Your Tarot Year Card reveals the overarching themes, lessons, and areas of development shaping a specific year of your life. Calculated using your date of birth and the current year, it offers a symbolic framework for reflection, intention-setting, and conscious engagement with time.
Unlike daily or situational Tarot readings, the Tarot Year Card works as a long-range compass. It doesn’t predict events. Instead, it highlights the kind of experiences, challenges, and growth you’re most likely to encounter — and how you might work with them wisely.
Navigate to:
- How to Calculate Your Tarot Year Card
- Tarot Year Card Meanings
- How to Work with Your Tarot Year Card
- Navigating the Year Ahead: A Tarot Year Card Spread
This guide explains exactly how to calculate your Tarot Year Card, clears up common misconceptions, and explores what each card suggests about the year ahead
How to Calculate Your Tarot Year Card
To find your Tarot Year Card, follow these steps:
- Add the day and month of your birth to the current year (or the year you’re interested in).
- Sum up all the digits in the result.
- If the sum is between 1 and 22, that’s your Tarot Year Card number. 22 corresponds with The Fool.
- If the sum is higher than 22, add the digits again until you get a number between 1 and 22.
For example, if you were born on 1 March, you would add the numbers together like this:
In Tarot for Your Self by Mary K. Greer, there are graphs that you can copy and use to show your year cards from age 0-21. There’s also a table that makes it quick and easy to figure out the card for each year.
It is interesting looking at the graph and trying to figure out what the energies of the Year Cards may have influenced main events. Knowing your Year Card (and your Birth Cards) also adds a deeper layer of meaning when interpreting your natal chart.
Important: Your Tarot Year Card Does Not Always Move Forward
A common misunderstanding is that Tarot Year Cards always progress sequentially from one year to the next. This is not always the case.
Your Tarot Year Card is recalculated each year using your day and month of birth combined with the calendar year in question. Because the year changes, the total changes — and so does the resulting card.
Using the same birth date as above (1 March), the equation for 2026 would be calculated afresh rather than counted on from the previous year:
Your Year Card may:
- Jump forward several numbers, while still reducing to the next single digit in the sequence
- Appear to move “backwards” to a single digit that corresponds to the next double-digit number in the overall cycle
Understanding this distinction helps avoid confusion and allows the Tarot Year Card to be used accurately and meaningfully.
The Tarot Year Card describes the tone of a particular year, whereas your Tarot Birth Cards reveal the underlying archetypes shaping your life as a whole. If we compare Year and Birth Cards to astrology, your Birth Cards are similar to the natal chart, while the Year Card functions much like a solar return chart.
Tarot Year Card Meanings: Themes for the Year Ahead
Each Tarot Year Card corresponds to a Major Arcana archetype. Below is a concise overview of what each card suggests about the tone and focus of a year.
22 – The Fool
A year of beginnings, experimentation, and stepping into the unknown. Often brings fresh starts and unexpected turns, asking for trust and openness rather than rigid planning.
1 – The Magician
A year of initiative, skill, and conscious creation. Emphasises agency, communication, and learning how to work with the tools already at hand.
2 – The High Priestess
A quieter, inward-facing year. Intuition, inner listening, and discernment are key. External progress may feel slower, but inner clarity deepens.
3 – The Empress
A year focused on growth, creativity, and nourishment. Relationships with the body, home, and creative projects often take centre stage.
4 – The Emperor
A year of structure, responsibility, and consolidation. Calls for boundaries, leadership, and taking authority over one’s life direction.
5 – The Hierophant
A year of learning, teaching, and re-examining belief systems. May involve formal study, mentorship, or redefining personal values.
6 – The Lovers
A year shaped by meaningful choices and relational dynamics. Alignment between values and actions becomes crucial.
7 – The Chariot
A year of momentum, determination, and focused effort. Progress comes through discipline and conscious direction rather than force.
8 – Strength
A year emphasising inner resilience, patience, and emotional courage. Often involves learning how to work with instinct rather than suppress it.
9 – The Hermit
A reflective year that favours solitude, study, and refinement. Outer activity may slow to allow deeper understanding to emerge.
10 – Wheel of Fortune
A year of change, turning points, and shifting circumstances. Flexibility and perspective help navigate what’s beyond personal control.
11 – Justice
A year centred on balance, accountability, and clarity. Decisions made now tend to have long-term consequences. Relationship focus.
12 – The Hanged Man
A year of pause, reorientation, and seeing things differently. Progress often comes through letting go rather than pushing ahead. Sacrifice leads to illumination.
