Vedic Sun Sign Dates: Sidereal Zodiac Dates 2026–2028

In Vedic astrology the Sun changes sign between the 12th and the 18th of each month, not around the 19th to the 23rd as in western astrology. The Vedic zodiac is sidereal: its signs are measured from a point fixed against the stars, while the western, tropical zodiac starts from the March equinox. In 2027 every Vedic sign begins 23 to 26 days after the western sign of the same name, so for most birthdays the western Sun sign is one sign ahead of the Vedic one.

As this is published the Sun is in sidereal Libra, तुला. It enters Scorpio on 16 November 2026 at 19:39 IST, and the Sun’s month in Scorpio runs from there. The tables below give every entry from 2026 to 2028, then the entry dates of a whole century, because a birthday near one of these dates can fall in either sign depending on the year and the hour.

When the Sun Enters Each Sign, 2026 to 2028

Times are IST, from the site’s ingress table, which is computed from the JPL DE421 ephemeris with the Lahiri ayanamsa. A Sun sign runs from its entry to the next sign’s entry, so a birth in 2027 has a Vedic Aries Sun from 14 April, 15:23 IST, until the Sun enters Taurus on 15 May at 12:14.

Each of these instants is also a Sankranti, the name the panchang gives to the Sun’s entry into a sign. The day on which a Sankranti is kept as a festival follows rules of its own about sunrise and the hours around the entry, so this table is a list of entries and not of festival days. The Makara entry in January and the Karka entry in July are the two the Uttarayan and Dakshinayan page discusses.

Western and Vedic Dates Side by Side, 2027

The western start dates are computed from the Sun’s tropical longitude and given as dates only; the western Capricorn that leads into the Vedic one of January 2027 begins on 22 December 2026. The gap is the Lahiri ayanamsa, about 24° in these years, covered at the Sun’s pace of roughly a degree a day. It varies a little from sign to sign, mostly because the Sun moves faster in January than in July, and partly because the table counts calendar days. The ayanamsa page gives the value itself and how it is calculated.

Reading the Sun at noon IST on each day of 2027, the two zodiacs name the same sign on 69 days, about 19% of the year. Those days are the short stretch in each month between the Vedic entry and the next western one, for instance 15 to 20 April, when both systems put the Sun in Aries. On the other 296 days the western sign is the next sign along, never any other. In short, the answer to “why is my sign different in Vedic astrology” is this: the name moves back one sign for roughly four birthdays in five, and stays the same for the rest.

Why the Date Moves From Year to Year

The Sun takes 365 days 6 hours and about 9 minutes to come back to the same point among the stars, which is the length of the sidereal year measured here from the Aries entries of 1950 and 2050. A common year of 365 days is about six hours shorter, so each entry comes about six hours later in the day than the year before, and each leap day moves the date back by one. Aries shows the pattern: the Sun entered it on 14 April 2026 at 09:29, enters it on 14 April 2027 at 15:23, and in 2028 a day earlier in the calendar, on 13 April at 21:38, because 29 February 2028 falls in between.

Over a longer span there is also a slow slide. The years 1950 to 2050 hold a leap day every fourth year without exception, 2000 included, so the calendar averages exactly 365¼ days across them. The sidereal year is about 9 minutes longer than that, and the minutes add up: the Aries entry of 2050 comes about 15 hours later in its leap cycle than the entry of 1950. That is why, among the dated years, 18 October appears as a Libra entry date only from 2019, and 16 October not after 1972.

Every Entry Date, 1950 to 2050

Over these 101 years each sign has two possible entry dates, or three for Libra, Scorpio and Capricorn. The counts are years. They were computed by scanning the Sun’s sidereal longitude across the whole century with the site’s solar routine, which reproduces all 36 DE421 entries of 2026 to 2028 to within 13 minutes. Of the 1,212 entries in the century, 29 fall within 20 minutes of midnight. That is too close to give them a date, so they are left out of the counts.

The two rarer dates sit at opposite ends of the century. Libra began on 16 October in six years, 1952, 1956, 1960, 1964, 1968, 1972, and falls on 18 October in eight, every fourth year from 2019 to 2047, 2027 among them. Scorpio and Capricorn show a similar pattern, a month and three months later.

Born on a Cusp Date

If a birthday falls on one of the dates in that table, the year decides, and on the entry day itself the hour decides too. Take 14 April. In 40 years the Aries entry falls on 13 April (most recently 2024, next in 2028); anyone born on 14 April in those years has a Vedic Aries Sun. In the 58 years whose entry falls on the 14th, as it did in 2026 and does in 2027, a birth that day before the entry instant still has the Sun in Pisces. The year lists for every sign:

A year missing from every row of its sign is one of the entries too near midnight to date, listed in the century table above.

The fixed table in the site’s Sun sign calculator gives each sign a single start date, and in every case it is the latest of the entry dates above: Aries from 14 April, Libra from 18 October. Birthdays from the day after a sign’s start date to the day before the next sign’s earliest entry date are not in doubt. On the start date and the day or two before it, a fixed table cannot see the year or the hour: it puts every 17 October birth in Virgo, although in 85 of the dated years the Sun enters Libra during that day, and in six more, all before 1973, it was in Libra all day. For a birthday on a cusp date the way to settle it is the Sun’s actual longitude at the moment of birth. The free kundli computes it from the date and time of birth (it asks you to sign in first). Its solar routine is the one used for the century table, so for a birth within about a quarter of an hour of an entry instant, compare the time with the 2026–2028 table above or treat the sign as undecided. The Janam Kundli report prints the Sun’s degree and nakshatra along with the other grahas’.

Sun Sign or Moon Sign?

The Sun sign is one of three signs a Vedic chart gives, with the Moon sign (Chandra rashi) and the lagna. When an Indian rashifal says “your rashi” it usually means the Moon sign, and the horoscopes on this site are read from it. The Moon changes sign about every two and a quarter days, so on many dates the birth time decides it; the Moon sign calculator finds it, and there is a side-by-side comparison of the two on the Sun sign vs Moon sign page. What the texts assign to the Sun itself is on the Surya page. In Hindi: सूर्य राशि की तारीखें 2026–2028: वैदिक राशि कब बदलती है.

What This Page Does Not Give

This page gives no festival date for any Sankranti, for the reason above, and no clock time for any year outside 2026 to 2028: the century table is a list of dates, read from a routine checked to within 13 minutes of the ephemeris, and the 29 entries closest to midnight are left undated. It says nothing about what a Sun sign is supposed to mean for a person. Only the Lahiri ayanamsa is used, and an almanac on a different ayanamsa can put an entry on a different day.

In Brief

• Vedic Sun signs change: on the 12th to 18th of each month, 23 to 26 days after the western dates in 2027
• Next entry: Scorpio, 16 November 2026 at 19:39 IST
• Same sign in both zodiacs: 69 days of 2027; on every other day the western sign is one ahead
• Why the date moves: about six hours later each common year, a day back at each leap day, and about 15 hours later per century
• Cusp birthdays: any date in the century table; settle them with the Sun’s longitude at the birth time, not a fixed date range