--- title: "Marriage Muhurat: Ten Stars, Four Weekdays, 48 Days" slug: "marriage-muhurat" canonical_url: "https://mahadasha.com/marriage-muhurat" description: "Marriage muhurat draws on the fixed and soft nakshatra classes, which left 48 qualifying days in 2026. The screens, in the order they actually cut." published_date: "2026-08-05 09:00:00" modified_date: "2026-08-05 09:00:00" author: "Pawan Acharya" keywords: "marriage muhurat, vivaha muhurat, marriage muhurat 2026, best marriage dates, auspicious marriage timing, marriage nakshatra list, shubh muhurat for marriage" locale: "en" --- # Marriage Muhurat: Ten Stars, Four Weekdays, 48 Days > Marriage muhurat is usually handed over as a list of eleven stars. It is really two nakshatra classes plus two named exceptions, and that is what makes it checkable. # Marriage Muhurat: Ten Stars, Four Weekdays, 48 Days A marriage muhurat is the strictest thing most families will ever ask an astrologer for, and it usually arrives as a list of acceptable stars with no account of where the list came from. It came from two of the seven Muhurta nakshatra classes plus two stars admitted by name, and once you know which two classes those are, the rest of the rule becomes readable rather than memorised. The classes are Dhruva, the fixed group, and Mridu, the soft group. Fixed because a marriage is meant to hold. Soft because the occasion should not be harsh. Between them they carry eight stars: Rohini, Uttara Phalguni, Uttara Ashadha and Uttara Bhadrapada from the fixed class, and Mrigashira, Chitra, Anuradha and Revati from the soft. Hasta and Swati are then let in by name, which gives ten. ## Marriage muhurat and its two disputed stars Older texts give eleven rather than ten, and the eleventh varies. Magha and Mula both appear in classical Vivaha lists and both are dropped in most North Indian practice, on the grounds that Magha's presiding ancestors and Mula's root symbolism sit badly with a wedding. Southern practice frequently keeps them. This site's Vivaha Muhurat calculator follows the stricter reading and screens both out. That is worth knowing if you compare its output against a printed almanac from another region and find dates missing. Neither answer is an error. It is a real divergence between schools, and the honest thing is to name which one is in use rather than present ten or eleven as the number. The [Magha nakshatra](https://mahadasha.com/magha-nakshatra) guide sets out what that star actually carries, which is the fairest way to judge the argument. ## Which days of the week Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Their lords are the Moon, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus, the four gentlest of the seven. Tuesday belongs to Mars, Saturday to Saturn and Sunday to the Sun, and all three are set aside for the same reason the fierce nakshatra class is. Among the four, Thursday is generally weighted highest, since Jupiter is the natural significator of the husband in a woman's chart and of dharma generally. Friday runs a close second because Venus signifies the wife and the marriage itself. A wedding on a Thursday under a fixed star is about as clean as this rule ever gets, and there are usually only a handful of those in a year. ## The tithis that go Nine of the thirty tithis in a lunar month are removed. The rikta group, the fourth, ninth and fourteenth of each fortnight, accounts for six of those, and they are called rikta precisely because the word means empty. The sixth and the eighth go as well, and so do the new Moon and the full Moon at either end. This is the screen most people underestimate. Ten stars is 37 percent of the zodiac by nakshatra and four weekdays is 57 percent, so the two together predict about 21 percent of a year, near 77 days. The measured count against 2026 at Delhi, reading the limbs at sunrise, is 48. The tithi rule removed roughly a third of everything the first two screens had left standing. ## What a real year leaves Of those 48 days, nine fall inside a Panchak window and five have Vishti karana running at sunrise. Clearing both leaves 35 days in a whole year. Then the couple. Each partner's own tara bala and chandra bala pass roughly half of any calendar, and a wedding needs both to pass on the same day. Testing the 35 against thousands of sampled pairs of birth charts, the median number of dates available to a specific couple is nine, and about one couple in eight has none at all across the entire year. Nine dates in twelve months, unevenly spread, is why a wedding date gets fixed a year ahead and why the venue is negotiable long before