Venus Transits Through the Houses: Long Stays, Re-Entry, Eight Years

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Ask how long moving Venus stays in one of your natal houses and the honest answer is: it depends on the year. In most years Venus passes through a house in two to five weeks. But every nineteen months or so Venus stations, moves backward for about six weeks over some 15° to 16° of the zodiac, and turns forward again. If that loop fits inside one house, Venus lingers there for around four months. If the loop straddles a cusp, Venus enters the house, backs out of it and comes in again, and a single number for "the stay" stops making sense. Venus also has a well-known eight-year rhythm: its positions come back to nearly the same dates after eight years. This page measures both for one invented chart, and measures how near the eight-year repeat really is.

This is not the same as a Venus return. A Venus return measures moving Venus against one fixed point, natal Venus. Here the fixed targets are the twelve natal house cusps, and nothing is measured against natal Venus.

In short, for the example chart:

• Short stays, and a few very long ones. Across 2000 to 2029 most single stays lasted 16 to 38 days. Five houses (her 3rd, 5th, 8th, 10th and 12th) also had stays of 120 to 135 days, each one a lap in which a whole retrograde loop fell inside the house.
• One split stay in thirty years. Of 18 complete retrograde loops in the window, only one crossed a cusp: her 8th cusp in 2025, crossed forward, backward and forward again. Venus was in her 8th for 69.2 days, back in her 7th for 9.6 days, then in her 8th again for 40.8 days.
• The eight-year repeat is close, but not exact. In 264 of 265 eight-year pairs, Venus's final entry into the same house came between 0.56 days earlier and 0.32 days later than exactly eight calendar years on, on average about 10 hours earlier. The one exception was 79 days late, and it is the 2025 loop above.
• Four minutes of birth time decide the 2025 loop. With the birth time four minutes earlier, the 8th cusp moves just below the point where Venus turned direct, and the three crossings become one.

Educational page. Astrologist.com offers no transit tool and no calculator, calendar or report for house entries. The free birth chart shows natal positions and natal houses only. All dates here were worked out offline for an invented person; anything after October 2026 is a model projection.

Chart, method and the rules fixed in advance

The example is again Lotte, the invented person on Sun transits through the houses, born in Utrecht on 27 August 1991 at 06:55 summer time (04:55 UT). Her Placidus cusps, recomputed with the free chart's code before any Venus date was solved and unchanged from the Sun and Mars pages, run from 4°44' Virgo on the Ascendant through 25°04' Virgo, 21°46' Libra, 26°07' Scorpio (IC), 4°37' Capricorn and 8°05' Aquarius, with the opposite six cusps exactly opposite. Her house widths go from 20.34° (1st and 7th) to 38.49° (4th and 10th). Natal Venus at 26°34' Leo, retrograde, in her 12th house, is mentioned only for context.

• Venus is computed with the chart's own planetary routine (astronomia's VSOP87 theory, apparent longitude of date) and the same UT-to-ephemeris-time step; the Sun, used for comparison, with the chart's solar routine. Cusps are taken at the stored 0.01° values.
• Track. Venus was sampled every two hours from late 1998 to early 2033 and unwrapped into one continuous longitude, so her 8th cusp just before 0° Aries is treated exactly like any other cusp. Crossings were solved to well under a second and stations to about a second. At each of the 42 stations it was checked that no crossing pair could hide between two samples.
• Definitions. F is a forward crossing of a cusp, R a backward one. A station that reaches a cusp without changing sides would count as a touch, not a crossing; there were none, and the closest any station came to a cusp was 27', in April 2025. A three-pass sequence is F, R, F through one cusp with the retrograde station before the R and the direct station after it.
• Three ways to measure a stay. An episode is any uninterrupted interval inside a house. The continuous stay is the longest episode. The net span runs from first entry to final exit when a loop makes Venus leave and come back, and is never presented as one continuous stay.
• Window and detail. Statistics use 1 January 2000, 00:00 UT, up to but not including 1 January 2030. The detailed tables cover calendar 2025 and 2026, Amsterdam time, chosen before solving; a supplementary example would have been added only if those two years held no complete three-pass sequence. They hold one, so there is none.
• Eight-year rule. For each cusp, each final forward entry is paired with that cusp's final forward entry nearest to the same moment eight Gregorian years later, and the signed difference is the drift. Pairs count when both entries are in the window. The first forward entry is compared the same way as a secondary check.

