Card 1
Where you are
Your present working situation and how it feels from the inside.
5 cards
Career tarot spread
The Career tarot spread uses 5 cards in fixed positions — where you are, what you bring, the obstacle, the opening, advice. Five cards on work, aimed at a decision rather than a fantasy. Use it at a crossroads — leaving, applying, negotiating.
How many ways it can fall
81,066,585,600 possible career spreads
5 positions drawn without replacement from 78 cards, each landing upright or reversed: 78 × 77 × … × 74 × 25. Drawn once a day, it would take about 222 million years to get through them all — so any particular spread is unlikely ever to come up for you twice.
Reversals double the count at every position. Readers who ignore them are working with 2,533,330,800 instead — still plenty, but a different deck of possibilities.
18 pages · printable
The 2027 Sky Calendar — free PDF
Every retrograde, eclipse, new and full moon of 2027 to the minute, already converted to your city. A month to a page, ready to print.
What each position means
5 cards on a grid 3 across and 2 down, numbered in the order they are dealt.
Card 2
What you bring
Skills, strengths and experience you can build on — often undervalued.
Card 3
The obstacle
The main block, whether external (a manager, the market) or internal (fear, burnout).
Card 4
The opening
An opportunity or direction worth exploring, sometimes in an unexpected place.
Card 5
Advice
The approach or next step the cards suggest.
A worked example
Someone unsure whether to leave a stable job draws the Four of Pentacles for where they are — holding tight to security; the Eight of Pentacles for what they bring — real craft; the Ten of Wands as the obstacle — carrying too much. The Page of Pentacles as the opening suggests training or a small new venture, and the Chariot as advice says to choose a direction and commit rather than drift.
Where it comes from
Career spreads grew out of the modern use of tarot as a coaching and reflection tool rather than fortune-telling. Layouts like this one are built around a decision — what you bring, what stands in the way and where an opening lies — rather than predicting a job title.
Variations
A job-choice version lays three cards for each option — pros, cons and long-term result; a burnout check-in replaces the opening with "what drains me" and "what restores me".
Cite this page
AstroHot. “Career Tarot Spread: Each Position Explained.” Accessed October 27, 2026. https://astrohot.com/tarot/spreads/career/
For Wikipedia
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