If your Sun is in the 4th house, you were born in the dark, close to the middle of the night. Under the house method most US apps use, the Sun was deep below your feet. It was on its way to the lowest point of its daily path, which it reaches at midnight by the Sun. You arrived in the two hours or so before that moment.
On the clock, that is not always before midnight. In winter, the window runs from about 9:30 p.m. to midnight. In summer, daylight saving time pushes it an hour later, to about 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. So six summer babies in ten with this Sun have a birth date one day later than the night they belong to.
These are quiet hours on a US maternity ward. So the placement is rarer than the math of twelve houses says. On an even clock it would be one birth in twelve. With the real US birth hours of 2024, it is about one birth in fifteen.
This guide gives the clock times for your city, the count behind each figure, and what the old and new books say about a Sun at the bottom of the sky. Every number comes from our own count. The method is at the end, so you can check it.
The 4th house, in plain words
Your birth chart is a map of the sky at the minute you were born. Astrologers cut that map into twelve slices called houses. Think of a home with twelve rooms. Each room covers one field of life, and the planets are the people in the rooms.
The 4th house is the cellar and the ground the home stands on. It covers your roots, your family, your private life and the place you come back to. Our guide to 4th house astrology covers the room itself in full.
The Sun stands for the core of you: the self you grow into, and the place where you want to shine. Put it in the 4th house and the core of you lives in the cellar. You shine first where few people look: at home, with your own people, in what you build to last.
Now the sky part. The houses are not fixed to the stars. They are fixed to the ground under your feet. The top of the chart is the highest point the Sun can reach in your sky. The bottom of the chart is the point straight under your feet, on the far side of the Earth. Astrologers call it the IC, short for Imum Coeli, which is Latin for the bottom of the sky.
The Sun crosses the IC once a day, at midnight by the Sun. The 4th house is the slice of sky just before that point. So each night, the Sun passes through the 4th house in the hours before the Sun’s own midnight. That is why this placement is tied to the clock.
Two ways to draw the houses
There are two common ways to cut the sky into rooms, and for the 4th house they give quite different clock times.
Whole sign houses are the oldest way. The sign rising in the east at your birth is your whole 1st house. The next sign is the 2nd house, and so on. The Greek writers used this method. The 4th house is simply the fourth sign from the rising sign.
Placidus houses cut the sky by time. The Sun’s path from sunset to sunrise is split into six equal parts of time, and each part is one room. Most US sites and apps use this one.
For the Sun, Placidus gives a clean rule. Split the time from sunset to the Sun’s midnight into three equal parts. The last part is the 4th house. It always ends at the Sun’s midnight, to the minute. The whole sign rule is looser, and we come back to it below.
What time of night puts the Sun in the 4th house
Start with Sun time. At noon by the Sun, the Sun stands highest in your sky. At midnight by the Sun, it stands lowest. On the two equinox days, when day and night have the same length, the Sun sets at 6 p.m. by the Sun.
From 6 p.m. to midnight is six hours. Split them into three parts of two hours. The last part runs from 10 p.m. to midnight by the Sun. That is the 4th house on the equinox.
The rest of the year, the window stretches and shrinks with the night. In June the nights are short, so the window lasts about an hour and a half. In December the nights are long, so it lasts about two and a half hours. Over the whole year and the whole country, it lasts 1.99 hours on average. It always ends at the Sun’s midnight.
Sun time is not clock time
Your birth record shows clock time, not Sun time. Two things pull them apart.
First, your time zone is wide. The clock is the same across the whole zone, but the Sun reaches its low point later the farther west you live. Second, daylight saving time moves the clock one hour ahead from March to November. So in July, the Sun’s midnight in New York comes close to 1 a.m. on the wall.
