How houses work
The houses divide the sky around your birthplace into twelve parts, starting from the eastern horizon. Because the sky turns once a day, the houses depend on your exact birth time. Without one, a chart can show every planet's sign but not its house.
There are many ways to divide the houses. This site uses whole-sign houses, the oldest system: the whole sign that was rising is the first house, the next sign is the second, and so on. Each house is exactly one sign, which makes charts easy to read and stable near the poles.
First house
The way you enter
The first house describes manner, body, and the impression that arrives before your biography does. In whole-sign houses it is the entire sign of the Ascendant. Planets here are hard to hide. They color how you begin a room, a job, or a conversation.
Second house
Money, skill, and what feels like yours
The second house is income, possessions, and the slower question of what you value enough to keep. It shows how you earn, how you spend, and what steadiness feels like in the body. A planet here ties its theme to resources and self-respect.
Third house
Speech, siblings, and the near world
The third house covers everyday thinking, short trips, siblings, neighbors, and the way you learn in public. It is the mind in motion rather than the mind in a library. Planets here show up in your phrasing and in the errands that make a week.
Fourth house
Home, family, and the private base
The fourth house is the base of the chart: home, parents, ancestry, and the mood you need when the door closes. It is not automatically the Midheaven's opposite in meaning, though it sits across from the public life. Planets here work in private before they work anywhere else.
Fifth house
Play, romance, and what you create
The fifth house is joy with your name on it: play, dating, art, children, and the risk of being visibly delighted. It is where you practice being a person who makes things. Planets here want expression, not only usefulness.
Sixth house
Work, health, and the daily craft
The sixth house is the ordinary labor that keeps a life running: tasks, colleagues, routines, and the body's maintenance. It is humble and powerful. Planets here ask to be used well, and they suffer in chaos more than in effort.
Seventh house
Partnership
The seventh house describes one-to-one bonds: marriage, business partners, and the open conflict that requires an equal. It is the sign opposite your Ascendant, so it often describes qualities you meet in other people before you claim them. The ruler of this house is one of the clearest voices in a relationship reading.
Eighth house
Shared resources and what is hard to say
The eighth house covers shared money, debt, intimacy, grief, and the parts of life that involve someone else's power as well as yours. It is not a house of doom. It is a house of entanglement. Planets here intensify whatever they touch.
Ninth house
Belief, study, and far places
The ninth house is the long view: higher study, travel, publishing, law, and the beliefs you are willing to test. It asks what your life is for, not only how to get through Tuesday. Planets here want meaning with some mileage on it.
Tenth house
Work in public and the long ambition
The tenth house is vocation, reputation, and the role you play where strangers can see you. In whole-sign houses it is a whole sign, not the exact degree of the Midheaven. The Midheaven is still calculated, and it may fall in a different sign. Read them together: one is the public house, the other is the highest point in the sky.
Eleventh house
Friends, groups, and the future you want
The eleventh house is friendship, audiences, collaborations, and the future you hope the group can build. It is less private than the fifth and less official than the tenth. Planets here describe how you belong, and how you refuse a belonging that costs too much.
Twelfth house
Solitude, the unseen, and what you carry quietly
The twelfth house is rest, retreat, imagination, and the habits that run underneath the schedule. It can be a place of compassion or of self-erasure. Planets here work best with privacy and a form. They go muddy when everything is unspoken.
Empty houses
With ten planets and twelve houses, every chart has empty houses. An empty house isn't a missing part of life. It's read through its sign and through the planet that rules that sign, wherever that planet sits in your chart.