Transits Through the Houses: How to Track a Planet by Degree

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Your natal houses describe where each planet stood at the moment you were born, and that picture never changes. A transit through a house is a different thing: the position of a planet today, or on any date you choose, measured against the house cusps of your birth chart. Astrologist.com has no transit tool, so these moving positions are not shown on your chart. This page explains the technique as an astrological method discussed here, and shows how to work it out by hand beside your free natal chart.

The general idea of transits is covered in how transits work. This page deals with one question only: which of your natal houses is a moving planet in, and when does it cross into the next one?

Fixed cusps, moving planet

Two sets of numbers meet in a house transit, and only one of them moves.

• Your natal cusps were calculated once, for your birth time and birthplace. They stay where they are for life.
• The transiting planet's longitude changes from day to day, and for some planets from hour to hour.

The houses are never recalculated for the transit date. A chart cast for today at your current address would have houses of its own, but that is a separate chart for a separate moment, not a transit to yours. When an astrologer says "Saturn is transiting your 8th house", they mean Saturn's present longitude lies between your natal 8th and 9th cusps.

What you need before you start

1. A reliable birth time. House transits depend on your cusps, and cusps depend on the minute of birth. If your time is unknown, the free chart shows no houses, and no house transit can be placed. Sign-level transits and contacts with your natal planets remain available; reading transits without a tool covers that side.
2. Your twelve natal cusps as numbers. The free chart draws the cusp lines but prints no cusp table and no numeric Ascendant degree. How to find your house cusps is the full workflow: the birth data to enter, the settings to match (Tropical zodiac, Placidus, or Equal houses from the Ascendant if your birthplace is at an absolute latitude greater than 66° north or south; exactly 66° stays Placidus), and a complete worked table.
3. Transit positions from an ephemeris that uses the Tropical zodiac and states the time of day its positions are for (often 00:00 UT) and how precisely it gives them.

Which house is the planet in?

Convert everything to longitudes from 0° Aries, then use the same rule as for any degree: a house runs from its own cusp up to, but not including, the next cusp, counted forward through the signs. A planet exactly on a cusp is in the house that starts there. If the house spans 0° Aries, add 360° to any negative difference.

The examples on this page use Lotte, a fictional person born in Utrecht on 27 August 1991 at 06:55 local time, whose full cusp table is on the house cusps page. Her cusps, in short: 1st 4°44' Virgo, 2nd 25°04' Virgo, 3rd 21°46' Libra, 4th 26°07' Scorpio, 5th 4°37' Capricorn, 6th 8°05' Aquarius, and the opposite degrees for the 7th to 12th. Her 8th house runs from 25°04' Pisces across 0° Aries to 21°46' Aries.

Transiting Saturn crossed her 8th cusp on 6 April 2025. It then changed sign three times, entering Aries on 25 May 2025, slipping back into Pisces on 1 September and re-entering Aries on 14 February 2026, without leaving her 8th house once. A sign change is not a house change.

Sign changes are not house changes

The same point shows up with a faster planet. Mars entered Lotte's 11th house (4°37' Cancer) on 12 September 2024. It moved into Leo on 4 November, turned retrograde around 6 December at about 6°10' Leo, fell back into Cancer on 6 January 2025, turned direct and re-entered Leo on 18 April. Three sign changes, and through all of them Mars stayed in her 11th. Its retrograde turn came less than two degrees short of her 12th cusp at 8°05' Leo. It finally crossed that cusp on 6 May 2025, after almost eight months in one house.

Someone reading "Mars in Leo" as "Mars in my 12th" because Leo holds their 12th cusp would have been wrong for most of that winter. Only the degrees settle it.

Why a house stay has no fixed length

Three things set how long a planet spends in one of your houses.

• House width. Placidus houses are unequal. Lotte's run from 20.34° (her 1st and 7th) to 38.49° (her 4th and 10th).
• The planet's speed, which varies through its orbit and falls to zero at a station.
• Retrograde loops that carry it back across a cusp and forward again.

Jupiter shows how large the spread can be. In Lotte's chart it spent 86 days in her 7th house in early 2022, moving fast through a narrow house, and 428 days in her 4th from October 2018 to December 2019. Saturn took about 1.9 years from first entering her 1st house to finally leaving it, and about 3.9 years for her 4th. The per-sign averages people quote for Saturn and Jupiter describe signs, which are all exactly 30°, and they are not a guide to houses. A stay length is a fact about one chart, so anyone born at another time or place has different cusps and different dates.

Retrograde loops and repeat crossings

A planet that turns retrograde near one of your cusps can cross it three times, and occasionally more.

• Mars, 2026 to 2027: in Lotte's chart Mars enters her 1st house on 9 December 2026, slips back into the 12th on 9 February 2027 and returns to the 1st on 26 May 2027.
• Neptune, 2022 to 2024: Neptune crossed her 8th cusp at 25°04' Pisces five times: in on 22 May 2022, back on 4 August 2022, in on 15 March 2023, back on 10 November 2023 and in for good on 1 January 2024. Its direct station on 6 December 2023 fell at about 24°53' Pisces, only 0.19° short of the cusp.

Each crossing is real in the calculation. How an astrologer weighs the back-and-forth period is interpretation; nothing about the repeat means the planet "counts double".

Why the wheel cannot time a crossing

On a chart wheel a single degree is a sliver of arc, and planet glyphs are often nudged sideways so they do not overlap. Reading a cusp or a planet by eye is easily a degree or two out. For Saturn moving at full speed, a degree is about eight days; near a station it can be months. A wheel can tell you roughly which house a slow planet is in when it is well inside one. It cannot tell you when the crossing happens.

Timing an ingress needs two things: longitudes precise enough for the planet's speed, and a stated time resolution. A daily ephemeris at 00:00 UT can narrow a Saturn crossing to a day. A table in whole degrees cannot narrow it at all. In 2029 Pluto, moving about 0.006° a day, dips back behind Lotte's 6th cusp at 8°05' Aquarius by roughly 0.04° for 27 days, from 7 October to 3 November. No whole-degree table and no wheel would show that.

The crossing dates on these pages were computed with the ephemeris routines behind the free chart, sampling the planet's longitude every hour against Lotte's cusps (given to 0.01°), and are reported as the UTC calendar date of the first hourly sample inside the new house. In Dutch local time a crossing just before midnight UT can fall on the next day.

Reading a house transit

The planet describes the kind of attention, and the house names the area of life where astrologers look for it. Natal planets in the house, the house's ruler and the house's own natal meaning all shape the reading. A transit through a house is a background emphasis that lasts as long as the stay; a transit's contacts with natal planets are often read as sharper, shorter episodes within it.

These are patterns that may describe what is in focus, not forecasts of events. Nothing on these pages says what will happen to anyone, in any house.

No margin is used before a cusp here. Some astrologers start reading a transit as part of the next house a few degrees early; the guides on this site work from the cusp itself.

Planet-by-planet guides

• Saturn transits through the houses: a full cycle in one chart, with stays from under two to almost four years.
• Jupiter transits through the houses: twelve houses in about twelve years, unevenly.
• Mars transits through the houses: fast passes, and the long retrograde stays.
• Uranus, Neptune and Pluto through the houses: stays measured in years.
• The Lunar Nodes through the houses: the Mean Node moving backward through opposite pairs.

Related articles

• How to Find Your House Cusps
• How to Read Transits Without a Transit Calculator
• Astrology Transit Timing
• House Meanings in Astrology
• Astrology Methodology