Here is the Placidus window for the Sun in the 4th house in three big US cities, in local clock time. A time after midnight falls on the next calendar day. We found each start and end with the Swiss Ephemeris, the same engine many chart apps use. We checked the house of the Sun every thirty seconds.
| Night in 2026 | New York | Chicago | Los Angeles. |
|---|---|---|---|
| January 15 | 9:40 p.m. to 12:06 a.m. EST | 9:33 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. CST | 9:43 p.m. to 12:03 a.m. PST. |
| March 7, last night of winter time | 10:01 p.m. to 12:07 a.m. EST | 9:55 p.m. to 12:01 a.m. CST | 9:59 p.m. to 12:04 a.m. PST. |
| March 9, after the clocks go forward | 11:02 p.m. to 1:06 a.m. EDT | 10:56 p.m. to 1:01 a.m. CDT | 11:00 p.m. to 1:03 a.m. PDT. |
| March 21, just after the equinox | 11:04 p.m. to 1:03 a.m. EDT | 10:58 p.m. to 12:57 a.m. CDT | 11:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. PDT. |
| June 21, the longest day | 11:27 p.m. to 12:58 a.m. EDT | 11:23 p.m. to 12:52 a.m. CDT | 11:18 p.m. to 12:55 a.m. PDT. |
| September 23, equinox | 10:48 p.m. to 12:48 a.m. EDT | 10:42 p.m. to 12:43 a.m. CDT | 10:45 p.m. to 12:45 a.m. PDT. |
| October 31, last night of summer time | 10:23 p.m. to 12:40 a.m. EDT | 10:16 p.m. to 12:34 a.m. CDT | 10:23 p.m. to 12:37 a.m. PDT. |
| November 2, after the clocks go back | 9:22 p.m. to 11:40 p.m. EST | 9:15 p.m. to 11:34 p.m. CST | 9:23 p.m. to 11:37 p.m. PST. |
| December 21, the shortest day | 9:25 p.m. to 11:54 p.m. EST | 9:18 p.m. to 11:49 p.m. CST | 9:29 p.m. to 11:51 p.m. PST. |
EST, CST and PST are winter clock time. EDT, CDT and PDT are summer clock time. At the equinox, all three cities match the two hour rule once you undo the time zone and the summer shift.
Look at the two weekends when the clocks change. From March 7 to March 9, the window jumps an hour later on the clock. From October 31 to November 2, it jumps an hour back. The sky did not move. Only the clock did. Since 2007, other years move these times by a minute or two, no more. Before 2007, summer time started in April and ended in late October, so check the rule for your birth year.
Summer time moves the birth date
This is the part most guides miss. The Sun in the 4th house is a night that runs across two calendar days. Which day ends up on the birth record depends on the season.
We added up every US birth with the Sun in the Placidus 4th house, from 1940 to 2030. We used the real birth hours of 2024 and the time zone rules of each year. Here is how many were born after midnight on the clock.
| Time of year | Born after midnight on the clock. |
|---|---|
| Summer time, March to November | 61 percent of these births. |
| Winter time, November to March | 13 percent of these births. |
| Whole year | 37 percent of these births. |
So in summer, most babies with this Sun carry the date of the next day. A baby born at 12:30 a.m. EDT on July 5 belongs, in the sky, to the night of July 4. Nothing is wrong with the record. The chart uses the exact moment, and good software turns the clock time back into Sun time on its own.
Summer time does a second thing. It pushes the window deeper into the quiet part of the night, when fewer babies are born. We ran the count again as if the clocks never changed, with the same birth hours. On summer time days, the share would rise from 5.98 to 6.26 percent. Over the whole year, it would rise from 6.81 to 6.96 percent. The effect is real but small, about one chart in fifty.
