Ashtakavarga Calculator

What is Ashtakavarga?

Ashtakavarga is a scoring system in Vedic astrology that grades every sign of the zodiac out of eight, separately for each planet. Ashta means eight and varga means division or group: eight reference points — the seven classical planets plus the ascendant — each judge whether a given sign is favourable, and the count of favourable verdicts is that sign's score. Each point awarded is called a bindu, literally a dot.

What makes it unusual is that it turns chart reading into arithmetic. Most of Vedic astrology is qualitative — a planet is exalted, aspected, in a good house — and different astrologers weigh those factors differently. Ashtakavarga produces a number for every sign, computed from a fixed table, so two people working from the same chart get the same figures. Whether they read the same meaning into them is another matter, but the measurement itself is not in dispute.

The system is attributed to Parashara and is set out at length in the classical literature, where it is used for judging transits, timing events, comparing houses and deriving longevity. In everyday practice today its most common use is far simpler: it tells you which parts of a chart carry weight and which are hollow.

The calculator above produces all of it from your birth details — a Bhinnashtakavarga table for each of the seven planets, and the combined Sarvashtakavarga. If you want the underlying chart those scores come from, the free birth chart calculator shows every planet on a full Lahiri wheel.

Bhinnashtakavarga and Sarvashtakavarga

Two terms cover almost everything in this system, and the difference between them is worth getting straight before anything else.

Bhinnashtakavarga (BAV) — bhinna means separate — is a single planet's own table. Twelve signs, each scored from 0 to 8. There are seven of them, one for each classical planet. Your Jupiter BAV answers the question: how favourable is each sign, specifically for Jupiter, in this chart?

Sarvashtakavarga (SAV) — sarva means all — adds the seven BAVs together sign by sign. Each sign ends up with a combined score, usually between about 20 and 40, and the twelve of them always total 337 bindus. SAV answers a different question: how strong is this sign, and therefore this house, overall?

You will also see Samudaya Ashtakavarga and Sarva Ashtakavarga used for the same thing; they are alternative names for SAV rather than different calculations. And Prastara Ashtakavarga refers to the fully expanded working — the eight individual rows before they are summed into a BAV — which is what the benefic-point table below actually contains.

In practice most reading starts with SAV, because it gives twelve numbers rather than eighty-four. BAV is where you go when you want to know why a particular sign scored what it did, or how one specific planet is placed.

How the bindus are calculated

The mechanism is a lookup table, and understanding it removes most of the mystery.

For each planet being scored, the tradition specifies which houses — counted from each of the eight reference points — are favourable. Take the Sun's Ashtakavarga as an example. Counted from the Sun's own position, the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th houses each get a bindu. Counted from the Moon, the 3rd, 6th, 10th and 11th. Counted from Mars, the same eight as from the Sun. And so on through Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn and finally the ascendant.

Work through all eight reference points, marking a bindu in the relevant sign each time, and you have the Sun's Bhinnashtakavarga: twelve signs, each holding somewhere between 0 and 8 bindus. A sign scoring 8 means every single reference point regards it as favourable for the Sun. A sign scoring 0 means none do.

Repeat for the other six planets and add the seven tables together, and you have the Sarvashtakavarga. That is the whole calculation. There is no ambiguity in it, no judgement call, and no room for two correct implementations to disagree — which is exactly why the totals below are such a useful check.

Why the total is always 337

Each planet's table contains a fixed number of bindus, and it is the same in every chart ever cast. Only their distribution across the twelve signs changes.

So 337 is a property of the table, not of your chart. Your Sarvashtakavarga will total 337 and so will everyone else's. What differs is whether your 337 bindus are spread evenly across the twelve signs or piled into three of them.

This makes an excellent correctness test, and it is worth using. If a calculator hands you a Sarvashtakavarga that totals anything other than 337, its benefic-point table has an error somewhere. That is not a hypothetical: this site's own chart pages carried a table with one spurious entry in the Sun's row, which made every chart total 338 until it was found and corrected. Nothing about the output looked wrong — a bindu in the wrong sign looks exactly like a bindu in the right one.

Note that Jupiter has the most bindus at 56 and Mars and Saturn the fewest at 39. That is the tradition building its view of the natural benefics and malefics straight into the arithmetic. Before you read anything into a low Saturn BAV, remember that Saturn starts with 17 fewer bindus than Jupiter to distribute.

What counts as a good score

The reference points are straightforward, and both follow from the averages.

In Sarvashtakavarga, 337 bindus across 12 signs averages just over 28. So:

• 30 and above — a strong sign. The house is well supported and matters it governs tend to be read as favoured.
• 25 to 29 — around average. Most signs in most charts land here.
• Below 25 — a weak sign, conventionally read as an area requiring more effort.
• Below 20 — notably weak, and uncommon.

