--- title: "Choghadiya Muhurat: Eight Slots, Four of Them Good" slug: "choghadiya-muhurat" canonical_url: "https://mahadasha.com/choghadiya-muhurat" description: "Choghadiya muhurat divides day and night into eight slots each. The names are the seven planets renamed, and the good and bad split is exactly theirs." published_date: "2026-08-05 09:00:00" modified_date: "2026-08-05 09:00:00" author: "Pawan Acharya" keywords: "choghadiya muhurat, choghadiya today, amrit choghadiya, shubh labh char, kaal rog udveg, choghadiya table, choghadiya calculation" locale: "en" --- # Choghadiya Muhurat: Eight Slots, Four of Them Good > Amrit, Shubh, Labh and Char are good. Kaal, Rog and Udveg are not. Those seven names are the seven planets, and the split is their own. # Choghadiya Muhurat: Eight Slots, Four of Them Good Choghadiya muhurat is the most practical timing tool in a panchang, and the easiest to actually use. Split the daylight into eight equal slots, split the night into eight more, and label each one. Four of the labels are favourable and three are not, so at any moment of any day you can look up whether the current slot is worth starting something in. The names are Amrit, Shubh, Labh, Char, Udveg, Kaal and Rog. They look like a list somebody invented. They are not. They are the seven planets with different names on, and the good and bad split is precisely the classical benefic and malefic division of those same seven. ## The names are the planets Each slot belongs to a graha, and the label is just that graha's timing name: - Amrit is the Moon. Nectar, the best of the eight. - Shubh is Jupiter. Auspicious. - Labh is Mercury. Gain, and the one for business. - Char is Venus. Movable, and the one for travel. - Udveg is the Sun. Anxiety, used for dealings with authority. - Kaal is Saturn. Death or time, the heavy one. - Rog is Mars. Illness, and the one for conflict. Now sort them. The four favourable slots belong to the Moon, Jupiter, Mercury and Venus. The three unfavourable ones belong to the Sun, Saturn and Mars. That is the natural benefic and malefic classification of the seven grahas, without a single exception. Nothing was decided separately about Choghadiya. Once you know which planets are benefic, you already know which slots are good, and the labels are a convenience rather than a second system to memorise. ## How the sequence runs The slots cycle through the seven lords in the order Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, then back to the Sun. That looks arbitrary too, and it is not: it is the Chaldean order, slowest apparent motion first, rotated to begin at the Sun. The same sequence runs the planetary hours, covered in [hora timing in astrology](https://mahadasha.com/hora-timing-in-astrology) . The daylight sequence opens on the weekday's own lord. So Sunday's first slot is Udveg, Monday's is Amrit, Tuesday's is Rog, Wednesday's is Labh, Thursday's is Shubh, Friday's is Char, Saturday's is Kaal. Eight slots dealt from a cycle of seven means the eighth repeats the first. Every day therefore opens and closes on the same quality. A Monday begins on Amrit and ends on Amrit; a Saturday begins on Kaal and ends on Kaal. That is a genuine structural feature and a useful one, because it means the last slot before sunset is free information once you know the first. The night runs on the same cycle but starts elsewhere: on the lord of the fifth weekday counted forward from today. Monday night therefore opens on Venus, giving Char, and Thursday night opens on the Moon, giving Amrit. ## How many good slots a week holds Worth counting, because the answer is more generous than the reputation of muhurat suggests. Each day has eight slots drawn from seven lords, four of which are benefic. Over seven days the cycle passes each lord exactly once as a starting point, so the count comes to seven times four, which is 28, plus one extra for each weekday whose own lord is benefic, since that lord appears twice in the eight. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday qualify. That gives 32. Thirty-two favourable daytime slots in a week out of 56. Running the same arithmetic over the nights gives 32 again out of 56. Sixty-four of 112 slots, which is a little over 57 per cent of all time. So more than half of every week is favourable by this measure. Choghadiya is not a system for finding rare windows. It is a system for avoiding the bad ones, and the difference matters when you are planning something. ## A worked day 5 August 2026 at Delhi, a Wednesday. Sunrise 05:45:50, sunset 19:08:12, so the daylight is 802 minutes and each slot runs 100.3 minutes. Wednesday opens on Mercury, giving Labh. The sequence from there runs Labh, Amrit, Kaal, Shubh, Rog, Udveg, Char, Labh. In