Solar Return Calculator: Exact Instant and Chart

Your birth data

Birth Date

Birth Time

I don't know my birth timeBirth City

Enter coordinates manually

Your birth details are used only to calculate this chart. They are not saved.

The year and the place

Return year

The birthday year you want to look at. The return lands on your birthday or the day next to it; in a rare year it sits two days away.

Where to cast the chart

Astrologers disagree here, and the choice changes the chart. Cast at your birth place, the houses stay in the same frame year after year, so returns compare. Cast where you actually are that year, and the houses follow the life you are living. The planets are identical either way; what moves is the houses, the Ascendant and the Midheaven — and with them the Part of Fortune and the Vertex, which are computed from the Ascendant.

Still needed: Birth Date · Birth Time · Birth City

What a solar return is

The Sun takes a tropical year to travel the zodiac and come back to the exact ecliptic longitude it held at your birth. That crossing happens once a year, and its instant drifts against the calendar: your birthday is the same date every year, your solar return is not. It usually lands the day before, on the day itself, or the day after, at any hour; in a rare year it sits two days from the calendar date. Astrologers cast a chart for that instant and read it as a portrait of the year from one birthday to the next. It is a snapshot of the sky, computed exactly the way a birth chart is computed. The only difference is the moment it freezes.

Read about the Sun in astrology

Birth place or where you are? The schools differ

This is the one real fork in solar-return practice, and it is worth stating plainly instead of deciding it for you behind the scenes.

Cast at the birth place

The chart keeps the same geographic frame as your natal chart. Returns from different years then sit on comparable axes, which is what you want if you read them as a series. The argument against it: it ignores where your life is actually happening.

Cast where you are that year

The chart uses the coordinates of wherever you are when the return perfects. This is mainstream modern practice, and it is also what sits behind the advice to travel for your solar return. The argument against it: a chart you can change by booking a flight is a strange kind of fate.

We do not pick for you. The planets and the signs they sit in are identical in both charts. What changes is the houses, the Ascendant and the Midheaven — and with them the Part of Fortune and the Vertex, which are computed from the Ascendant — enough that the two readings can look like two different years.

How the instant is computed

We read your natal Sun's ecliptic longitude from Swiss Ephemeris data, then use the ephemeris' own root-finder to locate the exact moment the transiting Sun crosses that same longitude in the year you asked for. No day-by-day scanning, no rounding to the nearest hour: the crossing is resolved to a fraction of an arcsecond, and the chart is cast on that instant rather than on a tidied-up minute. The local time shown is the wall clock at the place the chart was cast for, with that place's historical daylight-saving rules applied. The UTC line underneath is the same instant with no timezone at all, so it can be checked against any other source.

What this tool does not do

It computes; it does not predict. A return chart is a set of positions, not a set of events, and no chart decides what a year will hold. Nothing here is medical, financial, or legal advice. What we stand behind is the arithmetic: the instant, the positions, and the houses for the frame you chose.

Questions about the solar return

What is a solar return chart?

It is a chart cast for the exact moment the transiting Sun returns to the ecliptic longitude it held at your birth. Astrologers read it as a picture of the year running from that moment to the next return. The Sun in it is always on your natal Sun degree by construction; everything else in the chart is what makes one year's return different from another's.

Why isn't my solar return exactly on my birthday?

A tropical year is about 365.2422 days, while a calendar year is 365 or 366. The extra quarter-day pushes the crossing about six hours later each year, and each leap day pulls it back. Over a lifetime it usually stays within a day of your birthday, sometimes before it, sometimes after; in a rare year the leap-cycle arithmetic puts it two days away.

Should I use my birth place or the city I live in now?

Both are in real use. If you read your returns as a series, the birth place keeps successive years comparable. If you want the houses to reflect the ground the year is actually lived on, use where you will be. This calculator gives you either one and shows which frame produced the chart; it does not choose for you.

Do I need my exact birth time?

For a chart with houses, yes. The return instant is derived from your natal Sun, and without a birth time that Sun is taken at noon, which can move the computed instant by up to half a day. In half a day the Moon travels about six degrees and the Ascendant goes right around the zodiac, so we return the planets but no houses when the time is missing.

Is the return chart read on its own or against the birth chart?

Both approaches exist. Some astrologers read the return as a standalone chart for the year; others compare it with the natal chart and watch where the return's angles and planets land on natal placements. This tool computes the return chart itself. The comparison is a reading, not a calculation, and we do not pretend the two are the same thing.

The conventions this chart uses

None of these are facts of the sky. Each is a choice astrologers disagree on, so we list ours — a difference from another site can then be traced to its rule instead of blamed on the stars.

Tropical zodiac: Signs are tropical, anchored to the March equinox, not to the constellations. Sidereal (Vedic) astrology counts from the stars instead, which currently shifts every position by about 24 degrees — the most common reason two sites disagree about a sign.
Placidus houses: Houses are Placidus, the most widely used modern system. Whole-sign or Koch redraw the boundaries: they move planets between houses, never between signs. Beyond the polar circles Placidus is undefined, and we then show the chart without houses rather than guess.
Mean lunar nodes: The lunar nodes are mean (averaged). The "true" node oscillates around the mean by up to about two degrees — measured, at most 1°59' across two centuries.
Mean Lilith: Black Moon Lilith is the mean lunar apogee. The "true" (osculating) variant can sit up to about thirty degrees away — often a different sign, and the single biggest source of Lilith disagreements.
Aspect orbs: Natal orbs: conjunction and opposition 8°, square and trine 7°, sextile 5°, quincunx 3°. Toward the Ascendant and Midheaven the orbs tighten, and the quincunx is not counted there at all. A site with wider orbs lists more aspects, not different planets.
Sect: The Part of Fortune follows sect: a day birth (Sun above the horizon) uses Ascendant + Moon − Sun, a night birth the reverse. For night births, calculators that apply the day formula to everyone place it in a different sign roughly nine times out of ten.

Solar Return Calculator: The Chart of Your Birthday