The odds at each clock hour
We then asked a plain question. Of all US babies born in a given clock hour, how many have the Sun in the 4th house under Placidus? We used every day from 1940 to 2030, with the exact start and end of each window.
| Clock hour of birth | Share with the Sun in the 4th house. |
|---|---|
| Before 9 p.m. | Almost none. |
| 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. | 7.9 percent of births. |
| 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. | 39.4 percent of births. |
| 11 p.m. to midnight | 75.3 percent of births. |
| Midnight to 1 a.m. | 64.1 percent of births. |
| 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. | 12.2 percent of births. |
| 2 a.m. or later | Almost none. |
So a US baby born between 11 p.m. and midnight on the clock has the Sun in the 4th house three times in four. The midnight hour comes next, and it counts mostly in summer. The 9 p.m. hour counts only in winter, when the nights are long and the clock is not shifted. All the cases fall between 9 p.m. and 2 a.m. on the clock.
Of all the babies with this Sun, 38 percent were born in the 11 p.m. hour and 31 percent in the midnight hour. Another 21 percent came in the 10 p.m. hour.
How common is it? One birth in fifteen
If babies were born at the same rate every minute of the day, the Sun would sit in each house one time in twelve. That is 8.33 percent. Our even clock count gave 8.30 percent under Placidus. The 4th house is a night room, and US nights are a little shorter than US days over the year, so it comes out a hair under one in twelve.
The CDC, the US public health agency, puts every birth record into one public file each year. The CDC natality file for 2024 holds 3,638,436 births. Only 666 of them lack a time of birth. On an even clock, each hour would get 4.2 percent of births. The hours from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. get only 3.3 to 3.6 percent each. The 8 a.m. hour is the busiest of the day, at 6.3 percent.
So we weighted our count by the real 2024 birth hours, with the month and the day of the week kept apart.
| Birth hours used | Placidus houses | Whole sign houses. |
|---|---|---|
| Even clock | 8.30 percent | 8.27 percent. |
| Real US hours, 2024 | 6.81 percent | 6.52 percent. |
With real hours, the Sun in the 4th house goes from one birth in twelve to about one in fifteen. That is a drop of a sixth under Placidus.
It sits right between the night rooms and the day rooms. Our guide to the Sun in the 1st house found 6.13 percent there, in the dead hours before sunrise. Our guide to the Sun in the 3rd house found 6.29 percent, just after the Sun’s midnight. Our guide to the Sun in the 8th house puts the 4th house at 6.8 percent, and our count agrees. Up at the top of the sky, the morning rooms win. Our guide to the Sun in the 11th house found 10.51 percent, and our guide to the Sun in the 10th house found 10.43 percent. The 10th is the room right across the chart from the 4th.
Planned C-sections skip this window
The CDC file says how each baby was born. For a C-section, it also says if labor had started first. A C-section with no labor first is a birth planned ahead. Hospitals book these in the day, and the peak is the 8 a.m. hour. Very few are booked near midnight.
| Kind of birth in 2024 | Share of all births | Sun in the 4th house, Placidus. |
|---|---|---|
| C-section with no labor first | 23 percent of births | 3.5 percent of these births. |
| C-section after labor had started | 9 percent of births | 8.4 percent of these births. |
| Vaginal birth, labor not induced | 40 percent of births | 7.8 percent of these births. |
| Labor induced with drugs, any delivery | 34 percent of births | 7.9 percent of these births. |
A planned C-section baby has the Sun in the 4th house about one time in twenty-nine. Every other kind of birth lands close to the even clock rate. Induced labor means a birth started on purpose with drugs. The drip goes in during the day, and many of these babies come in the evening or at night. The last row overlaps the second, since some induced labors end in a C-section.
Put it together. Planned C-sections were 23 percent of US births in 2024. Yet they made up only 12 percent of the babies born with the Sun in the 4th house. The surgery schedule fills the morning rooms and leaves the midnight room to births that come on their own time.
