To better understand how planets form , it is important to study planet occurrence rates as a function of stellar mass . However , estimating masses of field stars is often difficult . Over the past decade , a controversy has arisen about the inferred occurrence rate of gas-giant planets around evolved intermediate-mass stars – the so-called ‘ retired A-stars ’ . The high masses of these red-giant planet hosts , derived using spectroscopic information and stellar evolution models , have been called into question . Here we address the controversy by determining the masses of eight evolved planet-hosting stars using asteroseismology . We compare the masses with spectroscopic-based masses from the Exoplanet Orbit Database that were previously adopted to infer properties of the exoplanets and their hosts . We find a significant one-sided offset between the two sets of masses for stars with spectroscopic masses above roughly 1.6M _ { \odot } , suggestive of an average 15–20 % overestimate of the adopted spectroscopic-based masses . The only star in our sample well below this mass limit is also the only one not showing this offset . Finally , we note that the scatter across literature values of spectroscopic-based masses often exceed their formal uncertainties , making it comparable to the offset we report here .