Zodiac Friendship Compatibility

In Western astrology, friendship compatibility follows the elements: signs of the same element, a trine apart, are read as the easiest friends, and fire with air or earth with water, a sextile apart, as the next easiest.

The same reading sits behind every astrology compatibility check on this site, for friends and partners alike.

What is zodiac friendship compatibility?

Zodiac friendship compatibility is the tradition's reading of how easily two sun signs get along as friends. It starts with the four elements: fire, earth, air and water. Then it adds the two other things the tradition reads for love: the angle between the two signs on the zodiac wheel, and their modality, cardinal, fixed or mutable. This page sets out that reading for all twelve signs as a table rather than as a separate friendship score, because the site keeps one rating for every kind of pair.

Astrology is a way of talking about friends, not a test of them. The best-known controlled test, published in Nature in 1985, found that astrologers could not match birth charts to personality profiles better than chance.

Which signs are best friends?

For each sign, the table below names the two signs of its own element, which the tradition reads as the easiest company. It also names the two signs a sextile away, which it reads as easy and friendly. A Cancer, for example, is read as closest to Scorpio and Pisces, the other water signs, and then to Taurus and Virgo, the earth signs two places away on either side.

Which elements make the best friends?

• Same element, a trine apart. The easiest friendship in the tradition: two signs of one element want the same kind of things, and because a trine always joins two different modalities, each goes after them at its own pace.
• Fire with air, earth with water, a sextile apart. Friendly and easy in the tradition, because these are the two element pairs it calls complementary.
• Every other pairing. Signs one, three or five places apart (a semisextile, a square or a quincunx) share no paired element, so the tradition reads the friendship as one that takes more effort. That is a reading of two signs, not a verdict on two friends.

Can opposite signs be friends?

Yes. Opposite signs sit six places apart, share a modality and fall in paired elements, fire with air or earth with water. So the tradition reads a pull in both directions: attraction, with some tension in it. The rating puts opposites in the middle of its scale, which is a long way from the bottom. The same rules decide friendship and love on this site, which raises the obvious question.

Is friendship compatibility the same as love compatibility?

On this site, the rules are the same and so is the rating. There is no separate friendship number: a pair the zodiac page rates highly for love is rated the same way as friends, and a pair it rates low is rated low for both. What changes is how you read the result. Between friends, the element is the part that describes how easily two people enjoy the same things, and the aspect is the part the tradition reads as ease or friction. Any site that shows a friendship score different from its love score for the same two signs is using rules of its own, and a fair one shows them.

Where is the friendship verdict for two signs?

Every sign pair gets its own page on this site, and each one carries a friendship section that reads the pair's rating for friends. The zodiac chart links every pair from one grid, and each sign's own page lists its eleven partners in order, with a link to every pair page that is already published. So a search for two signs as friends is answered on that pair's page, not on a friendship page of its own.

Is there a zodiac friendship compatibility calculator?

Yes and no. The sign check is the table above, or the two-sign selector on the zodiac page, which gives the rating any two signs share for love and friendship. To calculate friendship compatibility from names instead, the Friendship Calculator is the tool: a name game, labelled Game, that plays with the letters of two names and has nothing to do with the stars. The Chinese zodiac has a friendship reading too, but it is a separate tradition with its own animals, its own rules and its own pages.