Every Venus cusp crossing in 2025 and 2026

Amsterdam clock time, to the minute. The last column compares the final forward entry into each house with the Sun's entry into the same house; minus means Venus was first.

Entries from November 2026 on would be projections; there are none, because Venus stays in her 3rd house from 30 August 2026 until 3 January 2027. Watch how the last column swings from about seven weeks behind the Sun to about seven weeks ahead: over the whole window Venus's final entries ranged from 47.4 days before to 47.8 days after the Sun's, against about four weeks either way for Mercury.

Two entries sit within minutes of midnight: 10 October 2025 at 00:02 and 22 May 2026 at 23:59. Using the unrounded cusps instead of the stored ones moves them across midnight, to 9 October and 23 May. Treat their calendar dates as uncertain by a day even before the birth time is considered.

Stays in 2025 and 2026: episodes and net span

The 8th house in 2025, three ways. The net span from first entry (29 January) to final exit (28 May) was 119.6 days. The continuous stay, the longest single episode, was 69.2 days. And there were two episodes in the 8th with a separate 9.6-day episode in the 7th between them. In 2001, 2009 and 2017 the same season gave one unbroken stay in her 8th house of 119.9 to 120.1 days, because those loops turned direct before getting back to her 8th cusp (in 2017 by 1°50'). In 2025 the season was just as long, but split.

The 3rd house from August 2026. This is the other pattern: the whole loop, from 8°29' Scorpio back to 22°51' Libra, lies inside her 3rd house (21°46' Libra to 26°07' Scorpio), so no cusp is crossed backward and the stay is one continuous 126.3 days, most of it a model projection. The direct station is only 1°05' short of her 3rd cusp.

Thirty years of stays, house by house

All complete episodes in the window. Venus versus Sun is the range, over every lap, of the days between Venus's final forward entry into the house and the Sun's entry.

Venus's retrograde loops fall in five regions of the zodiac, roughly evenly spaced, and those regions creep only slowly. In this chart all five landed in her 3rd, 5th, 8th, 10th and 12th houses throughout the window, so those houses had stays of about four months roughly every eight years, while the other seven houses never had a stay longer than 38 days. Without a loop, the stay follows the house width: her two narrowest houses took 16 to 21 days, her widest without a loop, the 4th, 31 to 38. Of 361 cusp laps in the window, 360 were a single forward crossing; her 5th cusp was crossed 31 times, because Venus's laps do not line up with calendar years. No sequence was cut by either edge of the window, and no station touched a cusp.

The eight-year near-repeat, measured

Eight Gregorian years are 2,922 days. Five of Venus's cycles relative to the Sun take about 2,919.6 days and thirteen of its orbits about 2,921.1 days, so after eight years Venus is back at almost the same place on almost the same date. Using the rule fixed in advance:

• 264 of 265 pairs had a drift between -0.56 and +0.32 days, a mean of -0.42 days. In other words, each entry tended to come about 10 hours earlier than eight calendar years before. For example, Venus entered her 6th house on 24 January 2018 at 13:12 and on 24 January 2026 at 00:11.
• The pass structure matched in 264 of 265 pairs. The exception is her 8th cusp: one forward crossing on 28 January 2017, three crossings in 2025, and a final entry on 17 April 2025, 79.2 days after the eight-year mark.
• The first forward entry stayed in step. Compared by first forward entry instead, the same 8th-cusp pair drifted only +0.36 days (28 January 2017, 18:46, and 29 January 2025, 03:23), and all 265 pairs fell between -0.56 and +0.36 days.

