Tarot Timing Calculator

Tarot timing chart at a glance

Find your card in the inner ring. The dates printed under it are that card's ten days of the year, and the outer ring shows the zodiac sign those days belong to. The Six of Pentacles, for example, sits in the middle of Taurus, from April 30 to May 9.

Only the 36 numbered cards are on the wheel: the Two to the Ten of each suit. An Ace or a Page takes a whole season, a court card takes a sign, and a Major Arcana card takes a sign or a planet. They have their own sections below.

Three ways readers time a card

The rule most people meet first ties the suit to a unit of time and the number on the card to a count. In the version repeated most often online, Wands are days, Swords are weeks, Cups are months and Pentacles are years, so the Three of Cups is three months. The Eight of Wands gets its reputation as the fastest card in the deck from this rule.

Published versions of the rule contradict each other. Courtney Weber's timing guide from 2025 gives Swords to days, Cups to weeks, Wands to months and Pentacles to years, which turns that same Eight of Wands into eight months. The seasons vary too. A common list has Wands as spring, Cups as summer, Swords as autumn and Pentacles as winter, while Weber reads court cards with Swords as winter, Cups as spring, Wands as summer and Pentacles as autumn. Neither is wrong, because there is no older source to check either one against. They are personal systems, and they work for the readers who built them.

Joy Vernon's "Tarot and Timing" chart takes the second approach. It lists the decan dates for the numbered cards, reads Aces as "immediately" and gives Pages no timing.

The tables on this page give all three. The calendar comes from a text you can open and read. The rule of thumb is there because it is what most people expect to see, in its most repeated version. The count is our own.

The decan calendar: when in the year each card falls

A decan is a ten-degree slice of the zodiac. Twelve signs of thirty degrees each make 36 decans, and the Sun spends about ten days in each one. There are also 36 numbered cards from Two to Ten across the four suits.

The match was made in Book T, the tarot manuscript written for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn around 1888 and usually credited to S. L. MacGregor Mathers. It gives each decan one numbered card and one planet. The planets run in the Chaldean order (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon), beginning with Mars in the first ten degrees of Aries and ending with Mars again in the last ten degrees of Pisces. A. E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith were both members of the order, and the deck they published in 1909 follows the same assignments.

Each suit table has three timing columns. "Calendar window" is the card's decan, in dates for the tropical zodiac, which can move by a day from one year to the next. "Common rule" is the suit and number rule of thumb. "Tarotap count" is our own forward count: how long from today, worked out for where you are. It is described in the next section.

Aces have no decan. Book T places each Ace, with the Page of its suit, over a quarter of the zodiac, which is three signs. Read as a calendar, that is one season.

Wands

The Five and Ten of Wands run to years. The two systems disagree most about the Eight of Wands: eight days by the suit rule, several months by the count.

Cups

The Eight of Cups is the slow card of the suit. It runs to years.

Swords

The Three of Swords is the slow card here. It runs to years.

Pentacles

Rules of thumb treat Pentacles as the slow suit, years where Wands get days. In the count they are no slower than Cups or Swords. Only the Seven of Pentacles takes years.

Counting forward: the Tarotap count

The calendar tells you a season. It cannot tell you which year, and it is awkward when you ask in May about a card whose ten days fell in April. For "how long from now" we use a second method that counts forward from the day of the reading.

The count starts from the card's astrological attributions and gives a span of time from the day you ask. We do not publish how it is worked out. That is part of how Tarotap's readings work. On this page it is worked out for where you are and counted from today, in weeks for the short ones and in months or years for the long ones. The lookup also says roughly when that falls.

Most numbered cards land a few weeks to a few months ahead. Five of them run to years: the Five and Ten of Wands, the Eight of Cups, the Three of Swords and the Seven of Pentacles. Court cards and Major Arcana range from about a month to about two years, and they count the same wherever you are.

These figures are for the ordinary pace of things. For a question that will be settled within days, such as waiting to hear back from someone, a reader works on a faster clock and the same card lands much sooner. The Eight of Wands is the clearest case: several months at the ordinary pace, far sooner on the faster clock, which is closer to the card's reputation.

