How to find your houses
You need three things: the date, the exact time and the city of your birth. The time matters most. The houses are fixed to the horizon and the meridian of your birthplace, and the sky turns past them once a day, about one degree every four minutes, carrying the cusps with it. Your Sun takes roughly two hours to cross each house.
The calculator above lists every step for the birth you enter: clock time to Universal Time, the ascendant and midheaven, then the cusps in between. In the example, July 15, 1990, at 7:30 a.m. in New York City, the ascendant is 13°59′ Leo. Mercury at 6°44′ Leo lies 7°15′ short of it, so Placidus puts Mercury in the 12th house, while Whole Sign, which gives the whole of Leo to the 1st house, puts it in the 1st.
Without a birth time there is no honest way to place the houses. A chart cast for noon as a stand-in gets the houses wrong far more often than right. If you know roughly when you were born, our rising sign calculator shows which ascendants were possible that day, and the 1st house follows from the ascendant. The same goes for the vertex, the point astrologers link with fated meetings: it sits in the 5th to 8th house and needs the exact time too.
Placidus, Whole Sign or Equal: which house system?
Astrologers divide the chart in different ways, and the choice changes your houses. The three systems in our calculator are the ones most chart sites and apps use:
- Placidus is the default in most Western software and on most chart sites. Houses have different sizes: in New York they range from 20° to 48°, and in Anchorage from 10° to 92°. Above about 66° of latitude it cannot be calculated at all.
- Whole Sign is the oldest system and the one used in Hellenistic and Vedic astrology. The whole rising sign is the 1st house, the next sign the 2nd, and so on. Some modern astrologers and apps use it too.
- Equal starts the 1st house at the ascendant degree and gives every house 30°.
The two systems disagree more often than most people expect. We counted it on every date from 1930 to 2025, one moment per date spread evenly over the day, in five US cities. In New York, Placidus and Whole Sign put at least one planet in a different house in 96.8% of charts, and on average 5.3 of the ten planets change house. The 7th house holds a different set of planets in 50% of charts. So if two apps give you two answers, both can be right for their own system.
| City | Miami 26° N | Los Angeles 34° N | New York 41° N | Seattle 48° N | Anchorage 61° N |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Charts where Placidus and Whole Sign disagree | 94.3% | 95.7% | 96.8% | 98% | 99.5% |
| Planets that change house, average of 10 | 5.1 | 5.2 | 5.3 | 5.6 | 6.5 |
| Placidus charts with an intercepted sign | 33.3% | 46% | 58.8% | 73.6% | 90.7% |
| Smallest and largest Placidus house | 23–40° | 21–44° | 20–48° | 17–55° | 10–92° |
Shares of clock time, not of people: births are not spread perfectly evenly over the day. 35,064 dates per city.
Empty houses and full houses
Ten planets cannot fill twelve houses, so every chart has empty ones. In our New York count a chart had 5.6 empty houses on average, and the emptiest charts had 9. Each house was empty in about 46–48% of charts. An empty 7th does not mean no partner, and an empty 10th does not mean no career.
Astrologers read an empty house through the sign on its cusp and that sign's ruling planet. If your 2nd house starts in Virgo, Mercury rules your 2nd house, and where Mercury sits in your chart says something about how you earn and spend.
Crowded houses are common too. In 70% of New York charts at least one Placidus house holds three or more planets. Astrologers call such a group a stellium, though some keep the word for four planets or more.
House rulers: how to read any house
Every house has a ruler, the planet that rules the sign on its cusp. To read a house, astrologers look at three things in order: planets inside it, the sign on its cusp, and where that sign's ruler sits in your chart. The last step links two houses. If Taurus is on your 10th house cusp and your Venus is in the 4th, career and home are tied together in the reading.
The traditional rulers are Mars for Aries and Scorpio, Venus for Taurus and Libra, Mercury for Gemini and Virgo, the Moon for Cancer, the Sun for Leo, Jupiter for Sagittarius and Pisces, and Saturn for Capricorn and Aquarius. Modern astrologers add Pluto for Scorpio, Uranus for Aquarius and Neptune for Pisces. The calculator's 7th-house line names the ruler of your 7th and the house it is in.
Angular, succedent and cadent houses
The four angles of the chart are the ascendant (east), the IC (the lowest point), the descendant (west) and the midheaven (the highest point). The houses that start at them, the 1st, 4th, 7th and 10th, are the angular houses. Tradition treats them as the strongest places for a planet: a planet there shows in your life in ways other people can see.
The succedent houses (2nd, 5th, 8th and 11th) follow the angles and deal with what you build up and keep: money, children, shared resources, friends. The cadent houses (3rd, 6th, 9th and 12th) fall before the next angle and deal with learning, service and change. Traditional astrologers counted a planet in a cadent house as weak; modern astrologers mostly read it as working in the background.
What each house means
1st house. Your body, your manner and the way you begin things. The sign on its cusp is your rising sign, which is why the 1st house and the ascendant are often treated as one. The 1st house in detail.