Why did the repeat break there? The loops in that part of the sky drift backward by about 2.3° every eight years. Venus turned direct at 29°11' Pisces in 2009, at 26°54' Pisces in 2017 and at 24°37' Pisces in 2025. The 2017 loop turned direct 1°50' before getting back to her 8th cusp at 25°04' Pisces; the 2025 loop went 0°27' past it. A near-repeat that drifts will eventually carry a loop over a fixed cusp, and when it does, that house's dates stop repeating. The same slow drift brought the loop in her 3rd house from 3°28' short of the cusp in 2018 to 1°05' short in 2026. So the eight-year rhythm is a useful first guess, not an exact law, and a cusp near a loop's turning point is where it fails first.

Birth time: when four minutes change the shape of a year

The cusps were recalculated with the free chart's routine at six birth times fixed in advance (60, 15 and 4 minutes either side of 06:55), with Venus's path unchanged, and the 2025 to 2026 sequences solved again. Every one remained a Placidus chart.

Four minutes earlier, her 8th cusp moves to about 24°16' Pisces, just below the 24°37' Pisces where Venus turned direct, so Venus never comes back across it and the 2025 split stay becomes one stay. Four minutes later, the three passes survive but the final entry moves by more than three days, because Venus is barely moving near its station. Outside the loop, four minutes moved most entries by a calendar date (17 of 20 at -4 minutes, 16 of 23 crossings at +4). With an uncertain birth time, treat any Venus house date near a station as uncertain by weeks, and note that the free chart shows no houses at all without a birth time; see how accurate does a birth time need to be.

Rounding, tolerance and the Swiss check

With the unrounded cusps, the 2025 to 2026 crossings moved by at most 16.3 minutes (the slow ones beside the April 2025 station) and only the two near-midnight entries changed date. Reading the displayed degree and minute back as longitudes moved the slow crossings by up to 1 hour 45 minutes and changed one date. No pass count changed. The solver's sub-second tolerance is a separate matter from either of these.

The Swiss Ephemeris served only as an independent offline cross-check and supplied no date on this page. At the 23 crossing instants its Venus lay within 0.13 arc-seconds of the cusp, re-solved crossings moved by at most 7 seconds, and its four stations in these two years agreed to within 0.2 minutes. These are observed differences for these dates, not guaranteed accuracy; the repository's golden fixtures check chart positions to 0.05°, which is not an ingress-time figure. The Sun comparison uses the chart's solar routine and is good to a fraction of a day here.

Reading Venus in a house

In astrological tradition, Venus's time in a natal house is read as a pointer to where questions of liking, value, taste and ease tend to come up, in the themes of that house as described in house meanings and the style described in what Venus signs mean. A long stay is sometimes read as a longer season of that emphasis, and a split stay as a theme that is revisited. Use any of it, if at all, as an optional prompt for reflection. A retrograde loop is a matter of viewpoint, explained in retrograde planets and the Sun. Nothing on this page predicts relationships, attraction, money, purchases, appearance or any event.

Doing it for your own chart

1. Get your cusps as longitudes from the free birth chart (a known birth time is required); how to find your house cusps explains how.
2. List Venus's retrograde stations for the years you care about. A house that contains a whole loop will have a long stay; a cusp between the two stations will be crossed three times.
3. For the other cusps, find when Venus passes each longitude. Eight years earlier is a good first guess for the date, usually within a day, but check it.
4. Convert UT to your local time, and weigh every date against how well you know your birth time.

The general method is on transits through the houses. For a faster inner planet with three loops a year and many more three-pass cusps, see Mercury transits through the houses. Ask the Astrologist can discuss your natal houses or a date you have worked out; it does not compute house-entry dates.

Related articles

• Transits Through the Houses
• Venus Return (moving Venus back at one natal point, natal Venus, rather than crossing twelve cusps)
• Mercury Transits Through the Houses (the same cusps, a faster mover tied more closely to the Sun)
• Sun Transits Through the Houses
• Mars Transits Through the Houses
• Retrograde Planets and the Sun
• Why Placidus Houses Differ in Size