Free kundli: your Vedic birth chart

What a kundli shows

A kundli (also called a janam kundli or Vedic birth chart) is a map of the sky at the moment and place you were born, drawn on the sidereal zodiac. It places the Sun, Moon, the five visible planets and the lunar nodes Rahu and Ketu into twelve houses, counted from the rising sign (the lagna).

This page draws the chart in the north Indian style, where the houses are fixed diamonds and the signs move around them. House one, the rising sign, is always the top diamond. Next to the chart you get a table with each planet's sign, house, degree and whether it is moving backward (retrograde).

How the chart is calculated

Planet positions come from a standard astronomical ephemeris, converted to the sidereal zodiac with a fixed ayanamsa. Houses are whole sign: each sign is one house. The exact settings are listed on the method page, so you can compare them with any other software and see why two kundli programs sometimes differ by a sign.

Birth time matters. A few minutes can move the rising sign when it is close to a sign boundary, and that changes every house. The result tells you when your time is close to such a boundary, and what to check if it is.

How to read the table beside the chart

The table lists the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn, then Rahu and Ketu. For each one you see the sign it is in, the house that sign makes from your rising sign, and how many degrees into the sign it sits, from 0 to 30. A planet marked (R) was moving backward against the stars at your birth, which is an ordinary effect of how the planets orbit. It is a label for the motion and nothing more.

Signs and houses are two separate counts, and mixing them up is the most common confusion. The sign says which part of the zodiac a planet is in. The house says which area of the chart that sign was given, counting from your rising sign as house one. With whole sign houses, a planet's house is simply how many signs it is from your rising sign, counting the rising sign itself as one.

Getting your birth details right

The place matters as much as the time. Choose the town you were born in, not the one you live in now, because the rising sign depends on the latitude and longitude of the birth place. If your town does not appear, pick the nearest large city, or open the advanced box and type the coordinates yourself.

The best source for a birth time is a birth certificate, a hospital record or a note a family member wrote close to the day. A time remembered by a parent is a useful estimate, and the option for an approximate time tells the calculator to treat it that way. If you do not know the time at all, tick the box for that. You still get the Moon's sign and star, which change slowly, and the rising sign and houses are marked as uncertain.

Checking a kundli against your own life

A good test of any chart is the past. Write down three or four dated events you are sure of, such as a move, a change of job, finishing a course or something in the family, then open the dasha table and see which periods were running at those times. A chart built on a wrong birth time often sits badly against real events, and you can usually see it once you look.

This page does not read the chart for you, and it does not try to. It gives you the facts in a form you can check and take anywhere. If you have a specific question about work, marriage, money or timing, an astrologer reads your chart and answers it, and the box under your result starts that chat. Nothing is saved before you sign in.

Where to go next

A chart is a starting point, not an answer. To see which dasha period you are in and when it changes, try the Vimshottari dasha calculator or the current dasha page. To read one part of the chart by itself, use the nakshatra finder, the moon sign calculator or the lagna calculator.