Five of Pentacles

Arcana

Minor Arcana — one of the fifty-six

Suit

Pentacles — the Earth suit

The suit covers

money, the body, craft and material security

Rank

Five — the break

Place in the suit

fifth of fourteen

Pip or court

Pip card — one of the forty

Numbered alongside

The Hierophant (V), the Major sharing this number

Upright

Hardship, exclusion, help not asked for

Reversed

Recovery, help accepted, coming in from the cold

Listing position

card 69 of 78 as the deck is written out

Nothing on this page is calculated from your birth details or your name — the readings below are the traditional attributions for the Five of Pentacles, written plainly. The one part of it that is arithmetic, and exact, is how often a card of this kind actually turns up; that has its own section further down.

What the Five of Pentacles means

Hardship and the feeling of being outside, in the cold, past a lit window. Help exists. Ask — that is the card.

The Five of Pentacles is the fifth of the fourteen Pentacles cards, and in the numbering every suit follows, the Five is the break: the number every suit takes its loss on. Pentacles is the Earth suit, so the question a Five puts — what has gone wrong, and what does it cost — is answered here in terms of money, the body, craft and material security. That pairing is the whole card. Change the suit and the break lands somewhere else entirely; change the rank and money, the body, craft and material security are still the subject but at a different point in its life.

Read the keyword line — hardship, exclusion, help not asked for — as the short form of that, not as a separate meaning. It is the Earth answer to what has gone wrong, and what does it cost, compressed to fit a table cell.

The Five of Pentacles reversed

Recovery, help accepted, coming in from the cold

A reversal is a shift of emphasis, not a negation. Upside down, the Five of Pentacles is still the break and it is still about money, the body, craft and material security — what changes is which way that is moving. One common habit is to hear a reversal as the stage not fully arrived at, which would put the reversed Five of Pentacles nearer Four of Pentacles — holding on, security, conservation; the rank before it in Pentacles — than to its own upright line. That is a habit rather than a rule; several of the fifty-six read more comfortably reversed than upright, and which side the Five of Pentacles falls on is something the cards beside it settle.

Whether you read reversals at all is a house rule rather than a fact about the deck. If you do not, the Five of Pentacles carries its upright sense — hardship, exclusion, help not asked for — and the cards either side of it do the work of saying how welcome that is.

Where the Five of Pentacles sits in Pentacles

The Pentacles run reaches the break at the Five, immediately after the Four of Pentacles and immediately before the Six of Pentacles. Those two are the useful context: money, the body, craft and material security arrive at this card already carrying holding on, security, conservation, and what follows it is generosity, fair exchange, giving and receiving. The Five of Pentacles is the turn between them, not a standalone verdict.

A Five in the other three suits

Every suit passes through the break, and comparing the four is the fastest way to see what Pentacles in particular contributes. In Earth the Five reads as hardship, exclusion, help not asked for; the same number in the other three elements is recognisably the same stage put to a different subject. Because the Five is numbered 5, it is also the rank that answers to The Hierophant (V) in the Major Arcana — the same number one storey up, where the subject is a chapter of a life rather than money, the body, craft and material security.

Reading the Five of Pentacles in a spread

In a three-card spread read as setting, situation and direction of travel, the position changes the weight of the Five of Pentacles rather than its meaning:

• First — the setting. money, the body, craft and material security as the ground the question already stands on, with the Five saying the matter had reached the break before you asked.
• Second — the situation. the break as the live issue right now, in the Earth terms Pentacles deals in: money, the body, craft and material security.
• Third — the direction. Where money, the body, craft and material security are heading: the number every suit takes its loss on, arriving rather than already here.

In a love reading

Where the Five lands in a love question depends on what Pentacles covers there — the practical frame around a relationship — money, a home, time, who is carrying what — rather than the feeling inside it. Put the break into that frame and the Five of Pentacles is asking what has gone wrong, and what does it cost about the relationship in those specific terms.

In a career reading

A Five in a career question is read through what Pentacles governs at work — pay, security, skill and the material result of the work, which is the most literal reading a career question can get — and the Five says which point of that a question has reached, which here is the break. So the Five of Pentacles answers a career question about money, the body, craft and material security rather than about the job in general.

How often the Five of Pentacles actually comes up

This is the part of a card page that can be checked, so it is worth stating exactly. Three cards drawn from seventy-eight means any named card — the Five of Pentacles included — appears in one three-card spread in 26, or 3.8% of the time. No card in the deck is rarer than another, and any page telling you its own card is unusual to draw is wrong about arithmetic rather than about tarot.

• At least one Pentacles card turns up in 45.2% of three-card spreads, and the Five of Pentacles is one of the fourteen it could be.
• At least one of the four Fives turns up 14.8% of the time — roughly one spread in 7 — and three times out of four that card is not this one.
• At least one of the forty pip cards appears in 88.9% of spreads, so a draw with no pip in it at all is the unusual one.
• At least one of the fifty-six Minor Arcana appears in 98.0% of three-card spreads — the near-certainty that the widely quoted Major Arcana figure obscures.

Reversals do not change any of that. Whether the Five of Pentacles lands upright or reversed is a separate coin from whether it lands at all, which is worth remembering when a reversed card feels like it was aimed at you.

The full set of these figures, including what the most-feared cards actually add up to, is on the tarot page.

Five of Pentacles — common questions