In a single planet's Bhinnashtakavarga the scale is 0 to 8 and the average is 4. Five or more is favourable, four is neutral, three or fewer is weak. A sign with 7 or 8 bindus for a planet is genuinely notable, and 0 or 1 equally so in the other direction.

Two cautions worth more than the thresholds themselves. First, these are averages rather than grades — a sign on 27 is not "failing" anything. Second, and more useful: the pattern across the chart tells you more than any single figure. A chart where every sign sits between 26 and 30 is a different proposition from one ranging 18 to 42, even though both total 337. The first is even; the second is concentrated, with real strength in a few areas and real weakness elsewhere.

Reading Ashtakavarga by house

Bindus are calculated per sign, but they are almost always read per house, counted from your ascendant. The calculator above lists both, in house order, so you do not have to rotate the table yourself — which is where most hand errors creep in.

Once in house order, the scores can be read against what each house governs:

• 1st — the self, body and vitality. A strong first house is read as constitutional resilience.
• 2nd — accumulated wealth, family, speech.
• 4th — home, mother, property, peace of mind.
• 7th — marriage and partnership.
• 9th — fortune, father, higher learning. Traditionally one of the most valuable houses to find well supported.
• 10th — career, action, public standing. The house most often looked at first in a practical reading.
• 11th — gains and income. Frequently among the highest-scoring houses, which is a known feature of the system rather than a sign of good fortune.

Something worth knowing before you over-read a high 11th: several of the benefic-point rows include the 11th house from almost every reference point, so it tends to score well in most charts. The same is true of the 3rd and 10th to a lesser degree. Comparing your own houses against each other is informative; comparing your 11th against your 8th and concluding the 8th is afflicted is less so, because the system is not symmetric to begin with.

The seven planetary Ashtakavargas

Each planet's own table is read for the matters that planet governs, and each has a characteristic shape because each starts with a different number of bindus to distribute.

• Sun Ashtakavarga (48 bindus) — authority, father, health and vitality, government and recognition. Read alongside the 1st, 9th and 10th houses.
• Moon Ashtakavarga (49) — mind, mother, emotional steadiness and the general quality of daily life. Often the first table consulted after the SAV.
• Mars Ashtakavarga (39) — energy, property, siblings, disputes and surgery. Tied with Saturn for the fewest bindus, so a "low" Mars table is normal rather than alarming.
• Mercury Ashtakavarga (54) — communication, commerce, education and analysis. The second-richest table.
• Jupiter Ashtakavarga (56) — knowledge, children, wealth and guidance. The richest of the seven, which is the tradition's view of Jupiter written into the arithmetic.
• Venus Ashtakavarga (52) — relationships, comfort, art and vehicles. Frequently consulted for marriage questions alongside the 7th house.
• Saturn Ashtakavarga (39) — work, duty, endurance, delay and longevity. The most consulted single table in practice, because Saturn's transits are the slowest and the ones people most want warning of.

One clarification, since it is a common search: there is no Lagna Ashtakavarga in the classical seven-planet scheme, and no Rahu or Ketu table either. The ascendant is one of the eight reference points that award bindus, but it is not itself scored. Some modern practitioners construct extra tables for the nodes; those sit outside the 337-bindu system and are not computed here.

Because Jupiter starts with 56 bindus and Mars with 39, the two tables are not directly comparable. A 5 in Mars's table is proportionally stronger than a 5 in Jupiter's. Compare each planet's signs against that planet's own average — 56 over 12 is about 4.7 for Jupiter, 39 over 12 is about 3.3 for Mars — rather than against a flat 4.

Reading your own table, step by step

Given the tables above, a practical order to read them in:

1. Scan the Sarvashtakavarga column first. Note which houses clear 30 and which fall below 25. That is the shape of the chart in one pass, before any interpretation.
2. Check the spread, not just the extremes. Subtract your lowest sign from your highest. A range under 12 is an even chart; over 20 is a concentrated one, with pronounced strengths and weaknesses.
3. Look at the houses you actually care about. The 10th for work, the 7th for marriage, the 4th for home, the 9th for fortune. A number attached to a house you have no question about is not information.
4. Drop into the BAV row for the relevant planet. If the 7th house scores poorly in SAV, look at Venus's row for that sign to see whether Venus in particular is the reason or whether the deficit is spread across several planets.
5. Then check the transits. Find where Saturn and Jupiter currently sit, and read their bindus in those signs from their own rows. That is the part of this system with immediate practical use.

The step most people skip is the second. A chart where everything sits between 26 and 30 is genuinely different from one ranging 18 to 42, and reading only the highest and lowest signs hides that. Two charts can share the same strongest house and the same 337 total and still describe quite different lives.

Using Ashtakavarga for transits

This is the system's most practical everyday application, and the one classical texts emphasise most.

When a planet transits a sign, the tradition holds that its results depend heavily on how many bindus that planet has in that sign in your chart. Saturn moving through a sign where your Saturn BAV holds 6 bindus is read very differently from Saturn moving through one holding 1, even though the transit itself is identical for everyone.

