What is a Solar Return?

Once a year, close to your birthday, the Sun returns to the exact degree it occupied at your birth. A solar return is the technique of casting a fresh chart for that precise moment — usually for the city you are in — and reading the theme of the next twelve months from it.

Not the same thing as your birthday

Your calendar birthday and the solar return moment may fall on the same day, but they are not the same hour. The instant the Sun comes back to your natal degree is calculated to the minute, and can even land a day before or after your birthday — especially if you were born near midnight.

This new chart has its own arrangement of planets, signs and houses, just like your birth chart; but its influence is limited to one year, until the next birthday.

Where you are matters

A solar return chart is calculated for where the moment is lived. It is cast not for your birth city, but for the city you spend that birthday in. Some astrologers deliberately recommend spending a birthday elsewhere in order to "change the theme of the year". The standard approach is simply to calculate the chart from wherever you genuinely are.

What to look at

The Rising sign — the general atmosphere of the year, the energy it will be met with.
Which house is emphasised — where the planets cluster is the area (career, relationships, home) that comes to the foreground.
Comparison with the birth chart — which house of your birth chart does the solar return Sun fall into? That answers "where will I express myself this year".

Never read alone, always together A solar return chart is not interpreted independently of the birth chart — the two are laid over each other. Looking at which natal house a solar return planet falls into shows which area of your life the theme of that year settles into.

Similar "return" techniques exist for the Moon and Saturn: lunar returns happen monthly, Saturn returns roughly every 29.5 years. All three work on the same logic: a planet comes back to its natal position, and a new chart is cast for that moment.

Lunar Return

The monthly version of the same technique, run on the Moon.

Saturn Return

The great threshold that arrives once every ~29.5 years.

ALVEM's Solar Return screen takes your birthday and your current city and casts the chart for that year.