Weekends and weekdays
Hospitals book far fewer planned births on the weekend. So on a Saturday or a Sunday, the night hours hold a bigger slice of the day’s births.
| Day of birth | Sun in the 4th house, Placidus, real hours. |
|---|---|
| Monday | 6.30 percent. |
| Tuesday | 6.46 percent. |
| Wednesday | 6.64 percent. |
| Thursday | 6.65 percent. |
| Friday | 6.69 percent. |
| Saturday | 7.80 percent. |
| Sunday | 7.77 percent. |
A weekend birth has the Sun in the 4th house 7.78 percent of the time. A weekday birth has it 6.55 percent of the time. Monday is the low point, as it is for the 1st house, since Monday has the most planned C-sections of the week.
Winter babies have it more
The 4th house window grows with the night, so your birth month shifts the odds a lot. With real hours and Placidus, 8.6 percent of December births have the Sun in the 4th house. In June it is 5.2 percent. So a December baby is about 1.6 times as likely to have it.
Summer time adds to the gap. In June, the window is short, and the clock pushes it past midnight. In December, the window is long, and it sits in the evening, when the ward is busier.
That means your Sun sign shifts the odds too. The table gives the chance of a Sun in the 4th house for each Sun sign. The even clock column holds for any hour pattern. The real hours column is for a baby born under the 2024 pattern.
| Sun sign | Even clock | Real US hours, 2024. |
|---|---|---|
| Aries | 7.9 percent | 6.4 percent. |
| Taurus | 7.1 percent | 5.7 percent. |
| Gemini | 6.6 percent | 5.3 percent. |
| Cancer | 6.6 percent | 5.3 percent. |
| Leo | 7.1 percent | 5.7 percent. |
| Virgo | 7.9 percent | 6.4 percent. |
| Libra | 8.8 percent | 7.2 percent. |
| Scorpio | 9.6 percent | 8.2 percent. |
| Sagittarius | 10.1 percent | 8.6 percent. |
| Capricorn | 10.1 percent | 8.4 percent. |
| Aquarius | 9.5 percent | 7.9 percent. |
| Pisces | 8.7 percent | 7.2 percent. |
The even clock column is almost the same as the one in our 1st house guide. Both are night rooms, and each is a third of the night. A long winter night gives them a long window. So a Sagittarius or a Capricorn Sun is the most likely to sit in the 4th house, and a Gemini or a Cancer Sun the least.
There is an irony here. Modern books pair the 4th house with Cancer, the 4th sign. Yet a Cancer Sun sits in the 4th house less than any other sign but Gemini. It shines in the short nights of June and July.
Whole sign houses: a later, looser window
In whole sign houses, the Sun is in the 4th house when its sign is the fourth sign from your rising sign. The rule has nothing to do with the Sun’s midnight. So the window can open before that point or well after it.
Here is the whole sign window in New York on some of the same nights, in local clock time.
| Night in 2026 | Where the Sun is in its sign | Whole sign 4th house, New York | Sun’s midnight in New York. |
|---|---|---|---|
| January 15 | 25 degrees of Capricorn | 10:14 p.m. to 12:45 a.m. EST | 12:05 a.m. |
| March 21 | 1 degree of Aries | 2:25 a.m. to 4:19 a.m. EDT | 1:02 a.m. |
| June 21 | 0 degrees of Cancer | 12:54 a.m. to 2:06 a.m. EDT | 12:57 a.m. |
| August 1 | 9 degrees of Leo | 11:24 p.m. to 12:50 a.m. EDT | 1:02 a.m. |
| September 23 | 0 degrees of Libra | 11:16 p.m. to 1:39 a.m. EDT | 12:48 a.m. |
| November 2 | 10 degrees of Scorpio | 10:02 p.m. to 12:34 a.m. EST | 11:39 p.m. |
| December 21 | 0 degrees of Capricorn | 11:53 p.m. to 2:24 a.m. EST | 11:54 p.m. |
The pattern follows the Sun’s place in its sign, and the tilt of the sky. A sign is a slice of the zodiac 30 degrees wide. On June 21 and December 21, the Sun has just entered its sign, and the window opens right at the Sun’s midnight. So under whole sign houses, those babies are born after the Sun has passed the bottom of the sky. Under Placidus, most of them have the Sun in the 3rd house.