clock terms: - Labh 05:46 to 07:26 - Amrit 07:26 to 09:06 - Kaal 09:06 to 10:47 - Shubh 10:47 to 12:27 - Rog 12:27 to 14:07 - Udveg 14:07 to 15:48 - Char 15:48 to 17:28 - Labh 17:28 to 19:08 Five good slots and three bad, and notice how they interleave with the other windows. Yamaganda that day ran 07:26 to 09:06, which is exactly the Amrit slot. Rahu Kaal ran 12:27 to 14:07, exactly the Rog slot. Gulika ran 10:47 to 12:27, exactly the Shubh slot. That alignment is not a coincidence. Both systems cut the same daylight into eighths from the same sunrise, so their boundaries always fall together. What differs is which eighth each system flags, and that means one of the day's favourable Choghadiya slots is frequently cancelled by an eighth-part window sitting on top of it. Here two of the five good slots were compromised, leaving Labh, Char and the closing Labh genuinely clear. Anyone using Choghadiya alone would have picked the Amrit slot at 07:26 and walked straight into Yamaganda. Anyone using the eighth-parts alone would have had no idea that 17:28 onward was the strongest part of the day. ## The night, which almost nobody prints Night Choghadiya is computed the same way but starts from a different lord: the lord of the fifth weekday counted forward from today. That single shift changes the whole night sequence, and since eight slots again come from seven lords, each night also opens and closes on the same quality. - Sunday night opens on Jupiter, giving Shubh. - Monday night opens on Venus, giving Char. - Tuesday night opens on Saturn, giving Kaal. - Wednesday night opens on the Sun, giving Udveg. - Thursday night opens on the Moon, giving Amrit. - Friday night opens on Mars, giving Rog. - Saturday night opens on Mercury, giving Labh. Two things are worth noticing. Thursday night opens on Amrit, the best of the eight, which is the strongest opening slot anywhere in the week. And the day and night openings never match on any weekday, so a day that begins badly can begin well after sunset and the other way round. Tuesday opens on Rog by day and Kaal by night, which is the only weekday where both openings are unfavourable. Night slots are also a different length from day slots on every date except the equinoxes, since one is an eighth of the daylight and the other an eighth of the darkness. ## What each Choghadiya muhurat slot suits The activity assignments follow the planets, which makes them easy to reconstruct rather than memorise. Amrit takes anything important. Shubh takes marriage, ritual and anything requiring blessing. Labh takes trade, contracts and study. Char takes travel and movement, since Venus's slot is the movable one. Of the three unfavourable slots, two have traditional uses rather than being simply dead. Udveg, the Sun's, is the accepted window for approaching government and authority, on the reasoning that the Sun rules such matters whether or not the hour is comfortable. Kaal, Saturn's, is used for work that goes into the ground: construction, agriculture, anything meant to endure through labour. Rog, Mars's, is the one with no redeeming use, though it is sometimes cited for confrontation and competition, which fits everything else Mangal governs. How that plays out in a chart rather than a clock is covered in [Mars in different houses](https://mahadasha.com/mars-in-different-houses) . ## Frequently asked questions ### What is Choghadiya muhurat? A division of the daylight into eight equal slots, and the night into eight more, each labelled with one of seven planetary qualities. Four labels are favourable and three are not, so it answers whether now is a good time to begin something. ### Which Choghadiya is the best? Amrit, the Moon's slot, followed by Shubh and Labh. Char is favourable and particularly associated with travel. In practice any of the four will do for most purposes. ### How long is one Choghadiya slot? One eighth of the daylight for a day slot and one eighth of the night for a night slot, so the two are different lengths on every day except the equinoxes. At Delhi a day slot ranges from about 77 to 104 minutes through the year. ### What if a good slot overlaps Rahu Kaal? Then it is compromised, and most practitioners would pick a different slot. Both systems divide the same daylight into eighths from the same sunrise, so their boundaries coincide exactly and an eighth-part window always covers precisely one Choghadiya slot. The [panchang calculator](https://mahadasha.com/panchang-calculator) returns all sixteen slots with real clock times for your date and city. To check them against the windows that can cancel them, see [Rahu Kaal timing](https://mahadasha.com/rahu-kaal-timing) and [what is panchang](https://mahadasha.com/what-is-panchang) .