the day is. ## Which screen is doing the work It is worth knowing the order, because that is the order to relax them in when a deadline leaves nothing standing. Starting from 365 days: - The star screen alone leaves 135 days. Ten of twenty-seven stars, and the Moon visits each one about thirteen times a year. - Adding the weekday screen leaves 81. Four days of seven should have left about 77, so the two screens are very nearly independent, which is what you would expect from a 27-day cycle running against a 7-day one. - Adding the tithi screen leaves 48. This is the sharpest single cut of the three, and the one most tables omit. - Clearing Panchak and Bhadra leaves 35. So the tithi rule removes 33 days where the weekday rule removed 54 from a much larger pool. Relax the tithi preference first and you recover more dates than by adding a weekday, and you give up less, because the rikta tithis are a preference in most schools where the weekday exclusions are closer to absolute. If you want to see the raw numbers for a date rather than take these on trust, [the tithi guide](https://mahadasha.com/tithi-in-panchang) sets out how the thirty are counted and which of them the rikta group actually are. ## The minute, not just the day Everything so far picks a date. The ceremony itself is timed to a rising sign, and marriage wants a fixed one: Taurus, Leo, Scorpio or Aquarius. A fixed sign rises for roughly two hours and the vows are placed inside that window. Two conditions apply at that level and neither can be read off a printed table of dates. The seventh house from the rising sign should not hold a malefic, since it is the house of the partner. The eighth should ideally be empty. Both need the actual chart for the actual minute, which is why a wedding muhurat is properly given as a window and not as a day. Because a fixed sign rises at some point every single day, this condition never removes a date from the list. It only tells you which part of a qualifying day to use, and it frequently pushes a ceremony to an hour that looks inconvenient until you see why. ## Months that are ruled out entirely Marriage is not performed during an adhika masa, the intercalary month inserted roughly every third year to keep the lunar and solar calendars in step. 2026 carries one, Adhika Jyeshtha, running 17 May to 15 June, and no wedding date falls inside it however good the five limbs look on a given morning. That trap is easy to walk into because Jyeshtha itself is one of the four strongest months for marriage. The prefix is doing all the work, and a table that tests the month name without checking the adhika flag will happily recommend the worst month of the year. Beyond that, the four months of Chaturmas are avoided in most traditions, and the strongest are Magha, Phalguna, Vaishakha and Jyeshtha. These are lunar months. They drift about a fortnight against the Gregorian calendar, so Magha in 2026 ran 19 January to 17 February and lined up with no English month at all. ## Checking a date The [Vivaha Muhurat Calculator](https://mahadasha.com/vivaha-muhurat) runs the full screen across a year and returns scored dates with the limbs each was judged on, so you can check the reasoning rather than take the score. For the raw day first, the [Panchang Calculator](https://mahadasha.com/panchang-calculator) gives all five limbs and every timing window for a date and city, and [choosing a day from the panchang](https://mahadasha.com/auspicious-and-inauspicious-days) covers what to do when the limbs disagree with each other. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Which nakshatra is best for a marriage muhurat? Rohini and Uttara Phalguni are the two named most consistently across schools, both fixed-class stars with no dispute attached. [Rohini](https://mahadasha.com/rohini-nakshatra) is the one most often given outright, being the Moon's own exaltation star. Revati and Anuradha are the strongest of the soft class. ### How many wedding dates does a year actually hold? Around 48 by star, weekday and tithi at Delhi in 2026, falling to 35 once Panchak and Bhadra are cleared, and to a median of nine once both partners' tara bala and chandra bala are applied. ### Are Magha and Mula allowed? The classical eleven include both. Most North Indian practice drops them and this site follows that. An almanac that allows them is following a different and equally old reading, not making a mistake. ### Why is Tuesday excluded? Its lord is Mars. The same reasoning that removes the fierce nakshatra class removes the fierce weekday, and Saturday and Sunday go on identical grounds.