Choosing the clock is the reader's judgement.

Court cards and Major Arcana

Court cards and Major Arcana have no decan of their own.

In the calendar a court card takes a sign. The Queen gets the cardinal sign of her suit's element, the King the fixed sign and the Knight the mutable sign. That is a simplification of the Golden Dawn scheme, where each court card covers twenty degrees of one sign and ten of the sign before it.

A Major Arcana card takes the sign or the planet Book T gives it. A card with a sign has a month of the year. A card with a planet has no dates.

In the Tarotap count these cards mostly run longer than numbered cards. When a court card or a Major turns up as the timing card, we read it as a longer arc.

Aces, Pages and other cards without a count

Thirteen cards give no number in the Tarotap count. Most of them still have an answer in one of the other systems.

The four Aces have no decan and no planet. In the Golden Dawn calendar each Ace covers a quarter of the year: the Ace of Wands from June 21 to September 22, the Ace of Cups from September 23 to December 21, the Ace of Swords from December 22 to March 20 and the Ace of Pentacles from March 21 to June 20. By the suit rule an Ace is one unit, so one day for the Ace of Wands and one year for the Ace of Pentacles, and many readers read any Ace as "right away", as Joy Vernon's chart does. In our count an Ace as the timing card means draw one more card and time that one.

The four Pages share their Ace's quarter of the year. Rules of thumb give them a season (Courtney Weber reads a Page as the start of its suit's season) or no timing at all (Vernon). Our count has no number for them.

The Hermit and Justice belong to Virgo and Libra, so each has a month in the calendar. In the count, in the lineage we follow, they decline to answer. Either it is too early to ask, or something that matters has been left out of the question.

The Fool, The Hanged Man and Judgement are the elements Air, Water and Fire in the Golden Dawn scheme, and many modern decks give them Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. The count has no number for them.

Reversals do not change the count.

How to pull a timing card

1. Ask one "when" question about one event. "When will I hear back about the interview" works. "When will I get the job and move" is two events.
2. Shuffle while you hold the question in mind. If you are new to it, here is how to shuffle tarot cards.
3. Lay three cards in a row for the situation, then one card above them as the timing card.
4. Look at what kind of card the timing card is. A numbered card from Two to Ten is the easiest to read. If it is an Ace, draw one more.
5. Say the answer as a window. Give the broad range first, then the point inside it you would bet on.
6. Write down the date, the cards and the window. When the window has passed, go back and note what happened.

If the timing card gives no time, ask what has to happen first and draw one card for that. Knowing the step before the event is often more useful than a date.

How accurate is tarot timing?

Nobody has shown that tarot predicts dates. There are no controlled studies that support it, and we are not going to claim otherwise.

What a timing card does give you is a specific window to plan around and a date to come back and check. That alone is useful to anyone who would otherwise draw cards about the same worry every second evening.

Plenty of things move the real date. Other people change their minds. You act on what the reading said and things speed up or stall. A question that bundles two events gets one card for two clocks.

Do not use a timing card for medical, legal or financial deadlines.

It helps to know which parts of the method are fixed and which are a judgement call. The decan dates are fixed, and anyone can check them against Book T. The choice of clock is a judgement, and two readers can make it differently.

How we made this chart

The decans, the court cards' signs and the Aces' quarters come from Book T. The common rule column follows the most repeated published version of the suit rule.

The Tarotap count is the one our readings use. This page works it out when you open it, from today's date and your approximate location, which is all it needs from you. For the numbered cards the figure depends on how far north or south you are, so two readers can see different figures for the same card. The same count runs inside Tarotap readings for questions such as when someone will get in touch, when you will meet a partner or when a job will come through.

Last reviewed November 2026.

Ask your own "when" question

You can also let the reading do the arithmetic. On Tarotap, type a question such as when you will hear back or when you will meet someone, draw your cards, and the reading works out the window from your card for your part of the world.

For relationship questions that need more than a date, there is the love tarot reading. To look up what your timing card means apart from its timing, use the tarot card meanings cheat sheet.

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