Free Birth Chart Calculator: What Does My Birth Chart Say?

What is on your chart

When you press the button you land on your own chart page. It is laid out in the order most people want to read it.

• The Big 3. Three cards for your Sun, Moon and Rising signs, each with a short meaning and a degree.
• The wheel. A round chart with the twelve signs around the edge, twelve houses inside them, the planets placed at their degrees, and lines between planets that form an aspect.
• The position list. The Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, plus the North Node, Chiron and Black Moon Lilith. Each shows its sign, degree and house, and says when a planet is moving retrograde.
• A reading for every placement. One short passage on the planet in its sign and one on the house it sits in.

Reading the wheel without being an astrologer

Think of the chart as a clock face seen from the ground. The planets are the hands, the signs are the style each hand is wearing, and the houses are the rooms of life where they happen to be standing.

1. Planets say what kind of energy is at work: the Moon for feelings, Venus for what you value and love, Mars for drive, Saturn for patience and limits.
2. Signs say how that energy behaves. A planet in a quick, curious sign moves differently from the same planet in a slow, steady one.
3. Houses say where it shows up: home, work, friendships, partnerships.
4. Aspects say how two planets get along. A trine or sextile is a friendly link, a square is friction that pushes you to act, an opposition is a seesaw between two needs, and a conjunction blends two themes into one.

A good first pass is to read the Sun, Moon and Rising, then your Venus and Mars, and only then the slower outer planets, which are shared by everyone born within a few years of you.

The twelve houses at a glance

The houses start at the Ascendant and run round the chart. Roughly:

• 1: how you come across and how you begin things. 2: money, possessions, self-worth. 3: everyday thinking, talking, learning. 4: home and roots.
• 5: play, creativity, romance. 6: daily routines and being useful. 7: close one-to-one partnerships. 8: what you share with others, such as joint money and deep trust.
• 9: wider horizons, study, travel, beliefs. 10: career and public reputation. 11: friends, groups, shared goals. 12: the quiet, hidden part of the chart, solitude and rest.

The calculator uses Placidus houses. Close to the poles that system cannot be worked out, so for a birthplace that far north or south the chart switches to Whole Sign houses and tells you it has done so.

When you do not know the time

Without a birth time, the chart cannot place the Ascendant or draw the houses, so the wheel is left out. You still get every planet in its sign. If a planet changed signs on your birthday, you see both signs. The page also lists a sign for every window of the day on your birthday, which helps when you remember only roughly when it was. Our no-birth-time guide explains how to use that list.

Two ways people use it

Maya opens her chart because a friend asked for her Big 3. She reads the three cards, sees that her Moon sits in a different sign from her Sun, and spends most of her time on the Moon passage, since that one matches how she feels at the end of a long day. Elena has just got her birth time from a relative. She had only ever known her Sun sign, and the new houses and Rising sign are what she reads first. Neither needs to learn the whole system. Each takes the one or two parts that answer her question, then goes deeper when she is curious.

A planet marked retrograde simply appears to move backward against the stars for a while, as seen from Earth. It is a fact about the sky and not a verdict on that part of your chart.

What to check before you trust a chart

• The date: month and day swapped is a common slip when a birthday is written the other way round.
• AM and PM, and that the time is local to the birthplace.
• The town: pick the right one from the list, since several places share a name.
• The edge note: if your Sun or Rising is close to the border of a sign, the chart says so.

Going further

Each placement has its own page if you want more detail. Try the rising sign calculator, the moon sign calculator, the Venus sign calculator or the midheaven calculator. For a longer written reading of your own chart, see what is inside the birth chart report. If you wonder why degrees sometimes differ elsewhere, the how we calculate page explains our method.