About the Saturn transit
What is a Saturn transit?
A Saturn transit is Saturn moving out of one sign of the zodiac and into the next. Saturn takes close to twenty-nine and a half years to complete one circuit of the Sun, which works out to roughly two and a half years in each sign — the slowest-moving graha this site tracks, and the reason a single Saturn transit is read as shaping years rather than months.
The same event has several names depending on which tradition you grew up with. In Hindi almanacs it is shani gochar or shani rashi parivartan; in Tamil it is sani peyarchi; you will also see shani transit and saturn gochar used interchangeably. All of them describe what this page shows: Saturn changing rashi. The Tamil version of this page, with the same computed dates, is at சனி பெயர்ச்சி.
Read from your Moon sign, not your Sun sign
This is the step most people get wrong, and getting it wrong still produces a plausible-looking answer. Vedic gochara counts a transit from the rashi — the sign the Moon occupied at the moment you were born — not from the Sun sign a newspaper column uses. The two are usually different signs, so reading a Saturn transit against your Sun sign gives you the table row belonging to someone else.
Once you know your Moon sign, the count is simple. Start at your Moon sign as house one and count forward to the sign Saturn is in. With Saturn in Pisces, every one of the twelve possible answers is in the table above, so there is nothing to work out by hand.
What is Sade Sati?
Sade Sati is the seven-and-a-half year stretch when Saturn transits three signs in a row, each held for roughly two and a half years: the sign before your Moon sign, your own Moon sign, and the sign after it. It is read in three phases — the first phase (12th house from your Moon), the peak phase (Saturn on your own Moon sign), and the last phase (2nd house from your Moon) — and the table above marks whichever phase each rashi is in right now. The full Sade Sati calculator, with start and end dates for your own chart, is at /sade-sati.
Ashtama Sani: Saturn in the 8th house
Ashtama Sani is Saturn transiting the 8th house counted from your Moon sign — a separate transit from Sade Sati, not a phase of it. Classical gochara reads it as one of Saturn's more difficult placements, in the same restraint-focused register as Sade Sati's own phases: fewer sudden events than the name suggests, and more a stretch where effort is expected to convert into results more slowly than usual.
Ardhashtama Sani: Saturn in the 4th house
Ardhashtama Sani — literally the half-Ashtama — is Saturn in the 4th house from your Moon sign. It is read along similar lines to Ashtama Sani, generally centred on home, routine and a sense of settledness rather than the more visible themes of the Sade Sati phases either side of your own Moon sign.
Why other sites give a different Saturn transit date
Two reasons, and both are legitimate. The first is retrograde motion. A planet near a sign boundary can cross it, reverse, cross back, and cross again months later, so one transit honestly has several dates; a site printing a single date has usually kept the first crossing and dropped the rest. Every crossing is listed above.
The second is the ayanamsha — the offset between the sidereal zodiac and the tropical one. This page uses Lahiri, the value most Indian almanacs follow, but Raman, Krishnamurti and others are all in use and they disagree by enough to move an ingress by a few days. Neither almanac is wrong; they are answering from a different zero point. Dates here are recomputed from Swiss Ephemeris positions, so they also do not drift the way a hand-typed table does.
Does this page predict anything?
No, and it is worth being plain about that. What is here is the part that can actually be computed: which sign Saturn is in, when it changes, and whether that puts you in Sade Sati or Ashtama Sani counted from your Moon sign. Everyone born with the Moon in the same sign shares every word of it. How a transit plays out for you specifically depends on your whole chart — which houses Saturn rules for you, which dasha period you are running, what else aspects that house — and none of that can be read off an ingress date. For that, see a qualified astrologer.
Jupiter is the other transit that shapes a year
Jupiter and Saturn are the two slow-moving planets, and between them they carry most of what a yearly reading is based on. Jupiter spends about a year per sign, against Saturn's two and a half, so it is worth checking both — see the Jupiter transit page for the same kind of dates and house table. The full year-by-sign reading, with both grahas combined, is on the 2027 horoscope pages, and the live positions of all nine grahas are on the transit wheel.