Choghadiya Today — Day and Night Timings

Each name comes from the planet that rules the slot. The good ones are not interchangeable: Labh is the trader's slot, Char suits anything that moves, and Amrit is the one to wait for when it really matters.

The sequence is fixed for each weekday, so once you know the day you know the order. By day the slots run through the planets in the order Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, starting from the weekday's lord. By night the order changes: it starts from the lord of the fifth weekday and steps Jupiter, Moon, Venus, Mars, Saturn, Mercury, Sun. The eighth slot always repeats the first.

A lot of calculators get the night wrong by running it on the day sequence, which leaves only the first night slot correct. The tables below are the ones every standard panchang prints, and the times above follow them.

Choghadiya slots are one eighth of the actual daylight, so they stretch in summer and shrink in winter. In Delhi a day slot is about 1 hour 46 minutes in late June and about 1 hour 17 minutes in late December, and the night slots do the opposite. The further from the equator, the bigger the swing.

Sunrise and sunset here are the same ones the Panchang on this site uses, which are checked against Drik Panchang. That is why a printed Choghadiya that assumes a 6 AM sunrise can be half an hour or more out.

The two systems come from different regions and answer different questions. Choghadiya says which parts of the day are good. Rahu Kaal, a South Indian practice, marks the one part of the day that is not. They can overlap: an Amrit or Labh slot can contain Rahu Kaal. Most people who follow both simply avoid the overlapping minutes and use the rest of the good slot.

Dur Muhurtam, one or two 48-minute windows each day, is another caution that many panchangs print. When it is set for the day you are looking at, this page shows it under the tables.

For a daily decision, yes. For a wedding, griha pravesh, mundan or a large purchase, families usually want a full muhurat that also checks the tithi, nakshatra, yoga and the rising sign, and avoids Panchak, Bhadra and eclipses. Choghadiya is then used to pick the exact hour inside a day that has already been chosen.