Rahu Kaal is the period most people check even when they check nothing else in the Panchang. It is a stretch of roughly ninety minutes each day, traditionally avoided for starting anything new — signing, launching, travelling, beginning a ceremony. The useful thing about it is that the calculation is completely mechanical. You can work it out yourself in under a minute.

The calculation

Take the day’s daylight — sunrise to sunset — and divide it into eight equal parts. Rahu Kaal is always one of those eight parts, and which one depends only on the weekday.

The first part of the day is never Rahu Kaal. The remaining seven are assigned like this:

Weekday	Which part of the day	If sunrise is 6:00 and sunset 18:00
Monday	2nd	7:30 – 9:00
Saturday	3rd	9:00 – 10:30
Friday	4th	10:30 – 12:00
Wednesday	5th	12:00 – 13:30
Thursday	6th	13:30 – 15:00
Tuesday	7th	15:00 – 16:30
Sunday	8th	16:30 – 18:00

The order looks arbitrary written out as Monday, Saturday, Friday, Wednesday, Thursday, Tuesday, Sunday — but that sequence is the thing to remember. Most practitioners keep it as a mnemonic rather than recalculating from first principles.

A worked example

Say it is a Thursday, sunrise 6:24, sunset 18:36.

• Daylight: 6:24 to 18:36 = 12 hours 12 minutes = 732 minutes
• One part: 732 ÷ 8 = 91.5 minutes
• Thursday takes the 6th part, so it starts after 5 parts have passed: 5 × 91.5 = 457.5 minutes after sunrise
• 6:24 + 7 hours 37.5 minutes = 14:02
• It ends 91.5 minutes later, at 15:33

So Rahu Kaal that day runs roughly 14:02 to 15:33.

The quick method for your own day

1. Look up today’s sunrise and sunset for your city — any weather app gives both.
2. Work out the daylight length in minutes, then divide by 8.
3. Find your weekday in the table above to get its part number n.
4. Rahu Kaal starts (n − 1) parts after sunrise and lasts one part.

On a Wednesday with 726 minutes of daylight, one part is about 91 minutes; Wednesday takes the 5th part, so Rahu Kaal begins roughly 6 hours after sunrise and runs an hour and a half.

Or let it do the arithmetic for you:

Why two websites give you different times

This is the question that comes up most. Rahu Kaal is derived from local sunrise and sunset, and those move with latitude and with the season. The same Tuesday is not the same length of daylight in Delhi, London and Singapore, so the eight parts are different lengths and the window lands at a different clock time.

A Rahu Kaal time quoted without a location attached is incomplete. If a site gives you one without asking where you are, it is guessing.

Yamaganda and Gulika Kaal

Two more daily windows are calculated the same way — daylight divided into eight, one part assigned per weekday — and are treated as similarly unfavourable, though Rahu Kaal is the one most consistently observed. Most Panchang listings show all three together, which is why you will often see three shaded bands in a daily table rather than one.

What it is actually used for

The traditional rule is narrow: avoid beginning something during the window. Work already underway is not interrupted, and the period is not considered dangerous in itself. In practice people use it to choose between two possible times for a specific act — sending a proposal, setting off on a journey, opening a shop for the first time — rather than to rearrange a whole day.

It is also worth being clear about what kind of claim this is. The division of daylight into eight parts is arithmetic. The meaning attached to the parts is centuries of interpretive tradition. Those are two different things, and a guide that blurs them is not doing you a favour.

Next

The five limbs of the Panchang explains the wider daily reading this sits inside, and choosing a muhurat covers what happens when you are picking a time rather than avoiding one. Questions about a specific date are welcome in the forum.

Rahu Kaal is the same for everyone on a given day. What differs by sign is the Moon’s transit — see the daily horoscope for all 12 signs for that half of the picture.