The usual rule of thumb: 5 or more bindus and the transit is read as supportive; 3 or fewer and it is read as difficult. This is why two people can experience the same Saturn transit — the same Sade Sati, on the same dates — and describe completely different years. Ashtakavarga is one of the few tools that gives a concrete, chart-specific reason for that difference rather than a vague appeal to the rest of the chart.

To use it this way, find where the transiting planet currently sits — the live transit wheel shows every planet's present sign — then look up that sign in that planet's row in your BAV table above.

The same logic applies to the slow planets generally, which is where it matters most: Saturn spends about two and a half years in a sign, Jupiter about one, and Rahu and Ketu about eighteen months. A single number telling you whether the next two and a half years of Saturn land on supported ground is worth more than most of what is written about transits.

Ashtakavarga and Shadbala are not the same

Both put numbers on planetary strength, both come from classical Vedic astrology, and they are constantly conflated. They measure different things.

Shadbala scores the planet. It asks how much power Saturn has in your chart overall, adding six separately measured sources of strength — positional, directional, temporal, motional, natural and aspectual — and produces a total in rupas measured against a required threshold. One number per planet.

Ashtakavarga scores the signs, from each planet's point of view. It asks how favourable each of the twelve signs is for Saturn. Twelve numbers per planet, eighty-four in total, plus the twelve of the Sarvashtakavarga.

So a planet can be strong in Shadbala while sitting in a sign where its own BAV is thin, or weak in Shadbala while occupying a sign with 7 bindus. Practitioners who use both read them together: Shadbala for the planet's capacity to act, Ashtakavarga for whether the ground it stands on supports that action. You can compute the other half on the Shadbala calculator.

Trikona and Ekadhipatya reduction

Classical texts describe two further operations on the bindus, together called sodhana (reduction). This calculator does not apply them, and it is worth explaining why rather than leaving you to wonder.

Trikona sodhana works on the three signs of each element — the trines. Within each group of three, the lowest score is subtracted from all of them, so at least one sign in every trine ends at zero. Ekadhipatya sodhana then works on the pairs of signs ruled by the same planet, reducing them against each other under a set of conditions.

The results are used chiefly in the ayurdaya calculations for longevity, and in some predictive quantities derived from them. Three reasons this page leaves them out: schools disagree about the exact order and conditions, particularly for Ekadhipatya; the unreduced bindus are what virtually every chart, book and calculator displays; and reduced totals no longer sum to 337, so a reduced table cannot be compared against an unreduced one at all.

If you are following a source that uses reduced figures, expect its numbers to be lower than these and not to total 337. That is a difference in method, not an error in either.

Common misreadings

• "A low bindu count means something bad will happen." It means the area is less supported, in a system that grades on a curve where the average is 28. Every chart has weak signs, because 337 bindus cannot be spread evenly across twelve signs without leaving some below the mean.
• "My friend's SAV is higher than mine." Everyone's totals 337. Cross-chart comparison of the total is meaningless; only the distribution differs.
• "The 11th house is strong so I will be wealthy." The 11th tends to score well in most charts by construction. Compare houses within your own chart, not against an absolute standard.
• "Ashtakavarga replaces the rest of the chart." It is a scoring overlay, not a reading. It says nothing about which planets rule which houses, what dasha is running, or how planets aspect each other.
• "Rahu and Ketu should have their own tables." The classical system is built on the seven planets plus the ascendant. Some modern practitioners add a Rahu Ashtakavarga; it is not part of the traditional 337-bindu scheme and is not computed here.

How this calculator works

Planetary positions come from the Swiss Ephemeris and are converted to sidereal longitudes using the Lahiri ayanamsha, the Indian standard. Your birth city is geocoded to a latitude and longitude so the ascendant reflects where you were actually born.

Each planet's sign is then read off, and the benefic-point table is applied: for every one of the eight reference points, the specified houses counted from that point each receive a bindu. That produces the seven Bhinnashtakavarga tables, which are summed sign by sign into the Sarvashtakavarga.

The output is shown in house order from your ascendant rather than zodiac order, since that is how a chart is read, and every row total is displayed so you can verify the 48 / 49 / 39 / 54 / 56 / 52 / 39 pattern and the 337 total for yourself. A test in the codebase asserts those totals on every build, precisely because a wrong entry in this kind of table is invisible in the output.

Birth time matters here mainly through the ascendant, which decides which sign is house one and therefore how the whole table is oriented. The Lagna changes sign roughly every two hours. The bindus themselves depend only on planetary signs, which for the slow planets barely move within a day — so a rough birth time usually gives the right numbers attached to the wrong houses, which is worth knowing.

Free, no sign-up, nothing stored. Related tools: Shadbala for planetary strength in rupas, Sade Sati for Saturn's transit over your Moon, the Vimshottari dasha calculator for the period you are running, and the nakshatra finder for your birth star.