A solar return chart is cast for the exact moment the Sun comes back to the degree it occupied when you were born — your astrological birthday. The chart for that moment describes the year that follows. Lora reads yours against the real 2026 transits and returns a forecast written for your chart rather than your Sun sign.
Once a year the Sun returns to its exact natal degree, usually within a day of your birthday. Cast a chart for that instant and you get a fresh Ascendant, a fresh set of house cusps, and a fresh distribution of planets — a snapshot that astrologers read as the theme of the coming year.
Ten areas, each with its own reading: love, career, finance, friendship, home and family, health and wellbeing, creativity, identity, spirituality and healing, and luck and expansion. Each one names the natal house it touches, the transit driving it, why it matters this year, and the months it concentrates in.
The chart is calculated in the Placidus house system from your exact date, time and place of birth. The Ascendant anchors everything: it sets the chart ruler and decides which houses the year's transits actually land in, which is why the same transit reads differently for every rising sign. Aspects are counted inside standard orbs — 8° for conjunctions, oppositions and trines, 7° for squares, 6° for sextiles — and eclipses are flagged as significant when they fall within 5° of a natal planet or angle. If you do not know your birth time, the reading falls back to solar houses rather than guessing an Ascendant.
Yes, completely free to generate and read.
You still get a forecast. Without a time the reading uses solar houses, placing the Sun on the Ascendant, so transits are read relative to your Sun sign. An exact time gives the house-specific version.
At the moment of the return itself — on or within a day of your birthday — and it runs until the next one.
No. A birthday horoscope is generic to a Sun sign. A solar return chart is cast for your exact birth data, so it differs for two people born on the same day in different places.
Only to calculate your chart. Forecast generation data is not stored, and personal data is not sold to third parties.