Empty Houses in Astrology: Why Every Chart Has Them and How to Read One

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An empty house is a house with no planet in it. Every birth chart has some, and many have several; six was the most common count in the time sample below. That is simple arithmetic, not a gap in your chart: there are more houses than planets, and planets tend to bunch together. This page shows why, how many empty houses are typical, and how astrologers read a house that holds nothing.

Body set used here: the main count on this page uses the ten planets, the Sun and Moon through Pluto. The Lunar Nodes and Chiron, which the free birth chart also calculates (Chiron for supported dates), are counted separately where stated. Houses need a reliable birth time: without one, the free chart does not calculate houses, so no house can be called empty or occupied. See a chart without a birth time.

Why at least two houses are always empty

Ten planets, twelve houses. Even if every planet sat in a different house, ten houses would be occupied and two would be left over. So with the ten planets counted, at least two houses are always empty. Whenever two planets share a house, a further house is left empty, and in practice planets share houses all the time:

• Mercury and Venus stay close to the Sun. Seen from Earth they never get far from it, so the three are often in the same house or neighbouring ones.
• The slow planets move together for years. Uranus and Neptune were both in Capricorn for much of the time between February 1988 and January 1996, so many charts from those years put them in one house.
• Wide houses collect planets. A Placidus house can be twice as wide as its neighbour (see why Placidus houses differ in size), and a wide house is more likely to hold several planets, leaving narrow ones empty.

A worked example

Lotte is the fictional example used in how to find your house cusps: Utrecht, 27 August 1991, 06:55 local summer time, Placidus, Virgo rising. Her ten planets fall in five houses:

That leaves seven houses empty: the 1st, 4th, 6th, 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th. Her Sun sits only 1.30° before her Ascendant, at the end of the 12th house, so even her 1st house is empty. Adding the extra points changes the count by one: the North Node is in her 5th, already occupied, while the South Node and Chiron are both in her 11th. With them included she has six empty houses.

The Nodes always occupy opposite houses, because they are exactly opposite each other and so are the cusps: North Node in the 5th means South Node in the 11th.

Sem, born the same day in Utrecht at 17:12, has even more. His Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter are all in his 8th house, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in his 1st, the Moon in his 3rd and Pluto in his 10th. Four houses occupied, eight empty.

How many empty houses are typical

To see the spread, the site's calculation code was run for Utrecht (52.0907° N, 5.1214° E) four times a day, at 03:00, 09:00, 15:00 and 21:00 UTC, on every day from 1 January 1970 to 31 December 1999: 43,828 charts. Counting the ten planets only:

Six empty houses was the most common result, and nearly every sampled chart had between four and eight. With the Nodes and Chiron added, the counts drop, and in four of the 43,828 charts all twelve houses held at least one point.

The extremes are worth seeing. In a chart for Utrecht at 22:00 local time on 24 October 1984, the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Uranus and Pluto all fall in the 5th house and Mars, Jupiter and Neptune in the 6th, so ten houses are empty. At 22:00 on 6 May 1973 the ten planets are spread over ten different houses, leaving only the 11th and 12th empty.

These figures describe moments sampled evenly in time at one place. They are not the share of people with a given number of empty houses, and another latitude would give a different spread.

Reading an empty house through its cusp ruler

An empty house still has a cusp, the cusp is in a sign, and that sign has a ruler. Astrologers usually read an empty house through that ruler: its sign, its house and its aspects describe how the themes of the empty house tend to be approached. House rulers explained sets out the method, using modern rulers first with the traditional rulers kept for Scorpio, Aquarius and Pisces.

For Lotte:

• Empty 1st house, Virgo cusp. Mercury, the ruler of Virgo, is in Leo in her 12th house. Because the 1st cusp is the Ascendant, Mercury is also her chart ruler, and astrologers would read her self-presentation partly through a Mercury placed in the 12th.
• Empty 10th house, Taurus cusp. Venus is in Leo in her 12th house, so career and public-standing themes may be read through a Venus in the 12th.
• Empty 4th house, Scorpio cusp. Scorpio has two rulers to consider: Pluto, the modern ruler, in her 3rd house, and Mars, the traditional ruler, in her 2nd.

Her 4th house also contains the whole of Sagittarius without a cusp in it, an intercepted sign. Some astrologers would add Jupiter to the reading of that house; others would not, and this guide does not settle it.

What an empty house does not mean

An empty house is not an inactive area of life, a missing topic or a warning. An empty 7th house does not indicate an absence of partnership, and an empty 2nd says nothing on its own about money. The house still holds its themes; they are described from elsewhere in the chart, mainly through the cusp ruler. Planets in a house add emphasis, which is why a crowded house, like Lotte's 12th, is often read as a focus, but emphasis in one place is not absence everywhere else.

Empty houses are also not empty for life in the timing sense. Transiting planets move through every natal house in turn, and transits through the houses explains how astrologers read a moving planet passing through a house that is empty at birth.

To see which of your houses are empty, generate your free birth chart with an exact birth time and note the house each planet falls in, or Ask the Astrologist to talk through the ruler of an empty house in your chart.

Related articles

• House Rulers in Astrology
• Why Placidus Houses Differ in Size
• Intercepted Signs in Astrology
• The Same Sign on Two House Cusps
• What Is a Stellium?
• Astrology Houses Overview