Now the count. With real US birth hours, 6.52 percent of births have the Sun in the whole sign 4th house. That is a little less than the 6.81 percent under Placidus. The whole sign window runs later on average. Two whole sign cases in three come after midnight on the clock, in the quietest hours of the ward.
The two systems agree less than you might think. Of the babies with the Sun in the Placidus 4th house, only 45 percent have it in the whole sign 4th house too. Another 45 percent have it in the whole sign 5th house, one room earlier in the night. In the other direction, 42 percent of whole sign 4th house Suns sit in the Placidus 3rd house, past the Sun’s midnight.
What the old books say about the Sun here
The Greek writers called the bottom of the sky the hypogeion, the place under the earth. It was one of the four pivots, the points where the chart turns: the rising point, the top of the sky, the setting point and this one. A planet on or near a pivot was thought to act with force. Vettius Valens, in his Anthologies from the 2nd century, ties this pivot to parents, land, the home and hidden things.
Ptolemy, in the Tetrabiblos from the same century, reads the father from the Sun and Saturn. So a Sun in the 4th house puts the planet of the father in the room of the parents. Many astrologers read that as a father, or a family line, that shapes the whole life.
William Lilly, in Christian Astrology from 1647, gives the 4th house the father, lands, houses, inheritance, hidden treasure and the end of any matter. He also keeps score with points. A planet in the 10th or the 1st gets five points. A planet in the 4th gets four, the same as the 7th and the 11th. For Lilly, a Sun in the 4th is strong, one step below the best.
The Greeks gave each planet a room where it was glad to be. They called it the planet’s joy. The Sun’s joy is the 9th house, the room of God, which the Sun crosses in the early afternoon. No planet has its joy in the 4th house. So a Sun here has force, but it is far from its joy.
The old writers also split every chart into day and night. They called this sect. A chart is a day chart when the Sun is above the horizon, and a night chart when it is below. A Placidus 4th house Sun is as far below the horizon as the Sun can get, so it always gives a night chart. The Sun leads the day team. In a night chart it works out of sight. Chris Brennan, in Hellenistic Astrology from 2017, sets out this rule in plain terms.
What modern writers add
The modern reading keeps the roots and turns them inward. Liz Greene reads the Sun as the hero’s road, the self you grow into over a life. In the 4th house, that road starts at home and keeps coming back to it.
Robert Hand, in Horoscope Symbols from 1981, reads the 4th house as the parent who shaped your inner life, whichever one that was. Stephen Arroyo reads the house of the Sun as the field of life where a person wants to feel most alive. Put that field in the 4th and the person comes alive in private: at home, with family, on their own ground. Demetra George, who spent years bringing the Greek texts back, keeps the older sense in view. For her, the pivot under the earth is the ground of the chart, not only a mood.
Here is how those readings show up in a life. We give them as the tradition gives them, not as a forecast.
The self grows from the roots. The 4th house is where you come from. With the Sun there, your sense of who you are is tied to family, place and the past.
The home is the stage. A Sun wants to be seen. In the 4th house, it wants to be seen by its own people first. Many of these natives build a home the way others build a career.
Late light. Lilly’s 4th house is the end of any matter. Astrologers read this Sun as a life that shines more with age, and a name made last, not first.
The midnight child. This one is ours, and it comes from the sky, not the books. A Placidus 4th house Sun was born as the day ran out. Every one of these charts sits at the turn from one day to the next.
The rooms on each side change the tone. Charts that put the Sun in the room above read as the Sun in the 5th house, born earlier in the evening. Charts that put it in the room below read as the Sun in the 3rd house, born just after the Sun’s midnight.
