Vimshottari dasha: the mahadasha order, every antardasha, and how the dates are worked out

Ask an astrologer what period of life you are in, and the answer will usually come from the Vimshottari dasha (also spelt Vimsottari). It is the main timing system of Parashari astrology: a fixed sequence of planetary periods that starts from the Moon’s position at your birth.

Most explanations stop at the list of nine planets. This one gives the whole calculation: how your first period and its balance are found, the length of all 81 antardashas, how much an uncertain birth time moves the dates, and why two apps can disagree by months.

The nine mahadashas in order

Vimshottari means “one hundred and twenty” in Sanskrit. The system divides a 120-year cycle among the nine grahas, always in the same order, and each planet’s period is its mahadasha (major period).

Order, years and nakshatra lords as given in Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra; the same table the app uses.

The sequence follows the 27 nakshatras. Ashwini, the first nakshatra, belongs to Ketu, Bharani to Venus, Krittika to the Sun, and so on to Mercury’s Ashlesha; then the run of lords repeats from Magha and again from Mula, so each planet rules three nakshatras spaced nine apart. That is why the order never changes. After Rahu comes Jupiter, after Venus comes the Sun, after Saturn comes Mercury, and after Mercury the cycle returns to Ketu.

In Hindi, the order of the mahadashas (महादशा का क्रम) is केतु, शुक्र, सूर्य, चंद्र, मंगल, राहु, गुरु, शनि, बुध.

Nobody starts at Ketu by default. Where you enter the cycle depends on your Moon, and the sequence simply carries on from there.

How your first mahadasha and the balance at birth are worked out

Everything comes from the Moon’s sidereal position at the moment of birth, in three steps:

1. Find the Moon’s nakshatra. Place the Moon’s sidereal longitude (JyotishiVani uses the Lahiri ayanamsa) among the 27 nakshatras of 13°20′ each. The lord of that nakshatra rules your first mahadasha.
2. Measure how far the Moon has travelled through it. The fraction already crossed is the fraction of that mahadasha that ran before you were born.
3. The rest is the balance at birth. Multiply the fraction still to cross by the lord’s years. When the balance runs out, the next lord’s mahadasha begins and runs for its full length, and so on round the cycle.

A worked example

Suppose the Moon is at Taurus 15°00′.

• Rohini runs from Taurus 10°00′ to 23°20′, so the Moon is in Rohini, whose lord is the Moon. The first mahadasha is the Moon’s, 10 years long.
• The Moon is 5°00′ into a nakshatra 13°20′ wide: 5 ÷ 13⅓ = 0.375 of the way through.
• So 0.375 × 10 = 3.75 years (3 years 9 months) of the Moon mahadasha had already passed at birth.
• The balance is 0.625 × 10 = 6.25 years: 6 years 3 months.

The Moon reached Taurus 15°00′ (Lahiri) at 11:25 pm IST on 17 January 2000. For a birth at that moment, JyotishiVani’s engine gives a balance of 6 years 3 months 0 days, a Moon mahadasha that began on 18 April 1996, and this sequence:

JyotishiVani’s engine: Lahiri ayanamsa, one dasha year = one mean sidereal year of 365.2564 days. Dates in IST.

Every date after birth follows from that one balance. That is why the Moon’s exact position matters so much, as the section on birth time below shows.

Antardashas: the nine sub-periods of every mahadasha

Each mahadasha divides into nine antardashas (sub-periods, also called bhuktis), one for every planet. Two rules decide them.

1. Order. The first antardasha belongs to the mahadasha lord itself, and the rest follow the Vimshottari sequence. Rahu’s mahadasha runs Rahu–Rahu, Rahu–Jupiter, Rahu–Saturn and so on, ending with Rahu–Mars.
2. Length. An antardasha lasts (mahadasha years × antardasha years) ÷ 120 years. Rahu–Jupiter is 18 × 16 ÷ 120 = 2.4 years, or 2 years 4 months 24 days.

Because the nine planets’ years add up to 120, the nine sub-periods always fill their mahadasha exactly. Two cells you can check by hand: Venus–Venus is 20 × 20 ÷ 120 = 3⅓ years, or 3 years 4 months, and Sun–Sun is 6 × 6 ÷ 120 = 0.3 years, or 3 months 18 days.

All 81 antardasha lengths

Find your mahadasha in the left column and your antardasha along the top. Within a row, the sub-periods run from the mahadasha’s own column to the right, then wrap round to Ketu.

