Creation rather than production
Making things belongs here, but only the kind of making that carries your fingerprints. Craft performed to specification is sixth house work. The fifth is the version where the point is expression: a painting nobody commissioned, a song written on a Sunday, a garden arranged to please its owner.
Romance, distinct from partnership
This house covers courtship, affairs and the enjoyable part of attraction. Commitment, contracts and living arrangements move to the seventh. A chart with a lively fifth and an empty seventh often describes someone with a great deal of romantic history and very little interest in settling any of it.
Children
Traditionally the fifth is the house of children, read both as offspring and as the relationship you have with them. Modern practice tends to read it more broadly as anything you bring into being and then have to let develop on its own terms, which covers projects as readily as people.
Risk taken for pleasure
Gambling and speculation live here, on the grounds that both are play with money attached. The distinction from the eighth house is intent: the fifth risks for the enjoyment of risking, the eighth for what it might unlock. Jupiter in the fifth is the classic gambler's placement, and it describes the appetite rather than the outcome.
Facing the eleventh
Fifth and eleventh oppose each other as the personal against the collective: what you make yourself against what a group makes together, the lover against the friend. Charts weighted heavily to one side often struggle to take the other seriously.
How transits through the fifth house tend to read
A slow planet crossing this house is one of the more legible transits, because the house has such a narrow brief. Jupiter through the fifth usually shows up as more of everything the house covers: more romance, more output, more appetite for risk. Saturn through the fifth is the opposite and often the more useful one, since it tends to force a choice about which creative project is actually worth finishing.
What these transits do not do is guarantee an event. A transit describes a condition and a pressure. Two people can have the same Jupiter transit and spend it very differently, and the rest of the chart is where that difference lives.
Questions people ask about this
Is the fifth house about sex?
It covers romance and attraction. The more entangled aspects of intimacy belong to the eighth house.
Does an empty fifth house mean no children?
No. Emptiness is the ordinary case; read the ruler of the cusp. Nothing in a chart determines whether someone has children.
What is the difference between the fifth and sixth for creative work?
The fifth is work you would do unpaid. The sixth is the same skill applied to someone else's requirements.