Tarot Year Card Calculator

How the year card is worked out

The year card comes from Mary K. Greer's work on birth cards and personal years. It uses your birthday, not your birth year, and the year you want to read:

1. Add your birth month, your birth day and the year as plain numbers: July 21 in 2026 is 7 + 21 + 2026 = 2054.
2. Add the digits of that total: 2 + 0 + 5 + 4 = 11.
3. If the result is above 22, add its digits again. The number left is your year card: 11 is Justice. A 22 would be The Fool.

When the year starts is an open question among readers. In a 2011 example Greer counted by the calendar year; in Archetypal Tarot (2021) she reads birthdays from January to June by the calendar year and birthdays from July to December from one birthday to the next. The card for a given year is the same either way; only the day you start reading it moves.

Why the card climbs, and when it falls back

Each new year adds one to the total, so the digit sum usually rises by one: Justice this year, The Hanged Man the next, Death the year after. The exception comes when the total passes a round ten. 2059 becomes 2060, the digit sum drops from 16 to 8, and the card falls back by eight places. Which year that happens depends on your birthday, not on the calendar.

So a run of year cards reads like a short stretch of the Major Arcana in order, with a reset every decade or so. The calculator shows your next few years so you can see where your run is heading.

Why another calculator may give a different card

There are two common ways to add the date. Greer's, used on this page, adds the month, the day and the whole year as numbers. The other adds every single digit of the date: for July 21, 2026 that is 7 + 2 + 1 + 2 + 0 + 2 + 6 = 20, Judgement, where Greer's method gives Justice (11).

Tarot.com's calculator uses the every-digit method and reduces any total above 21, so it never gives The Fool. Over every birthday in 2026 the two methods give different cards about three times in four. The calculator shows both, so you can see which one another site used.

How the 366 birthdays split in 2026

Worked out over every birthday, February 29 included. In any one year only about a dozen cards occur, and the middle numbers are the common ones.

The cards nobody draws this century

Under Greer's method, between 2000 and 2099 the digit sum of month + day + year never falls below 3 or rises above 20. So The Magician, The High Priestess, The World and The Fool are nobody's year card for the rest of this century. Others are rare for decades at a time: The Moon first appears in 2036, The Sun in 2046 and Judgement in 2056, each for a single birthday. The every-digit method spreads the cards more widely, which is one reason the two disagree so often.

All 22 year cards

Each page holds what the year tends to ask, questions to sit with, and the birthdays that give the card in 2026 and 2027.

• The Magician Year Card1
• The High Priestess Year Card2
• The Empress Year Card3
• The Emperor Year Card4
• The Hierophant Year Card5
• The Lovers Year Card6
• The Chariot Year Card7
• Strength Year Card8
• The Hermit Year Card9
• Wheel of Fortune Year Card10
• Justice Year Card11
• The Hanged Man Year Card12
• Death Year Card13
• Temperance Year Card14
• The Devil Year Card15
• The Tower Year Card16
• The Star Year Card17
• The Moon Year Card18
• The Sun Year Card19
• Judgement Year Card20
• The World Year Card21
• The Fool Year Card22

Year cards and birth cards

Your birth cards come from the same arithmetic with your birth year in place of the current one, and they stay with you for life. The year card changes every birthday. A year whose card matches one of your birth cards is often read as a year that returns you to your own ground.

Find your birth cards

Questions about tarot year cards