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How to find your houses

What you need, and how it is worked out

The short version

You need your date, time and place of birth. From those, a calculator works out which sign is on each of your twelve houses and which planets sit inside them. You cannot read your houses off your star sign, because they depend on the exact minute and place you were born.

What you need

Your date of birth, the time you were born and the town or city. The time matters most. The rising sign, and with it every house, changes roughly every two hours. A birth certificate often has the time, and a parent or the hospital record may too.

Why the time and place matter

Your houses are based on the sky as seen from where you were born, at the moment you were born. The Earth turns once every 24 hours, so a different sign comes over the horizon about every two hours. Two people born on the same day, a few hours apart or in different cities, can have completely different houses.

How it is worked out

The calculator finds the sign rising on the eastern horizon at your birth place and time. That is the start of your 1st house. It then divides the sky into twelve houses from there, and works out where each planet was in the sky. A planet sits in whichever house covers its position.

What you will get

You get a sign on each house, which tells you the style of that area of life, and a list of any planets inside it, which tells you what shows up there. Your Sun's house, your Moon's house and your rising sign are usually the best place to start reading.

What if you do not know your birth time

Without a time, the houses cannot be worked out reliably, because they would be different at 6am and at 6pm. Your planets in their signs are still right, apart from the Moon on some days. For the houses, ask family, check a birth certificate, baby book or hospital record, or treat any result as a guess. Some astrologers use noon as a stand-in, but the houses it gives are only an estimate.

Birth time on the certificate

In some places the birth certificate does not show the time, so it can be worth asking the registry or hospital that holds your records. If your family remembers it only roughly, such as late morning, a rough time is still better than none, but the houses may be one place out.

Is it accurate?

The maths is exact. What can go wrong is the input: a wrong time, a wrong place, or a time given in daylight saving. The calculator deals with time zones and daylight saving for you, so enter the time as it was on the clock where you were born.

Try it

Use the calculator on the home page. It shows your Sun, Moon and rising sign, then what is in each of your twelve houses.

Open the rising sign calculator →