2nd house. Money you earn yourself and the things you buy and keep. Astrologers also read it for what you value and what makes you feel secure. The 2nd house in detail.
3rd house. Brothers and sisters, neighbors, the messages and errands of an ordinary week, short trips, and the school you went to as a child. The 3rd house in detail.
4th house. The house you live in and the family you come from. Tradition gives it one parent and the end of life; its cusp, the IC, is the lowest point of the chart. The 4th house in detail.
5th house. Dating and romance, children, games and hobbies, creative work, and gambling. Many astrologers put falling in love here and the commitment that follows in the 7th. The 5th house in detail.
6th house. The daily routine of your job, the people you work with, illness and health habits, and small animals. The 6th house in detail.
7th house. Partners: marriage, business partners, people you sign contracts with, and open rivals. Its cusp is the descendant, the point opposite your ascendant. The 7th house in detail, and the planet most searched there: Venus in the 7th house.
8th house. Other people's money: a spouse's income, debts, taxes, inheritance. It also covers sex and death, which is why older books call it the house of death. The 8th house in detail.
9th house. Long trips and foreign countries, university, law, religion and the beliefs you live by. The 9th house in detail.
10th house. Career, status and reputation, how the public sees you, and in some traditions the other parent. In Placidus its cusp is the midheaven. The 10th house in detail.
11th house. Friends, clubs and groups, allies, and the things you hope for. The 11th house in detail.
12th house. What happens out of sight: time alone, hospitals, prisons and retreats, hidden enemies, and the ways people undo themselves. The 12th house in detail.
For a single planet in a single house, our pages for the Moon, Venus, Mars and Mercury in each sign have a paragraph for each of the 12 houses, and the calculator links to the one you need. Your Saturn return lands in the house where your natal Saturn sits; the dates are in the Saturn return calculator.
Planets in houses, one page each, by sign, in transit and in synastry: Venus in the 1st house · Venus in the 5th house · Mars in the 7th house · Moon in the 7th house · Venus in the 7th house · Venus in the 10th house.
Questions about the houses
Does everyone have all 12 houses?
Yes. Every chart is divided into 12 houses, whatever the birth time and place. What differs is which houses hold planets. With ten planets and twelve houses, some houses are always empty: in our count for New York births, a chart had 5.6 empty houses on average.
What are the 1st, 4th, 7th and 10th houses called?
They are the angular houses, and each one starts at an angle of the chart. The 1st house starts at the ascendant, the 4th at the IC (imum coeli, the bottom of the sky), the 7th at the descendant and the 10th at the midheaven. In Placidus and other quadrant systems the four angles are exactly these cusps.
What is the most powerful house in the birth chart?
Traditional astrology ranks the angular houses (1st, 4th, 7th and 10th) as the strongest places for a planet, the succedent houses next, and the cadent houses (3rd, 6th, 9th, 12th) as the weakest. Many astrologers single out the 1st and 10th. No house is good or bad in itself; the ranking is about how visibly a planet acts.
How do I find out my houses?
You need your birth date, the exact time and the city. Enter them in the calculator above: it shows the sign and degree at the start of each house and lists the planets inside it. If you do not know the time, the houses cannot be worked out, though your planets' signs still can.
Why does another site put my planets in different houses?
Almost always because it uses a different house system. Many apps use Placidus, some use Whole Sign, a few use Equal. In our count of New York charts, Placidus and Whole Sign disagree about at least one planet in 97% of charts. The other cause is the birth time: the houses turn once a day, so a few minutes can move a planet across a cusp.
What does an empty house mean?
It means no planet sits there, and that is normal: every chart has several. Astrologers still read an empty house through the sign on its cusp and the planet that rules that sign. An empty 7th house, for example, is read through the ruler of the sign on the 7th cusp.
Which house system is the most accurate?
None can be proved more accurate; they are different conventions. Placidus is the most common default in modern Western astrology and software. Whole Sign is the oldest system and is used in Hellenistic and Vedic astrology. Equal houses are simple and still work at high latitudes, where Placidus breaks down. The calculator shows all three so you can compare.
What is an intercepted sign?
In Placidus and other quadrant systems houses come in different sizes, so a large house can swallow a whole sign with no cusp in it. That sign is intercepted, and some other sign starts two houses. In our New York count, 59% of Placidus charts have at least one intercepted sign. Whole Sign and Equal houses never have them.
Sources
- Astronomy Engine: the open-source ephemeris library behind our planet positions, dates and statistics
- Jean Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms (Willmann-Bell, 1991): formulas for the ascendant, midheaven, mean node and mean Lilith
- Astro-Databank (Astrodienst): published birth charts we test the calculation against
- GeoNames: city coordinates for the calculator (CC BY 4.0)
- How we create our readings: our own calculation of sign dates, positions and the 1930 to 2025 statistics
Astrology is a symbolic tradition, not a science. We explain what the tradition says and show the calculation so you can check it. Our Placidus cusps match the published charts of five well-documented births (Astro-Databank rating AA) at astrotheme.com and a second chart site to within 0.02°. Positions come from the astronomy-engine ephemeris in the tropical zodiac. More in How we work.