Solar Return Chart — Discover Your Year Ahead with AI

Every sign spans thirty degrees and splits into three ten-degree decans, each with its own ruler under the Chaldean order and its own Minor Arcana card. Where you fall inside Libra is a real distinction, and it is the first thing a solar return chart makes visible.

Venus rules Libra and Taurus, and the two are not interchangeable. In Taurus the Venusian work is holding; in Libra it is balancing — comparison, proportion, the relation between two things. In a solar return that reads as a year organised around a second party, whether a person, a contract or an obligation, and the house Venus occupies usually marks where the negotiation is actually happening rather than where you expect it to be.

Venus has the least calendar-friendly retrograde cycle of the classical planets, reversing roughly every nineteen months. Because that does not divide evenly into a year, the periods drift through your solar returns with no pattern you would spot without checking: some of your years contain one and most do not. That irregularity is the reason the dates below are worth reading rather than assuming, and it is a genuinely different situation from the Mercury-ruled signs, where the answer is always yes.

Libra’s decans are the Moon, Saturn and Jupiter — none of them Venus, and between them about as wide a spread of temperament as any sign contains. A first-decan Libra reads through the Moon, and produces the version most people picture: responsive, attuned to the room, quick to register what other people need. The Two of Swords sits here, which is a card about a decision held in suspension, and the pairing is apt.

The second decan is Saturn, and Saturn is exalted in Libra, which makes this the most structurally solid ten degrees of the sign — a Libra whose sense of fairness has the weight of a principle rather than the flexibility of a preference. The third is Jupiter, the most expansive and the least cautious. The distance between a Saturn-decan and a Jupiter-decan Libra is large enough that the standard description of the sign fits neither of them particularly well.

Libra begins at the September equinox, the moment the Sun crosses the celestial equator going south and day and night are equal. The tropical zodiac is defined from the equinoxes and solstices, so 0° Libra is that crossing by construction rather than by approximation, and every degree in the tables on this page is measured within that framework. It is also the neatest symbolic fit in the zodiac: the sign of balance begins at the one moment of the year when light and dark are actually equal, and the symbolism came from the astronomy rather than the other way round. A practical consequence worth knowing: your solar return always falls at the start of astronomical autumn in the northern hemisphere, at a turning point rather than partway along a slope.

Your solar return falls between the September equinox and the third week of October — the start of northern autumn and southern spring, and one of the two moments in the year when day and night are equal. Because your sign begins at the equinox rather than near it, the first day of Libra is an astronomical event with a time attached, not a calendar convention. In practice your return lands in the busiest stretch of the institutional year, which makes it easy to cast and easy to shelve.

The decan dates above are computed rather than rounded. For Libra the first boundary is the equinox itself, which shifts by several hours annually, so anyone born within about a day of it should treat the birth time as decisive rather than incidental — it determines the sign, and every table further down this page follows from the sign.

Read the seventh house of the return first. It is Libra’s own house, and where for other signs it describes one area of life among twelve, for a Libra Sun a loaded seventh is usually the headline of the year. What sits there — and who — tends to be the thing the year is actually about, and an empty seventh is worth as much attention as a crowded one.

Then find Venus by house and condition, and specifically check whether it is retrograde at the return. Because Venus reverses so irregularly, this is a real flag rather than a formality, and a retrograde return Venus reliably shifts a Libra year from forming new arrangements to re-examining existing ones. The dates below settle whether it applies to you this time.

2 eclipses fall in Libra between 2024 and 2030. An eclipse near one of your own degrees is the single most datable thing in a year, which is why the exact positions are printed rather than described.

• March 25, 2024Lunar eclipse at 5° Libra
• October 2, 2024Solar eclipse at 10° Libra

Libra has been carrying the nodal axis recently and is handing it on, which is why the list above is shorter than it was a few years ago. Check the degrees against your own Sun rather than reading the sign as a whole — proximity in degrees is what makes an eclipse datable.

Your ruler stations retrograde 4 times between 2024 and 2030 — about 0.7 periods a year. That rate is a fact about orbital geometry rather than about you, and it is the single biggest difference between one sign and another here: a Mercury-ruled sign sees its ruler reverse roughly three times a year, a Mars-ruled one waits about two years between.

The first of those inside the measured span runs from March 2, 2025 to April 13, 2025 — real station dates you can check against any ephemeris, not an estimate.