The 12 Houses of Astrology, Explained Simply
Houses are where astrology stops being vague. What each of the twelve governs, how to read an empty one, and why two chart calculators can disagree.
Cadent house · Valetudo
The 6th house
The sixth house is the job rather than the vocation: the actual daily work, the routines around it, the habits that keep a body running, and the people you serve or who serve you. The tenth house holds the career; this one holds the Tuesday.
At a glance
| Governs | Work, routine, health and service |
|---|---|
| Traditional name | Valetudo |
| Type | Cadent |
| Associated sign | Virgo and Mercury, by analogy |
| Opposite house | The 12th, solitude, the unconscious and what is out of sight |
The houses that fall away from the angles. Traditionally the weakest by position and the most associated with learning, adjusting and preparing rather than with acting.
What the 6th house covers
The tradition links work and health in one house on the reasoning that both are matters of maintenance, and modern practice has not found a good reason to separate them. A difficult sixth house is read as a relationship with routine that has to be worked at, which frequently shows up in the body before it shows up anywhere else.
This site records the health association as a traditional one and nothing more. Nothing here is a medical claim, and an astrological reading is not a reason to do or not do anything about your health.
What an empty 6th house means
An empty sixth house is often quite comfortable: it suggests routine and health are not battlegrounds in this chart.
There are ten planets and twelve houses, so at least two are always empty and usually more like six. An empty house is the normal case, not a deficiency, and the sign on its cusp carries the reading instead.
A planet in the 6th house
What a planet does here, one page each. A planet says what, the house says where in a life it happens.
- ☉ Sun in the 6thIdentity, vitality and what you are becoming
- ☽ Moon in the 6thNeed, instinct and what settles you
- ☿ Mercury in the 6thMind, language and how you process
- ♀ Venus in the 6thValues, attraction and what you find beautiful
- ♂ Mars in the 6thDrive, anger and how you go after things
- ♃ Jupiter in the 6thMeaning, growth and the risk of too much
- ♄ Saturn in the 6thLimit, structure and what has to be earned
- ♅ Uranus in the 6thDisruption, independence and the sudden turn
- ♆ Neptune in the 6thImagination, dissolution and what you cannot see clearly
- ♇ Pluto in the 6thPower, compulsion and what will not stay buried
- ☊ North Node in the 6thThe direction of growth, and the thing you have no practice at
- ☋ South Node in the 6thWhat comes easily, and what you hide in
- ⚷ Chiron in the 6thThe injury that does not close, and what it made you able to do
- ⊗ Part of Fortune in the 6thWhere the three most important points in the chart agree
Houses need a birth time. Signs do not.
Your Sun sign depends only on the date. Your houses depend on the horizon at the moment you were born, and the whole framework rotates by one house roughly every two hours. An hour of error moves half of it.
This is why a Sun-sign horoscope cannot use real houses. It counts them from your Sun sign instead, which is a genuine traditional technique called the solar chart and is an approximation. This site uses it for the daily, weekly and monthly readings and says so on each of them; the transit calculator uses your real houses when you give it a time, and withholds them when you do not.
What is in your 6th house?
The chart is free and computes all twelve from your birth time, alongside every planet, the lunar nodes and Chiron.
More on reading a chart
How to Read Your Birth Chart: A Beginner's Guide
A seven-step method for reading a natal chart from scratch: what to look at first, what to ignore, and how to turn symbols into an actual person.
What Is a Birth Chart? A Complete Beginner's Guide
A birth chart maps the sky at the exact moment you were born. Here is what every part of it means, and how to read yours from scratch, no jargon.