Your Annual
Profections

A profection moves a point of the chart forward one sign for each year of life. Annual profections apply it to the rising sign: the year from birth to the first birthday belongs to the 1st house, the next year to the 2nd, and after twelve years the count comes back to the 1st house. The house you reach is your profection year, and the planet that rules its sign is the lord of the year, often called the time lord.

The technique is old and written down in detail. Ptolemy describes it in the last book of the Tetrabiblos (Book IV, chapter 10): the annual time lords are found by counting from each starting point “one year to each sign” and taking the ruler of the sign reached, with months counted at 28 days to a sign and days at two and a third days to a sign. He profects from five starting points, each for its own subject: the Ascendant for the body and journeys, the Lot of Fortune for property, the Moon for states of mind and marriage, the Sun for rank, and the Midheaven for actions, friends and children. Vettius Valens works the technique through in Book IV of his Anthology, and the ninth-century astrologer Abu Ma'shar combined it with the solar return in his book on the revolutions of the years of nativities.

This calculator profects the Ascendant alone and treats the year's sign as a house (an 8th-house year, a 10th-house year), the form in which the technique is usually taught today. The other starting points still work the same way if you want them: count one sign per year from the Sun, the Moon or the Midheaven instead.

You need your age and your rising sign. Then:

1. Take your age in completed years, your age at your last birthday. A baby is 0 until the first birthday.
2. Divide by 12 and keep the remainder. The remainder plus one is the house. A remainder of 0 means a 1st-house year; a remainder of 11 means a 12th-house year.
3. Count signs from the rising sign, calling the rising sign 1, until you reach the house number. That sign is the sign of the year.
4. Look up the sign's traditional ruler in the table below. That planet is the lord of the year.

With Virgo rising, age 45 gives 45 ÷ 12 = 3 remainder 9, so the 10th house. Counting Virgo as 1, the 10th sign is Gemini, and Gemini is ruled by Mercury. That is the worked example further down.

Only the seven visible planets rule signs in this scheme, so Aquarius years go to Saturn, Pisces years to Jupiter and Scorpio years to Mars. In any 12-year round, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn each rule two years and the Moon and the Sun one each, whatever the rising sign.

Find your age to read off the house of your year. Each row is one house; reading across shows the same house coming back every twelve years, 8 times between birth and 95.

The table counts completed years, as the calculator does. Someone who has just turned 30 is in a 7th-house year until the day before turning 31.

Once you know your house, this table gives the lord of the year: find your rising sign on the left and your house across the top. The sign of the year is the rising sign moved on by the house number minus one.

The 1st column is always the ruler of the rising sign, the chart ruler, so the chart ruler is lord of the year at ages 0, 12, 24 and every twelve years after. The 7th column is the ruler of the setting sign, and the 10th the ruler of the sign that whole-sign houses treat as the career house.

Your birth details go to our API, which casts the chart from precise astronomical calculations and returns the Ascendant and the planets (see the methodology page). The calculator asks for Whole Sign houses, so the rising sign is the 1st house and each following sign the next house. The rest happens in your browser:

• Age. Your birth date is read as three numbers (year, month, day) and compared with today's date on your device. Your age is the number of birthdays you have had. The comparison uses calendar dates only, so the result does not depend on your time zone.
• February 29. In a common year, a February 29 birthday is counted as March 1, the day February 29 would have followed. The solar return for such a birth falls on February 28 or March 1 depending on the year and the birth time.
• House and sign. The house is the remainder of your age divided by 12, plus one, and its sign is that many signs on from the rising sign.
• Lord of the year. The traditional ruler of that sign. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are listed if they sit in the sign of the year but are never its lord.
• Dates. The year runs from your birthday to the day before your next birthday, and the result shows both dates and the house that follows.

Profecting the Ascendant degree by 30° a year gives the same sign as counting whole signs, so the two descriptions are equivalent. Taking the sign on the cusp of a Placidus or other quadrant house is a different method, and it can disagree when a sign is intercepted, which is common at high latitudes.

Steve Jobs was born at 7:15 PM (UTC−8:00) on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco; the time is from his birth certificate. Our API puts his Ascendant at 22°17′ Virgo, so Virgo is his 1st house and the twelve signs from it are the houses of his profection years. Each row below lists the natal planets in that sign and the ages it ruled up to 56, his age when he died in 2011.

Take his year from February 24, 2000 to February 23, 2001, when he was 45. 45 ÷ 12 is 3 with 9 left over, so it was a 10th-house year. The 10th sign from Virgo is Gemini, ruled by Mercury, so Mercury was lord of the year. In his chart Mercury sits at 14°21′ Aquarius, in the 6th house, and that is where a reading of the year would start. Profecting the Ascendant degree instead gives 22°17′ Gemini: the same sign.

Over the 57 years in the table, Venus ruled 10, Mars ruled 10, Jupiter ruled 10, Saturn ruled 10, Mercury ruled 9, the Sun ruled 4 and the Moon ruled 4. Scorpio (3rd), Capricorn (5th), Aquarius (6th), Pisces (7th), Aries (8th) and Cancer (11th) hold natal planets, so those years also activate the planets in them. Libra (Neptune) and Leo (Pluto) hold only an outer planet, and Virgo, Sagittarius, Taurus and Gemini hold none. With Placidus houses each cusp of his chart falls in the same sign as the whole-sign house (the Midheaven is at 21°18′ Gemini), so a "sign on the cusp" reading would name the same lords.

The table is arithmetic only. It makes no claim about what happened to him in any of those years.

A profection year is a year of life, and astrologers differ on the exact moment it turns. The calculator uses the calendar birthday. Some astrologers turn it at the solar return instead, the moment the Sun comes back to the degree it held at birth, because that is when a new solar year begins astronomically and when the solar return chart is cast.

The two are close but not always on the same date. We computed all 56 of Steve Jobs's solar returns with our API and converted them to San Francisco time. 50 fell on February 24. At ages 1 and 5 the return came just after midnight, on February 25 (1:05 AM and 12:23 AM). At ages 42, 46, 50 and 54 it came in the evening of February 23 (11:51 PM, 11:21 PM, 10:31 PM and 9:39 PM).

The reason is general. The return comes about a quarter of a day later by the clock each year and drops back after each February 29, so over each four-year cycle its clock time wanders across most of a day. Whether yours ever slips to a neighboring date depends on your birth time and on where your birth year sits in the leap-year cycle. The solar return calculator gives the exact moment for any year; if it falls the day before your birthday and you follow the solar return, start your new profection year a day early.

• Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, Book IV, chapter 10, “Of the Division of Times”, translated by F. E. Robbins (Loeb Classical Library, 1940): annual time lords counted one sign per year from five starting points, months at 28 days to a sign and days at two and a third.
• Vettius Valens, Anthology, Book IV, translated by Mark T. Riley: annual profections from the Ascendant and the planets.
• Abu Ma'shar, On the Revolutions of the Years of Nativities, translated by Benjamin N. Dykes as Persian Nativities IV (Cazimi Press, 2019): profections combined with solar returns.
• The house topics, Greek names and planetary joys follow the Hellenistic scheme as it is usually set out from these authors; the modern additions are marked as modern.