Bhava Bala Calculator
The strength of all twelve houses, in shashtiamsas and rupas, ranked from strongest to weakest.
A worked example
The twelve houses of one illustrative chart, exactly as the engine returns them.
Chart: 13 December 1961, 05:30, Channarayapatna, India (Lahiri ayanamsa)
Bhava Bala — 13 December 1961
The 12th house leads on 517.84 with the 2nd a whisker behind on 517.40; the 11th trails on 370.21. The 4th lands on exactly 7.00 rupas.
| House | Shashtiamsas | Rupas | Ratio | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st House | 384.92 | 6.42 | 0.92 | 11 |
| 2nd House | 517.40 | 8.62 | 1.23 | 2 |
| 3rd House | 387.06 | 6.45 | 0.92 | 10 |
| 4th House | 419.73 | 7.00 | 1.00 | 8 |
| 5th House | 450.85 | 7.51 | 1.07 | 6 |
| 6th House | 411.37 | 6.86 | 0.98 | 9 |
| 7th House | 495.71 | 8.26 | 1.18 | 4 |
| 8th House | 420.69 | 7.01 | 1.00 | 7 |
| 9th House | 492.52 | 8.21 | 1.17 | 5 |
| 10th House | 498.22 | 8.30 | 1.19 | 3 |
| 11th House | 370.21 | 6.17 | 0.88 | 12 |
| 12th House | 517.84 | 8.63 | 1.23 | 1 |
Each house lord brings its own strength into these totals; the planets' six-fold strength is on the Shadbala calculator.
Illustrative birth data used to demonstrate the output. It is not a customer chart, and no birth details you enter above are ever stored, put in a URL, or published.
Bhava Bala is the house-level counterpart to Shad Bala. Instead of asking how strong a planet is, it asks how much working machinery stands behind a house — the fourth as a container for home and mother, the tenth for work and standing — whether or not anything happens to be sitting in it. An empty house still has a bhava bala, and that is exactly what makes the measure useful.
The three things a house strength is made of
Bhavadhipati Bala is the strength of the house lord, carried over whole from that planet's Shad Bala. It is usually the largest of the three components, and it is why bhava bala and shad bala tend to move together: strengthen a planet and every house it rules strengthens with it.
Bhava Digbala is a directional component belonging to the house itself rather than to any planet — the quarter of the chart a house occupies earns it up to a full rupa of strength. Bhava Drishti Bala is the net aspect falling on the house: benefic aspects add, malefic aspects subtract, and each is weighted by how close to exact it is. Drishti bala is the component that can go negative, and it is why a house with a very strong lord can still finish mid-table.
Shashtiamsas, rupas and the ratio column
Every total is expressed in shashtiamsas, the sixtieth part of a rupa, which is the unit the whole bala system is built in. Divide by sixty and you have rupas — the number an astrologer working by hand would quote. Our engine prints all three columns, plus a ratio against a seven-rupa reference, so a value of 1.00 means the house met that reference exactly.
In the worked example the fourth house lands on 419.73 shashtiamsas, which is 7.00 rupas, which is a ratio of 1.00 — you can check the arithmetic straight off the table. That kind of round number is a coincidence of one chart, not a rule.
Read the ranking, not the number
Parasara's own instruction for bhava bala is comparative. The twelve totals are only meaningful against one another, which is why the table carries a rank column: rank one is the strongest house of the twelve by total, rank twelve the weakest.
The spread also matters. Across the worked example the twelfth house leads on 517.84 with the second house a whisker behind on 517.40, and the eleventh trails on 370.21 — a range of about forty per cent from top to bottom. When two houses are four points apart out of five hundred, the rank difference between them carries no information at all. The ends of the table are where the signal is.
What a strong or weak house actually says
A high bhava bala says the affairs of that house have capacity behind them — a strong lord, supportive aspect, a favourable position. It does not say the outcomes are good, and the arithmetic makes no distinction between a strong sixth house and a strong ninth. The sixth house governs debt, illness and conflict; strengthening it strengthens those topics as topics. Strength here means the house is loud, not that it is kind.
A weak house is read the same way in reverse: the matters it governs have less structural support and tend to depend more on the dasha running at the time and on transits than on the birth chart's own scaffolding. Neither reading is a verdict, and nothing on this page should be treated as one — bhava bala is one input among many, and it is at its most useful as a way of deciding which houses in a chart deserve the closest attention.
Classical source. Defined in Brihat Parasara Hora Sastra in the chapter on Bhava Bala; B. V. Raman's Graha and Bhava Balas works the arithmetic through by hand.
This calculation is one panel of the full chart
The free birth chart runs every calculation on this site for one set of birth details at once — 23 divisional charts, 56 dasha systems, ashtakavarga, yogas and every bala, including this one.
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- ShadbalaThe six-fold strength of the Sun through Saturn, each component listed, totalled in rupas and measured against its classical minimum.
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Other calculations
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- Navamsa (D9) ChartDraw the D9 navamsa chart, with each planet's ninth-part sign and house and every vargottama placement flagged against the Rasi.
- D10 Dasamsa ChartThe D10 dasamsa: ten 3° parts per sign, each body's D10 sign and house, and the tenth house of the D10 examined.
- D7 Saptamsa ChartThe D7 saptamsa — seven parts of 4°17′ per sign, read classically for progeny, with the fifth house of the D7 examined.
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- Pitra DoshaThe five traditional pitru dosha indicators, each shown as met or not met in your chart — indicators, not a verdict.
- Gemstone (Traditional)The traditional ratna for your lagna lord and the two trikona lords, beside what the classical text prescribes instead.
- DarakarakaFind the Dara Karaka under both classical schemes, with its D9 sign and its house counted from both ascendants.
- AmatyakarakaFind the Amatya Karaka, second only to the soul planet, with its D10 sign and its house from both lagnas.
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- Upapada LagnaThe arudha of the twelfth house, which Jaimini practice consults on marriage, with the second sign from it.
- D2 Hora ChartThe D2 hora — two halves per sign, every body in the Sun's Leo or the Moon's Cancer, the division Parashara gives to wealth.
- D3 Drekkana ChartThe D3 drekkana — three ten-degree parts per sign, counted through the sign's own trine, read classically for brothers and sisters.
- D4 Chaturthamsa ChartThe D4 chaturthamsa — four quarters per sign, counted through the sign's kendras, read for fortune, residence and property.
- D16 Shodasamsa ChartThe D16 shodasamsa — sixteen narrow parts per sign, started from Aries, Leo or Sagittarius by sign type, read for conveyances and comforts.
- D30 Trimsamsa ChartThe D30 trimsamsa — five unequal bands per sign, each ruled by one of the five non-luminary planets, read classically for difficulties.
- D60 Shashtiamsa ChartThe D60 shashtiamsa: sixty half-degree parts per sign, each body's D60 sign and house, and the named deity of its part.
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- Shani DhaiyaLists Saturn's two-and-a-half-year passages through the 4th and 8th signs from your Moon sign, with dates.
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- Chara Dasha (Jaimini)Jaimini chara dasha: twelve sign periods from the lagna, each sign's years counted to its lord, dated across two cycles.