13 – Death
A year of profound endings and renewal. What’s outworn falls away to make space for a new chapter.
14 – Temperance
A year of integration, healing, and recalibration. Encourages moderation and the blending of different aspects of life. A great year for a vision quest.
15 – The Devil
A year that brings attention to attachments, patterns, and power dynamics. Offers the chance to reclaim autonomy through awareness.
16 – The Tower
A year of disruption and truth-telling. Structures that no longer serve may collapse, clearing the ground for something more honest.
17 – The Star
A year of renewal, hope, and long-term healing. Often follows difficulty, restoring faith and direction. Service to others comes into focus.
18 – The Moon
A year of heightened sensitivity, emotional depth, and navigating uncertainty. Intuition is a vital guide. Brings the opportunity to transmute fear.
19 – The Sun
A year of visibility, vitality, and confidence. Encourages self-expression, joy, and conscious engagement with life. Facilitates pinnacle moments on the journey of individuation.
20 – Judgement
A year of awakening and life review. Past experiences are re-evaluated, leading to decisive movement forward. Karmic rewards and sliding door moments.
21 – The World
A year of completion and integration. Marks the end of karmic cycles and the embodiment of accumulated wisdom.
How to Work With Your Tarot Year Card
Knowing your Tarot Year Card is most valuable when you engage with it consciously. Here are a few practical ways to do so:
- Study the symbolism of your Year Card and notice how its themes appear in everyday life
- Set intentions that align with the card’s core lesson and create affirmations that match
- Journal throughout the year, tracking patterns and insights
- Meditate with the card during monthly or seasonal check-ins
- Use it as an anchor in personal Tarot readings
Rather than trying to control outcomes, the Tarot Year Card works best as a reflective tool — one that supports meaning-making and informed choice.
Navigating The Year Ahead: A Tarot Year Card Spread
This seven-card Tarot spread helps you explore how your Tarot Year Card may express itself over the course of the year ahead. Rather than predicting specific events, the spread offers a reflective framework for understanding themes, challenges, and areas of growth connected with your Year Card.
1. Core Energy
The central theme of the year, read alongside your Year Card.
2. Lessons to Learn
Key skills or insights the year invites you to develop.
3. Opportunities to Embrace
Areas where growth, support, or expansion may arise.
4. Challenges to Navigate
Potential sticking points or tensions connected to the year’s theme.
5. Best Approach
How to engage with the year constructively and consciously.
6. Area of Personal Growth
The part of your life most shaped by this cycle.
7. Integration
What becomes possible by the end of the year if the lessons are met with awareness.
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Comments
So, it’s definitely a “let’s get going” year with an 8 for me. Strength and Leo (Leo, of course). The power grows and needs expressing, I think. Thanks for reminding me to do this!
Cool! I started my Tarot biz in an 8 year 🙂
I’m in Temperance now! Had enough of Death for a lifetime! I must calculate if I’ll be due another Death year at some stage.
A fellow tarot reading friend of mine says that you stay with the card of the year until your birthday, and that you have both vibrations for part of the year (unless you were born in January). So for me that means I have both Death and Temperance until my birthday in February, and then just Temperance for the rest of 2018. I definitely found it has been accurate the past few years. Interesting concept! Everyone has a different spin on it 🙂
Yeah, I was first taught to read it like that too… it’s trickier with people who have birthdays late in the year than for people like me whose birthday is in January. It never worked for me… or the people I was reading for. And strictly from a Numerology point of view, it doesn’t work either according to one published Numerologist I know. But of course, if you feel it works for you, you should stick with it 🙂
If my birthday is in October 2016, do I do the calculation with 2016 or 2017 to find out my card for this year?
For this year, use 2016. Your personal year changes on 1 January – same for everyone.
The Numbers will never add up to zero, so is the Fool card completely skipped? Should the Fool be counted as 23 instead?
I have seen in other places where the Fool is counted as 23, but now not sure which is correct.
Hi Debs, The Fool has the numerical value of 22 for these kinds of operations 🙂
Your Article needs to be updated to show the Fool as 22 in the table.
Thank you, I have done that now. This article was written as a sequel to the Tarot Birth Cards article where this had already been covered but you are absolutely right – It needs to be stated clearly 🙂
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For me it is Temperance
That’s my 2017! 🙂
Hi Lisa! Strength!….I’m gonna need it!
All the best for your Strength year, Margie! 🙂
I am really looking forward to all your posts & courses! Good luck but with that venus-jupiter conjunction that must go smoothly 🙂
Thanks Laura, let’s hope so!