Free Bhava Chalit Chart Calculator

Enter your birth date, time and place above and this free calculator draws your Bhava chalit chart, the house-cusp chart, next to your rashi chart, in North or South Indian style. It names every planet that moves to another house, lists all twelve bhavas with the degree where each begins, its middle and its end, and marks any planet that sits close to a junction, where the birth time matters most. The houses are worked out by the Sripati method.

How it works

In the rashi chart each house is one whole sign. In the Bhava chalit chart the houses are measured from the ascendant and the Midheaven instead, so a house can begin part way through a sign. The Sripati method builds them in three steps.

1. The degree rising in the east (the ascendant) is the middle, or madhya, of the 1st bhava. The degree on the meridian (the Midheaven) is the middle of the 10th. The points opposite them are the middles of the 7th and the 4th.
2. Each quarter between these four points is cut into three equal arcs. That gives the middles of the other eight bhavas. Because the quarters are seldom 90 degrees each, the bhavas are not all 30 degrees wide.
3. A bhava begins at the junction, or sandhi, halfway between its middle and the middle of the bhava before it, and ends at the next junction.

Each planet is then placed in the bhava its longitude falls in. Positions are sidereal with the Lahiri ayanamsa, from the NASA JPL DE440 tables, and the Midheaven is found with the same formula as the Shadbala calculator. For the eight test charts we keep, every middle and junction agrees with the Porphyry and Sripati house systems of the Swiss Ephemeris to within a few seconds of arc.

In the preface to his translation of Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, R. Santhanam writes that houses found from the Midheaven in this way are popularly called Sripati Paddhati, and that Parashara originally advocated this system.

Reading the result

A planet that changes house has not changed sign. Its sign, and everything read from the sign, still comes from the rashi chart; what changes is the house, the area of life, it works through. Santhanam’s notes to ch. 5 of the same text quote the rule that a planet at the middle of a bhava gives that bhava’s results in full and one at a junction gives none of that bhava’s results, and he adds that this does not make the planet ineffective in general.

The cusps move quickly with the birth time, so the result tells you how far your own ascendant moves in four minutes. If a planet is marked as close to a junction, a small error in the recorded time can move it across.

Where traditions differ

There is more than one way to draw a chalit chart. Krishnamurti (KP) astrology uses the Placidus cusps, which can differ from these by several degrees. Some astrologers make every bhava 30 degrees wide with the ascendant degree at the middle of the 1st. Some read only the rashi chart and use no cusps at all. This page follows the Sripati method throughout and says so in the result; if your astrologer uses another method, the planets near a junction may be placed differently.

What it does not do

It does not change any planet’s sign, dignity or aspects, and it does not redraw the divisional charts, which are always counted from the signs. It needs the time of birth, because the cusps cannot be found without it. It makes no prediction.

Frequently asked questions