Mahadasha years × antardasha years ÷ 120, written as years (y), months (m) and days (d) with 12 months of 30 days to the year, so every row adds up exactly to its mahadasha. In calendar time JyotishiVani counts a dasha year as one mean sidereal year of 365.2564 days, so each of these 30-day months is about 30.4 calendar days.

The order of antardashas in each mahadasha

Each mahadasha begins with its own antardasha and follows the Vimshottari sequence.

So the last antardasha of any mahadasha belongs to the planet just before it in the sequence. Venus’s period ends with Venus–Ketu, Rahu’s with Rahu–Mars and Saturn’s with Saturn–Jupiter, and the next mahadasha opens with its own lord: Rahu–Mars is followed by Jupiter–Jupiter.

Pratyantardasha and the finer levels

The same rule works one level down. Each antardasha divides into nine pratyantardashas, starting with the antardasha lord, and each lasts (mahadasha × antardasha × pratyantardasha years) ÷ 14,400, which is 120 × 120. A full cycle holds 9 × 9 × 9 = 729 of them, about two months long on average. The longest, Venus–Venus–Venus, lasts 6 months 20 days; the shortest, Sun–Sun–Sun, about five and a half days.

The texts go further still, to the sookshma and prana dashas, by the same rule. A sookshma lasts from about six and a half hours to 34 days and a prana from about 20 minutes to five and a half days, so these levels need a birth time accurate to the minute, which few people have. JyotishiVani calculates down to the pratyantardasha when you ask for it.

How much your birth time moves the dates

Every date in the sequence hangs on the balance at birth, and the balance hangs on exactly where the Moon was. The Moon moves fast: about 13.18° a day on average, or 0.55° an hour, and anywhere between about 11.8° and 15.4° a day depending on where it is in its orbit.

A birth time that is an hour out puts the Moon about 0.55° from where it really was, which is 4.1% of a nakshatra. The balance changes by 4.1% of the first mahadasha’s length, and because every later period follows on from it, every dasha date moves by the same amount: earlier if you were really born later than recorded, later if you were really born earlier.

The Moon’s sidereal speed from Swiss Ephemeris, sampled hourly over 1950–2050: 13.18° a day on average, 11.76° at its slowest and 15.39° at its fastest. One dasha year = 365.2564 days.

So for a Sun nakshatra (Krittika, Uttara Phalguni or Uttara Ashadha), an hour’s error moves the dates by about three months; for a Venus nakshatra (Bharani, Purva Phalguni or Purva Ashadha), by about ten. Half an hour moves them half as far.

Two things follow. First, a sub-period date can only be as precise as your birth time. Many antardashas last less than a year and Sun–Sun only 3 months 18 days, while a one-hour error moves the dates by more than that for six of the nine birth-star lords. Second, being born near the edge of a nakshatra is less dramatic than it sounds. If the Moon had in fact just crossed into the next nakshatra, your first period would be the very start of the next lord’s mahadasha instead of the last days of the previous one, and the dates of everything after would still move only by the amounts in the table. The sequence does not jump.

Why apps and astrologers show different dasha dates

When two sources give different dates for the same mahadasha, the difference usually comes from one of three settings.

• The ayanamsa. The dates hang on the Moon’s sidereal position, and ayanamsas differ. On 1 January 2026 the Lahiri and B. V. Raman ayanamsas were 1°27′ apart; for a Moon in a Venus nakshatra, that moves every dasha date by about two years and two months. Why astrologers disagree covers this and the other settings in detail.
• The birth time and time zone. As above, each hour of error moves the dates by roughly three to ten months. A wrong UTC offset, such as missing India’s war-time clocks of 1942 to 1945 or daylight saving abroad, is an hour’s error.
• The length of a dasha year. The texts give the periods in years, and every program has to turn years into calendar days.

The length of a dasha year

Practice differs. Some astrologers and programs count a dasha year as 360 days, twelve months of thirty days; others use a solar year of about 365¼ days, in one of several definitions. JyotishiVani uses the mean sidereal year, the time the Sun takes to return to the same place among the stars: 365.2564 days. It matches the sidereal zodiac the rest of the chart is measured in.

Difference after 40 dasha years = 40 × (365.2564 − the year’s length) days.

The three solar years differ from one another by less than a day over 40 years. The 360-day year does not: it is 5.26 days shorter, so 40 years after birth its dates come about 210 days, roughly seven months, earlier. In the worked example above, a 360-day year would start the Saturn mahadasha on 13 August 2046 instead of 19 April 2047, about eight months early.

Neither choice can be proven correct. What matters is knowing which one a date was computed with, so that you compare like with like.

Which mahadasha is best, and which is worst?

