Third House

Placidus or whole sign: why do houses differ between apps?

Because there’s more than one way to divide a chart into its twelve houses, and apps choose differently. Your signs, degrees, rising sign and Midheaven match on any correct chart; what moves is which house a planet falls in when it sits near a boundary.

What a house system does

Signs say where a planet is along the zodiac. Houses say where it was in the sky as seen from your birthplace at your birth moment, split into twelve areas of life: the first for you, the seventh for partners, the tenth for work, and so on. Everyone agrees the first house starts at the rising sign. They disagree about where the other eleven lines go.

Whole sign: the oldest way

The rising sign is the whole first house, the next sign the whole second, and so on, one sign to one house. It’s the system of Hellenistic astrology, the Greek-language tradition Western astrology grew from, and of Vedic astrology, and its simplicity is the point, since a planet’s house is never in doubt.

Placidus: the modern default

Placidus divides the sky by time, by how long each part of the zodiac takes to rise and culminate, so houses come out unequal in size. It’s been the default in most Western astrology software and books for well over a century. Its one weakness is geographic: far north or south, houses stretch and squeeze, and near the polar circles they can stop working altogether.

There are others, including Koch, Equal, Porphyry, Regiomontanus and Campanus, and some popular apps default to one of them, which is the usual reason two apps disagree.

Which one is right

People reasonably want to know which system is the real one, and the honest answer is that a house system is a convention, not a measurement. It’s more like choosing a map projection than measuring a distance, although unlike a map, nobody’s going to get lost. The useful question is whose tradition you’re reading, and each tradition has its own answer.

We use each tradition’s own: Placidus for Western charts, whole sign for Hellenistic and Vedic, and none for BaZi, which has no houses. So your chart here is the one an astrologer of that tradition would draw. Why the Vedic signs differ too.

Placidus or whole sign houses: why charts differ between apps — Third House