Your Vimshottari dasha periods, from birth to 120 years

Last updated 25 October 2026

Enter your date and time of birth and the UTC offset to get the full Vimshottari sequence: the period you were born into, its balance, every mahadasha and antardasha with dates, and the pair running today. Below: how the dates are worked out and how an astrologer reads them alongside transits.

How the Vimshottari sequence is calculated

Vimshottari means “of one hundred and twenty”: the scheme shares out a 120-year cycle among the nine grahas in a fixed order. Ketu has 7 years, Venus 20, the Sun 6, the Moon 10, Mars 7, Rahu 18, Jupiter 16, Saturn 19 and Mercury 17. Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra describes it, and it is the timing system most Indian astrologers reach for first.

The calculator asks for three things: your date of birth, the time shown on your birth record, and the offset from UTC that applied where you were born (UTC+5:30 for India). From them it works out the Moon’s position in the sidereal zodiac (Lahiri ayanamsa) and identifies its nakshatra. Each nakshatra is ruled by one of the nine planets, and that planet’s period is the one running at birth. How far the Moon had already travelled through the nakshatra decides how much of that first period was used up before you were born; what is left is the “balance of dasha” the result states in years, months and days.

From there the periods follow in order. Each mahadasha is divided into nine antardashas (also called bhuktis), starting with the mahadasha’s own planet and following the same order; an antardasha lasts the mahadasha’s years multiplied by the sub-period planet’s years, divided by 120. For converting years into calendar dates the calculator uses a year of 365.2425 days, the mean length of the Gregorian year, so a whole-year period finishes close to the calendar date on which it started.

The result names the period at birth and its balance, the mahadasha and antardasha running today, a table of all the mahadashas, and each mahadasha’s nine antardashas in a section you can open. The Moon’s position comes from a computed approximation, so the dates typically land within a few days of those from a full chart calculation.

How an astrologer times events with the dashas

A dasha table on its own is a calendar of planetary rulers. An astrologer turns it into a reading by asking, for the period in question, what each ruler stands for in your particular chart.

• The mahadasha lord’s placement and lordship. Which houses it rules from your Lagna, which house it occupies, its sign and strength. A Venus period for someone whose Venus rules the tenth house reads very differently from a Venus period where Venus rules the sixth.
• The antardasha lord’s relationship to it. Whether the two are friends, how they are placed from each other, and which houses the sub-period lord activates. Many events are timed to the antardasha rather than the long mahadasha.
• Transits alongside. A common working principle is that the dasha shows what is promised for the period, and the slow transits, especially Jupiter and Saturn, show when it is triggered. A practitioner looks for the dasha and the transits pointing to the same house at the same time.
• The divisional charts. For a career question the astrologer checks how the period lords sit in the dasamsa; for marriage, in the navamsa.

Reading the current period is usually where a consultation starts. If the result shows you are, say, in a Jupiter mahadasha with a Saturn antardasha, a good astrologer will explain what those two planets mean for you, why the sub-period might feel different from the one before, and when the next change falls. They should also say what the dashas cannot tell you: a period does not decide events by itself, and it says nothing about choices still open to you.

Checking the birth time before trusting the dates

The calculator tells you how many days every date moves for a ten-minute error in the birth time, and adds a warning when the Moon was close enough to the edge of its nakshatra that a small error would start the whole sequence with a different planet. If you see that warning, the dates below it are provisional. An astrologer may compare the period changes with events you remember, such as a move or the start of a job, to judge which side of the edge you were born on.

Questions to ask your astrologer about your dashas

• Which houses does my current mahadasha lord rule and occupy, and what does that mean for the next few years?
• Is my present antardasha lord friendly to the mahadasha lord, and how does that change things?
• Which transits are you combining with the dasha for the question I brought?
• Do your dates match these within a few days, and if not, what birth time or method are you using?
• When does my next antardasha begin, and what would you watch for then?

Our guide on what to expect in an astrology reading describes how timing questions are usually handled in a session.

The nine periods, their lengths and their nakshatras

Computed from the calculator’s own figures. The last column lists the birth nakshatras whose ruler opens the sequence with that planet.