when nobody asked for one, in rooms where being ordinary would have been easier and more welcome.

The way through is not modesty. It is an audience worth having. Leo dims fastest around people who cannot be pleased and steadies the moment it is among people who can.

Your Sun sign is one placement of ten

A Sun sign is one planet out of ten. Leo is the one place where that undersells it a little, because the Sun rules Leo, so the planet and the sign are saying the same thing twice.

It is still not the whole chart. The other nine each have a sign of their own, starting with the Moon. A Leo Sun with a Virgo Moon is warm in public and hard on itself in private. Nobody is one placement, and the interesting part is usually the argument between two.

Born with the Sun in Leo

Twelve of the most looked-up people among the famous charts on this site, each with the Sun in Leo at any hour of their birthday:

Each one is a full chart, with the Moon and every planet, so you can see how differently the same Sun sign sits in twelve lives.

Where Leo sits in your chart, whatever your sign

There is Leo in every chart, including the ones with no fire anywhere else in them. It falls on one of your houses whether or not a planet is standing there.

Traditionally it is read as the lit part of the stage. Find yours, then ask honestly whether doing that same thing with nobody watching would still be worth it.

Leo on the eastern horizon at the minute you were born makes a Leo rising sign, a different placement from a Leo Sun and one that needs your birth time: what a rising sign is.

Leo season, in the sky

The Sun is in Leo from late July to late August, at its hottest in the northern hemisphere, with the constellation the sign is named for lost in the glare behind it.

Regulus, the heart of the Lion and its brightest star, spent roughly two thousand years inside the sign Leo and left it in 2012. It now falls at 0 degrees of the sign Virgo. Nothing moved suddenly: the equinox has been drifting the whole time, and Regulus happened to cross the line in our lifetime.

the Sun, the sign's ruler

Leo is ruled by the Sun, which is not a planet and does not behave like one. It never turns retrograde, it barely changes speed, and it spends exactly one month in each sign every year of your life. It is the only body in the chart that is always going forwards.

That steadiness is why the Sun sign became the one everybody knows. For a Leo, the usual correction, that your Sun sign is only the headline, is gentler than it is for anyone else.

Leo compatibility

Leo with Aries · Taurus · Gemini · Cancer · Leo · Virgo · Libra · Scorpio · Sagittarius · Capricorn · Aquarius · Pisces.

A pairing of Sun signs is the coarsest version of compatibility. Two whole charts compared planet by planet is where the detail is.

Leo also touches

performance, romance, children, play, the stage, generosity, loyalty, self-expression.

A question to sit with

What changes when you are properly seen, and what does it take to ask for that?