What Sade Sati is
Sade Sati (also written Saade Saati or Sadhe Sati) is the Vedic name for the time when Saturn is in the 12th, the 1st or the 2nd sign counted from your Moon sign.
The name means seven and a half. Saturn stays about two and a half years in a sign, and three signs together come to about seven and a half years.
It is a counting rule taken from the Moon, not a statement about a person. Saturn goes once around the zodiac in about 29.5 years, so Sade Sati for a given Moon sign comes round about every 29 or 30 years, and a long life sees it two or three times.
Whether it matters, and how, depends on the whole chart, which this page does not read.
How to check it in three steps
- Find your Moon sign (rashi), the sign the Moon was in at your birth. If you do not know it, the Moon sign calculator finds it from your birth details.
- Tap that sign at the top of this page. The answer shows the sign Saturn is in today.
- Count from your Moon sign, counting the Moon sign itself as 1. If Saturn is in the 12th, 1st or 2nd sign, that is Sade Sati. If it is in the 4th or 8th sign, that is Dhaiya. Any other sign is neither.
The page does this counting for you and adds the dates, so you can see how long each stay lasts and when the next one begins.
The three phases and the Dhaiya
Sade Sati has three phases of about two and a half years each. In the first, Saturn is in the sign before your Moon sign, the 12th from it. In the second, Saturn is in your Moon sign itself.
In the third, Saturn is in the sign after it, the 2nd. Some writers call these the rising, peak and setting phases. This page only calls them first, second and third.
Dhaiya (also spelled Dhaiyya) is the shorter count: Saturn in the 4th sign from the Moon sign, which many books call Kantak Shani, or in the 8th, called Ashtam Shani. Each is one stay of about two and a half years. Traditions give each a different weight, and some do not count Dhaiya at all.
A worked example with Cancer
Take a Moon sign of Cancer (Karka). Counting Cancer as 1 gives Gemini as the 12th sign, Cancer as the 1st and Leo as the 2nd. So Sade Sati for Cancer is the time Saturn spends in Gemini, then Cancer, then Leo. Dhaiya is Saturn in Libra, the 4th sign, or in Aquarius, the 8th.
Why Saturn's dates go back and forth
Saturn turns backward (retrograde) for about four and a half months of every year. When that happens near the edge of a sign, Saturn can leave the sign, move back into the one before it, and cross again some months later. So one sign can have two or three separate stays.
This page lists every real stay with the exact time Saturn crosses the boundary, in Indian Standard Time, instead of one tidy start and end date.
Where Sade Sati dates differ between sites
Websites often show different dates for the same Moon sign, for three reasons. Some use the tropical zodiac, which sits about 24 degrees ahead of the sidereal one, so their signs and dates do not match.
Some use another ayanamsa, which can move a date by days or weeks. And some give one rounded date and ignore a step back.
This page uses the sidereal zodiac with the Lahiri ayanamsa, the same settings as the rest of MyKundli, listed on the method page. Astrologers who also look at the degree of the Moon or of Saturn may set a start or an end differently. The sign count here is the common one.
How to find your Moon sign
Your Moon sign is the sidereal sign the Moon was in at the moment you were born. It is not your Sun sign. The Moon takes about two and a quarter days to cross a sign, so for most birth dates the date alone gives it, but on a day the Moon changes sign the birth time and place decide it.
If you do not know your birth time and your birth fell on such a day, check both signs here. Some families use the sign taken from the first letter of the name. Traditions differ on that, and this page counts from the Moon at birth.
What this page does not tell you
This page says where Saturn is and counts signs from your Moon sign. It does not say what Sade Sati means for you. A Saturn stay is read together with the rest of the chart, such as the Moon's nakshatra, the houses Saturn passes through and the dasha running at the time.
If you want your own chart read, send your birth details and an astrologer reads your chart. Nothing on this page asks you to buy or perform anything.
Calculated with the Lahiri ayanamsa and whole sign houses; every setting is on the method page. Last checked 14 October 2026.