Astrological Houses, Step by Step

This guide gives you seven steps for reading the houses of your own chart, in an order where each step makes the next one easier. After the steps, the same seven are done on one published chart, so you can see what each of them produces. For the meaning of each house on one page, see houses in astrology.

Step 1. What a house is

The signs divide the zodiac, the band of sky the Sun, the Moon and the planets move along. The houses are a second division laid over the first, and they are tied to the place and the minute of birth. Picture the sky from the birthplace: the horizon cuts it into a visible half and a hidden half, and the meridian, the line from north to south overhead, cuts it again. Those two lines give the four angles: the Ascendant in the east, the Descendant in the west, the Midheaven above and the IC below. Each quarter is divided into three, which makes twelve houses.

The houses are numbered from the Ascendant, going under the horizon first: houses 1 to 6 lie below the horizon, houses 7 to 12 above it. As the Earth turns, the Sun and the planets are carried through all twelve houses once a day, in reverse order. A planet that has just risen is in the twelfth house, at its highest it crosses the Midheaven from the tenth house into the ninth, and it sets from the seventh into the sixth.

That gives a quick check on any chart. Someone born around sunrise has the Sun near the Ascendant, around midday near the Midheaven, around sunset near the Descendant and around midnight near the IC. If the Sun of a chart stands in a house that does not fit the clock, the time or the timezone was entered wrongly.

Step 2. What the twelve houses cover

Opposite houses are read as pairs: the first and seventh (self and partner), the second and eighth (own and shared resources), the third and ninth (near and far), the fourth and tenth (home and public life), the fifth and eleventh (personal creation and the group), the sixth and twelfth (daily work and retreat). The first, fourth, seventh and tenth houses begin at the four angles, and planets in them are read as prominent.

The last column shows which of the six spheres of NatalChart.AI (Identity, Love, Body, Money, Home and Mind) names the house as a source. The eighth, eleventh and twelfth houses are not named by a sphere. A planet in one of them is still read in the spheres that name the planet itself. See the six spheres.

Step 3. A planet in a house

A planet in a house is read in three parts. The planet is the function, the sign is the manner, and the house is the area of life. Venus is the way a person relates and what they enjoy. Venus in the tenth house brings that to career and public role, and Venus in the fourth brings it home.

A planet belongs to a house from the degree of its cusp up to the next cusp. NatalChart.AI decides this by longitude alone: a planet that has reached a cusp is in that house, and one a fraction of a degree before it is still in the previous house. Several planets in one house mark an area where much of the chart is concentrated, so start with those houses.

Step 4. The ruler of a house

Each sign has a ruling planet. The sign on the cusp of a house gives the house its ruler, and the ruler carries the matters of that house to wherever it stands. If the cusp of your tenth house is in Taurus, Venus rules your tenth house, and the sign, house and aspects of Venus describe how career matters are approached.

NatalChart.AI uses the modern rulers: Mars for Aries, Venus for Taurus, Mercury for Gemini, the Moon for Cancer, the Sun for Leo, Mercury for Virgo, Venus for Libra, Pluto for Scorpio, Jupiter for Sagittarius, Saturn for Capricorn, Uranus for Aquarius and Neptune for Pisces. The ruler of the first house is the chart ruler; see the first house.

Step 5. An empty house

Most charts have several empty houses. Ten planets cannot fill twelve houses, and planets cluster: Mercury and Venus are never far from the Sun. An empty house is not a missing area of life. It is simply not where the planets concentrate.

Read an empty house through the sign on its cusp and then through the ruler of that sign: its sign, its house and its aspects. Later, planets passing through the house by transit bring it into focus for a while; see how to read transits.

Step 6. The size of a house

In Placidus the houses are not equal in degrees of the zodiac, because Placidus divides time, not space. It takes the time a degree of the zodiac needs to travel from the horizon to the meridian and cuts it into three equal parts. Away from the equator the signs rise at different speeds, so equal parts of time cover unequal stretches of zodiac. Near the equator the houses are all close to 30°. The further north or south the birthplace, the larger the differences.

Opposite houses always have the same width. A wide house can hold a whole sign that has no cusp in it, called an intercepted sign, and then somewhere else one sign holds two cusps. A wide house is not more important. It covers more of the zodiac, so a planet is more likely to fall in it and a transiting planet stays in it longer.

Step 7. A planet near a cusp

A planet close to the end of a house raises two questions. The first is convention: many astrologers read a planet within a few degrees of the next cusp as already acting in the next house. That is a reading habit, not a calculation, and schools differ on the distance. NatalChart.AI applies no such allowance. The house is decided by the cusp alone, so anyone can reproduce it.