None, for everyone. A mahadasha brings forward what its lord means in your own chart, and the same planet means different things in different charts. Texts judge a period by:

• The houses the lord rules, counted from your lagna. Lords of the trikonas (the 1st, 5th and 9th houses) are read as favourable for the chart; lords of the 3rd, 6th and 11th as troublesome; and the 8th lord as generally adverse.
• Where the lord sits: its house, its sign and its dignity, such as exalted, in its own sign or debilitated.
• The planets that join or aspect it, and its strength in the navamsa (D9).
• The antardasha lord and how it relates to the mahadasha lord, which is why the same mahadasha feels different from one sub-period to the next.

So the same planet can be the most helpful lord in one chart and a difficult one in another. For Taurus and Libra lagnas, Saturn rules both a kendra and a trikona, which makes it the chart’s yogakaraka, the planet texts expect most from. Venus plays that role for Capricorn and Aquarius lagnas, and Mars for Cancer and Leo. Jupiter, the great natural benefic, rules the 8th and 11th houses for a Taurus lagna and the 3rd and 6th for a Libra lagna. “Jupiter’s mahadasha is always good” is no truer than “Saturn’s is always bad”.

Rahu and Ketu are not given signs of their own in the usual Parashari scheme. Texts read them through the sign they occupy and its lord, the house they fall in and the planets they join, which is why one person’s Rahu mahadasha can look nothing like another’s.

Saturn and Rahu mahadashas, without the fear

These are the two periods people are most often frightened of, partly because they are long: 19 and 18 years. Between them they cover 37 of the 120 years, and by our calculation a little over a third of people aged 20 to 60 are running one of the two at any given time. They are not rare misfortunes that fall on a few. The app’s own short labels for them are “work, discipline, steady effort” for Saturn and “ambition, change, foreign links” for Rahu; how those play out depends on the chart.

Two confusions add to the fear. Sade Sati is Saturn’s transit through your Moon sign and the signs on either side of it, not a dasha, and it can fall in any mahadasha. And a demanding period is not a forecast of disaster: classical astrology describes emphasis and tendency, and a reading that announces a bad period and then offers a remedy for sale deserves the most scrutiny.

Yogini dasha: a second clock

Yogini dasha is often used to confirm Vimshottari timing. It is shorter: a 36-year cycle of eight yoginis, each linked to a planet, with periods of one to eight years.

Yoginis, planets and years as in JyotishiVani’s engine. The first yogini: add 3 to the number of the birth nakshatra (Ashwini = 1) and divide by 8; the remainder gives the yogini, with 0 for Sankata.

The balance at birth is found exactly as in Vimshottari. In the worked example, Rohini is nakshatra 4, and 4 + 3 = 7 gives Siddha (Venus, 7 years). With 0.625 of Rohini still to cross, the balance is 0.625 × 7 = 4.375 years, or 4 years 4 months 15 days, so the Siddha period ends in June 2004. Sub-periods follow the antardasha pattern: (yogini years × sub-period years) ÷ 36, starting with the period’s own yogini. Some software splits every Yogini period into eight equal parts instead, which puts sub-periods out by up to ten months; JyotishiVani uses the proportional rule.

JyotishiVani calculates both systems and uses Yogini dasha alongside Vimshottari when you ask about timing, as a check rather than a replacement.

Dasha sandhi: the junction between periods

The change from one dasha to the next, above all from one mahadasha to the next, is called dasha sandhi (junction). It is read as a time of transition, when the outgoing lord’s results fade and the incoming lord’s begin, and many astrologers allow a few months on either side of the change. In the worked example, the Rahu–Jupiter junction falls on 19 April 2031. Since an hour’s error in the birth time moves that date by months, a junction is exactly where an uncertain birth time matters most.

How JyotishiVani shows your dashas

• Timeline. The Timeline tab shows your Vimshottari mahadashas from birth as life chapters on a single bar, with a marker for today. Below it, the current chapter lists its antardashas with their dates, marks the one running now and the next one, and shows how far through it you are.
• Answers that lead with the value. Ask Vani, the AI astrologer, “which dasha am I running?” and the first sentence names your mahadasha and antardasha. The explanation that follows weighs what those planets rule and where they sit in your chart.
• Nothing your birth time cannot support. The app recalculates your dashas across the uncertainty in your birth time. A date that moves is shown with its margin in days, and if the current period cannot be named, the app says so instead of guessing.
• One stated method. The Lahiri ayanamsa, the mean sidereal year and the historical time zone for your date and place of birth. Your full chart, with the Moon’s nakshatra and pada, is on the kundli page.