Is your Sun in the 4th house? Check these three things
First, you need a birth time you can trust. Look for the time on your long form birth record, not a family memory. Under Placidus, a US birth before 9 p.m. or after 2 a.m. on the clock never has the Sun in the 4th house.
Second, read the date with care. If you were born after midnight in summer, your chart belongs to the night before your birthday. That is fine. Enter the date and time as written, and the software does the rest. Do not move the date by hand.
Third, know which house system your app uses. On March 21, 2026, in New York, the Placidus window is 11:04 p.m. to 1:03 a.m. EDT. The whole sign window that night is 2:25 a.m. to 4:19 a.m. EDT. The two windows do not touch. A baby born at 3 a.m. that night has the Sun in the 4th house in one system and the 3rd in the other.
Your Sun sign comes from the date alone. The house needs the hour. And for this house, the hour sits right on the line between two dates.
How we counted
We want you to be able to check this, so here is the full method. It is the same setup as our other Sun in the houses guides, so the pages can be read side by side. Our guide to the Sun in the 7th house uses it for the hours before sunset.
Places: every US county, placed at its 2020 center of people from the Census Bureau and weighted by its head count. We grouped the counties into 303 cells, each with its own time zone.
Dates: every day from January 1, 1940 to December 31, 2030. We turned each clock time into world time with the official time zone rules, war time and summer time included.
Birth hours: the CDC natality file for 2024, split by month, day of the week and minute of birth. For the kinds of birth, we used three fields of the same file: the way the baby was born, if labor was induced, and, for a C-section, if labor was tried first. We used the 2024 pattern for every year. Births in the 1970s had far fewer planned C-sections, so for older readers the true share sits between the even clock value and the 2024 value.
Route one: an exact sum. For the Sun, Placidus has a simple rule. The Sun is in the 4th house during the last third of the time between sunset and its lowest point. We solved for the start and end of that window each day, in each place, with our own formulas for the Sun. A window that runs past midnight counts on the next clock day, with that day’s birth hours. Then we added up the births inside it. This gave 6.81 percent, and every figure by kind of birth, by weekday, by month, by sign and by clock hour. The summer time test uses the same windows with the summer hour taken off.
Route two: 800,000 charts drawn at random with a fixed seed, each one built with the Swiss Ephemeris and its own Placidus houses. It gave 6.79 percent, give or take 0.03. A second draw of 400,000 charts on an even clock gave 8.29 percent.
Route three, for whole sign houses: a regular grid every fifth day and every two minutes, from the same places and birth hours, with our own formulas for the rising sign. It gave 6.81 percent under Placidus, the same as route one, and 6.52 percent for the whole sign 4th house. Route two gave 6.51 percent for whole sign, give or take 0.03.
Questions people ask
How common is the Sun in the 4th house?
On an even clock, a hair under one chart in twelve, or 8.30 percent under Placidus. With real US birth hours from 2024, it drops to 6.81 percent, about one birth in fifteen.
What time of day gives the Sun in the 4th house?
Under Placidus, the last third of the time from sunset to the Sun’s midnight. That is 10 p.m. to midnight by the Sun at the equinox. On US clocks, all cases fall between 9 p.m. and 2 a.m. The 11 p.m. hour has the best odds, at 75.3 percent.
Is a Sun in the 4th house born before or after midnight?
Both. Over the year, 63 percent of US cases come before midnight on the clock. Under summer time the window slides an hour later, and 61 percent come after midnight. So many summer babies with this Sun carry the next day’s date.
Why is the Sun in the 4th house rarer than one in twelve?
Because fewer babies are born late at night. Planned C-sections, almost a quarter of US births, are booked in the day. Only 3.5 percent of them have the Sun in the 4th house.
Is the Sun in the 4th house a good placement?
In the old score books, it is a strong one. William Lilly gives a planet in the 4th house four points, one below the top score. The Greeks counted the bottom of the sky as one of the four pivots of the chart. Modern writers read it as a self rooted in home and family.
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