The second is the birth time. The cusps move about one degree for each four minutes of clock time on average, faster or slower depending on the cusp, the latitude and the hour. A planet one degree from a cusp changes house if the recorded time is a few minutes off. When a planet is that close, read both houses unless the time comes from a written record.

Why houses depend on the birth time and the latitude

The planets move slowly against the zodiac: the Moon about 13° a day, the Sun about 1°, the others less. The houses turn with the Earth, so all twelve cusps pass through the whole zodiac in 24 hours. The date fixes the planets in the signs. The clock time and the place fix the houses.

Latitude matters because it tilts the horizon against the zodiac. At the same moment, two places on the same meridian share a Midheaven but have different Ascendants and different cusps in between, and the further from the equator, the more uneven the houses become.

Without a birth time the houses are undetermined, not approximate. There is no roughly right house: over a day each cusp visits each sign and each planet passes through all twelve houses. In that case NatalChart.AI still calculates the planets, while the Ascendant, the Midheaven and the houses stay undetermined. If you are unsure of your time, see how to find your birth time, and check the Ascendant with the rising sign calculator.

Placidus, and how house systems differ

A house system is a rule for drawing the cusps. The common systems agree on the Ascendant. The quadrant systems, such as Placidus, Koch, Regiomontanus, Campanus and Porphyry, also agree that the Midheaven is the tenth cusp, and they differ in the cusps in between. Whole Sign makes each sign one house, beginning with the rising sign. Equal House starts at the Ascendant degree and adds 30° at a time. In those two the Midheaven is a point inside the chart and not the tenth cusp.

Changing the system never moves a planet in the zodiac. It moves the boundaries, so a planet can land in a different house. NatalChart.AI calculates Placidus houses only, with no switch, so two charts from the site can be compared directly. Before comparing with another tool, match the house system. Placidus and Whole Sign compared on one chart shows how much can change. Placidus has one limit: inside the polar circles some degrees of the zodiac never rise or set, and the division cannot be completed there.

A worked example: the seven steps on one chart

Demonstration birth: 1991-09-06 at 18:30 local time, Kyiv, Ukraine (50.4501° N, 30.5234° E), Europe/Kyiv at UTC+3, so 1991-09-06 15:30 UTC. Tropical zodiac, Placidus houses, Swiss Ephemeris 2.10.03. Full result and settings on How to verify your birth chart.

• Step 1. What a house is. The Ascendant is at 14°59′ Aquarius and the Midheaven at 9°54′ Sagittarius. The birth is recorded at 18:30 local time, which is about 17:32 in local solar time at that longitude. The Sun is in the seventh house, where it stands in the last hours before sunset. The clock and the chart tell the same story.
• Step 2. What the twelve cover. The 17 bodies fall in five of the twelve houses: 6, 7, 8, 11 and 12. The seventh house holds the most, six: Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter. It is the house of partnership and one-to-one relationships, so that is where a reading of this chart starts.
• Step 3. A planet in a house. The Sun is at 13°33′ Virgo (163.5457°). The seventh cusp is at 14°59′ Leo and the eighth at 13°45′ Libra. The Sun lies between them, so it is in the seventh house: identity and direction, in the manner of Virgo, worked out through partnership and one-to-one relationships.
• Step 4. The ruler of a house. The second cusp is at 13°45′ Aries. Aries is ruled by Mars, and Mars stands at 3°28′ Libra in the seventh house. The matters of the second house (money, possessions and what a person values) are read through Mars and through the seventh house (partnership and one-to-one relationships).
• Step 5. An empty house. Houses 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9 and 10 hold none of the 17 bodies. Take the tenth: its cusp is at 9°54′ Sagittarius, Sagittarius is ruled by Jupiter, and Jupiter stands at 28°48′ Leo in the seventh house. So career, public role and reputation are read through Jupiter: its sign, its house and its aspects.
• Step 6. The size of a house. The widest houses are the first and seventh at 58.76°, and the narrowest the fourth and tenth at 18.00°. The birthplace lies at 50.4501° N. Virgo in house 7 and Pisces in house 1 have no cusp of their own and are intercepted. Gemini and Sagittarius each hold two cusps.
• Step 7. A planet near a cusp. Pluto at 18°00′ Scorpio (228.0048°) stands 0.0503° before the ninth cusp at 18°03′ Scorpio (228.0551°). That is about 3 arcminutes, so the calculation puts it in the eighth house. At the average rate the gap equals about 12 seconds of clock time, so a slightly earlier birth time would put it in the ninth house. With a placement this close, read both houses.

Read the houses of your own chart

Enter your birth date, the most reliable time you have and your birthplace. The chart lists the twelve Placidus cusps to the degree and the house of each body, so you can repeat the seven steps on your own numbers. The chart is calculated first, and the reading is written afterwards from the calculated values, naming the placement each statement rests on.

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