Vimshottari Dasha Calculator

The 120-year cycle almost every Vedic reading is timed against — nine lords, entered at the point your Moon's nakshatra dictates.

A worked example

The full 120-year Vimshottari sequence for one illustrative chart, exactly as the engine returns it.

Chart: 13 December 1961, 05:30, Channarayapatna, India (Lahiri ayanamsa)

Vimshottari mahadashas — 13 December 1961

The full 120-year sequence for one illustrative chart. Mars opens it as a balance — a seven-year lord with under two years left to run at birth — and the last row's end is extrapolated, since no successor period supplies it.

Planet	From	To	Length	Classical years
MarsBalance	13 Dec 1961	18 Sep 1963	1y 9mo 4d	7
Rahu	18 Sep 1963	17 Sep 1981	18y 4d	18
Jupiter	17 Sep 1981	17 Sep 1997	16y 4d	16
Saturn	17 Sep 1997	17 Sep 2016	19y 4d	19
Mercury	17 Sep 2016	18 Sep 2033	17y 4d	17
Ketu	18 Sep 2033	17 Sep 2040	7y 1d	7
Venus	17 Sep 2040	18 Sep 2060	20y 5d	20
Sun	18 Sep 2060	18 Sep 2066	6y 1d	6
Moon	18 Sep 2066	≈ 2 Oct 2076Estimated	10y 16d	10

Vimshottari years per lord

The nine allotments total 120 — the number the system is named for. Venus and Saturn hold thirty-nine of them between them; the Sun holds six.

Planet	Years	Planet	Years
Ketu	7	Rahu	18
Venus	20	Jupiter	16
Sun	6	Saturn	19
Moon	10	Mercury	17
Mars	7

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.

Vimshottari is the timing system most Vedic astrology actually runs on, and it is the one a reader meets first. It divides a notional 120-year life into nine planetary periods, hands each one a fixed number of years, and fixes where an individual chart enters that sequence by the nakshatra the Moon occupied at birth. What comes out is not a forecast but a calendar: which planet governs which stretch of a life, and how far through the current stretch a chart currently sits.

120 years shared among nine lords

The allotments are Ketu 7, Venus 20, Sun 6, Moon 10, Mars 7, Rahu 18, Jupiter 16, Saturn 19 and Mercury 17. Added together they make 120, and the wheel always turns in that order before returning to Ketu. Nobody lives the whole rotation, so what a chart actually receives is a window onto part of it — typically four or five mahadashas across an ordinary lifetime, beginning partway through whichever one the birth fell inside.

The spread of the allotments is what gives the system its texture. Venus and Saturn between them account for thirty-nine of the hundred and twenty, so a chart that opens in either can spend the better part of two decades under a single governing planet, while a Sun period is over in six years and a Mars or Ketu period in seven. Two people born a fortnight apart can therefore be handed quite differently shaped calendars.

The Moon's nakshatra decides where the sequence starts

Each of the twenty-seven nakshatras belongs to one of the nine lords, three apiece, and the lord of the nakshatra the Moon occupied at birth is the mahadasha a chart begins in. A Moon in Ashwini, Magha or Mula opens under Ketu; a Moon in Pushya, Anuradha or Uttara Bhadrapada opens under Saturn. This is the whole of the entry rule, and it is why an accurate birth time matters here more than it does for most single calculations: the Moon covers a nakshatra in roughly a day, so a shifted birth time can move the starting lord and re-cut every date below it.

Because the Moon is almost never at the exact start of its nakshatra, the first period is entered partway through. How far through is set by the proportion of the nakshatra already traversed, and the remainder is what the tradition calls the balance at birth.

Why the first row looks short

In the worked example the first mahadasha belongs to Mars, whose classical span is seven years, and it runs for one year, nine months and four days. That is not an error and it is not a different Mars. The engine reports the period as beginning in September 1956, five years before this birth, because that is when a full Mars period containing this Moon position would have opened; only the part after the birth moment was lived, and that remainder is what the table shows.

Every date on this page is measured from the birth moment for that reason, never from the notional start. It is worth knowing that the underlying figure exists, though, because the balance is the number a traditional reading quotes when it says a chart began life in the last stretch of a period rather than at the head of one.

Below the mahadasha, the same proportion repeats

A mahadasha subdivides into antardashas that run through all nine lords in the same fixed order, starting with the mahadasha lord itself. Each sub-period takes the same share of its parent that its own allotment takes of 120 — so Saturn's antardasha inside a Saturn mahadasha is nineteen twentieths of nineteen years times nineteen over a hundred and twenty, and the Sun's inside the same parent is proportionally brief. The pattern then repeats a level down for pratyantardashas, and again below that.

The result is that the running antardasha is usually the more informative of the two figures. A mahadasha of nineteen years is too coarse to say much about a given season of life; the sub-period beneath it moves on a scale of months and is what most readings are actually keyed to. The table below shows the sub-periods of whichever mahadasha is currently running, which is the pair a single calculation is for.

Classical source. Parasara sets out Vimshottari in Brihat Parasara Hora Sastra as the dasha to be used when no conditional system applies, which is why it became the default reckoning in practice.

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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