The Astrolium relocation chart calculator recalculates your natal chart for any city worldwide, returning the relocated Ascendant, Midheaven, house cusps, and every planet in its new house. Math runs on the Swiss Ephemeris with 13 house systems available. Free, no signup.
A relocation chart uses your exact birth date and time but treats a different city as the place of birth for the geometric calculation. The planets stay at the same zodiacal positions they held at the moment of birth. The houses shift because house cusps depend on local latitude and longitude, not on time. The Ascendant and Midheaven both move; in cases of a large east-west shift, they can move by entire signs.
Practitioners use the relocation chart when considering a move, evaluating a city for work or partnership, or understanding why life feels different in one place than another. The chart does not tell you to relocate. It describes the quality of a place for you: which life areas activate, which quiet down, which planets become angular.
Jim Lewis and the theory of relocation
Jim Lewis built the modern locational toolkit in the 1970s and 1980s. His framing was structural: the natal chart describes who you are; the relocation chart describes how that chart expresses in a given place. The angles do the work. When Mars moves to the Midheaven by relocation, the city pulls career and public role toward Mars themes regardless of what your natal MC says.
Lewis treated astrocartography as the screening tool, useful for narrowing geography across continents, and the relocation chart as the precision tool once a city was on the table. The two work together. Astrocartography answers "where on earth"; the relocation chart answers "what does it look like when I get there."
The technique predates Lewis in fragments. Charles Jayne worked with relocated angles in the 1950s. The Hellenistic tradition has fragmentary references to chart adjustments for travel. Lewis's contribution was the consolidated method and the practical software pipeline that made the calculation routine.
Angular changes when relocating
The single most important read on a relocation chart is which planets change from cadent or succedent to angular. A planet that becomes angular by relocation operates at full strength in that city.
The four angular houses are the 1st, 4th, 7th, and 10th. A natal Mars in the 3rd that lands in the relocated 1st becomes a Mars-first chart for that city. A natal Saturn in the 2nd that lands in the relocated 10th makes the city a place of Saturn-shaped career. The list of planets that gain angularity is the practitioner's primary worksheet.
Sun in the relocated 1st or 10th: visibility, identity, and public role tend to increase. Saturn in the relocated 1st or 7th: structure, discipline, or friction in self-presentation and partnership. Jupiter in the relocated 1st or 10th: expansion and recognized opportunity. Venus in the relocated 1st or 7th: social ease, partnership, creative work.
A planet that loses angularity matters less; the technique reads gains, not losses.
Reading houses in the relocated chart
The relocated houses are the working layer. Each natal planet appears in a new house. The reading procedure has three steps.
Step 1: list the angular planets. Note every planet now in houses 1, 4, 7, 10. These run the city's headline themes.
Step 2: read the relocated Ascendant and Midheaven by sign. The relocated Ascendant describes how the city reads you on first encounter. A natal Scorpio rising with a relocated Sagittarius Ascendant pulls a more open register from you in that city. The relocated Midheaven describes the city's career and reputation shape. A relocated MC in Capricorn intensifies professional ambition; in Pisces, it softens the career profile toward creative or service work.
Step 3: read the planets that changed houses across categories. A natal Venus in the 5th that relocates to the 11th moves creative output toward community. A natal Moon in the 10th that relocates to the 4th moves the emotional center from public work back to home.
The natal chart is not overwritten. The relocation chart is an overlay describing the city's modulation of the existing chart.
How relocation chart relates to astrolocality
Astrolocality is the broader category. It covers astrocartography (planetary line maps), local space (compass-bearing maps from the birth location), and relocation charts (full chart recalculations for a specific city). The three tools answer related questions with different geometry.
Most practitioners run astrocartography first to spot favourable geography across continents, then cast a relocation chart for the specific cities of interest. The solar return chart for the relocation city adds a time layer: which year-specific themes activate there during a given 12-month period.
Run astrocartography, the relocation chart, and a relocated solar return and you have the geographic, structural, and timing layers of the picture. The relocation chart is the practitioner's precision tool inside the larger astrolocality toolkit.
After the calculator
The relocation chart reads against the natal chart, never alone. Without the natal reference there is no "shift" to describe. The natal chart names the person; the relocation chart names what that person looks like in a place.
For the natal chart this technique extends, see the natal chart feature and the how to read a natal chart guide. For the global geography that precedes a city decision, see the astrocartography calculator. For the compass-bearing layer of locational work, see the local space astrology calculator.