Free Self-Discovery Tool
Free Placidus vs whole sign calculator: your birth chart’s houses under Placidus, whole sign and equal houses side by side, with every planet that changes house marked and explained.
Signs, degrees and aspects are identical in every house system; only the twelve labels change. Whole sign draws the houses on the signs themselves, equal houses draw them from the Ascendant in 30° steps, and Placidus draws them from the time each degree takes to rise where you were born, which is why Placidus houses are uneven and why it breaks down above the polar circles, where this site falls back to Porphyry. The calculator puts all three beside each other so the disagreement is visible instead of confusing.
When a planet sits in your 7th house under Placidus and your 8th under whole sign, both descriptions will sound right, because both are written to. The honest test is not which system is correct but which arena that planet actually plays out in for you. The calculator lists every mover with both houses so you can check each one against your life, and the reading that follows does the same from the whole chart rather than from one app’s default.
Whole sign houses use your entire rising sign as the 1st house and each following sign as the next house, so every house is one sign and starts at 0°. Placidus divides the sky by time: it splits the hours between your Ascendant and Midheaven into equal parts, so houses have different sizes and a sign can hold two cusps or none. Same planets, different labels.
Neither is more accurate in the sense of measuring the sky better; both are conventions for dividing it. Whole sign is the older system and the one most social-media astrology uses; Placidus has been the default in Western astrology software for about a century and is what this site casts by default. Compare both here and read the house descriptions your life actually matches.
Because the apps use different house systems. A planet late in a sign under Placidus can sit in the next house under whole sign, and the further your Ascendant is from 0° of its sign, the more placements tend to move. This calculator marks every one that changes for your chart.
Equal houses start the 1st house at your exact Ascendant degree and give every house exactly 30° from there. They keep the Ascendant on the 1st house cusp like Placidus does, but with even sizes like whole sign. The calculator shows them as a third column.
Yes. Every house system starts from the Ascendant, which moves through the whole zodiac every 24 hours, so without a time there are no houses to compare.