Career by Nakshatra: all 27 birth stars, 108 padas and the dasha layer

The Moon's exact position at the moment you were born falls inside one of 27 equal segments of the sidereal zodiac, each 13 degrees 20 minutes wide. That segment is your nakshatra, the birth star a Vedic career reading is built on. Every one of the 27 is below with its ruling planet, along with all 108 padas, the quarters each nakshatra divides into, and the sign and planet each quarter resolves to.

Two layers make this page different from a single-star career profile. The first is the pada, which narrows one of 27 answers to one of 108. The second is the vimshottari dasha, the 120-year ladder of planetary periods that Vedic practice uses to date career events, because where your Moon sits inside its nakshatra is what starts that ladder and decides how much of the first period you were born into. A career page that names your star and stops has skipped the part that carries dates.

What the nakshatra actually fixes

Your Moon's sidereal longitude is a single number between 0 and 360 degrees. Divide it by 13.3333 and the whole-number part identifies the nakshatra; divide the remainder by 3.3333 and you have the pada, counted 1 to 4. Nothing in that calculation is a matter of interpretation, which is why it is the first thing AstroMedha computes and the last thing worth guessing at.

That one number decides three separate things at once. It names the nakshatra's ruling planet, which is the planet whose working-life signature colours the whole reading. It fixes the navamsa sign of your pada, meaning the sign your quarter maps to in the ninth divisional chart, and the ruling planet of that sign becomes your pada's dispositor, which is the planet the pada answers to. And it sets the first mahadasha, the opening chapter of the period ladder, along with how many years of that chapter were still unspent on the day you were born.

Layer one: the pada dispositor, and why two people share a star but not a signature

Each nakshatra spans 13 degrees 20 minutes and each pada spans exactly 3 degrees 20 minutes, which is exactly one navamsa division. That is not a coincidence of arithmetic. It is the reason the two systems interlock: a pada and a navamsa division are the same slice of sky under two names. So every pada resolves cleanly to one navamsa sign, and that sign has one ruling planet.

The consequence is the part the thin per-star pages leave out. Across all 27 nakshatras, 18 have four different pada dispositors and 9 have two. So for two out of every three birth stars, four people born under the same star are answering to four different planets at work. Ashwini pada 1 answers to Mars. Ashwini pada 4 answers to the Moon. Those are close to opposite instructions about how to earn a living.

The nine nakshatras carrying only two dispositors are every third one in the sequence, starting from Krittika. Their four padas run Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces in navamsa, so the dispositors run Jupiter, Saturn, Saturn, Jupiter. The nine are Krittika, Ardra, Ashlesha, Uttara Phalguni, Swati, Jyeshtha, Uttara Ashadha, Shatabhisha and Revati. Anyone born under one of those has a narrower spread to consider, and it is still worth knowing which side of it you fall on, because Jupiter and Saturn point at very different working lives.

The seven planets that can be a pada dispositor

Only seven of the nine grahas rule a sign, so Rahu and Ketu never appear as a pada dispositor even though both rule nakshatras. The working-life signature of each planet below is the same one AstroMedha's career engine uses when it dates a period.

The Sun and the Moon hold half as many padas as the rest because each rules a single sign, Leo and Cancer, while the other five each rule two. That is why a Sun-dispositor or Moon-dispositor pada is the rarer placement of the seven: 9 padas in 108 rather than 18.

Layer two: the dasha balance your pada sets

The nakshatra's ruling planet is also the lord of the first mahadasha, the first chapter of the vimshottari period ladder. How much of that chapter remains at birth is set by how far through the nakshatra your Moon had travelled. Born at the very start of a nakshatra, the whole period is ahead of you. Born at the very end, it closes almost immediately and the next lord takes over.

Because a pada is a clean quarter of the nakshatra, each pada corresponds to a quarter of that first period. A pada 1 birth leaves between 100% and 75% of the first mahadasha unspent, pada 2 leaves 75% to 50%, pada 3 leaves 50% to 25%, and pada 4 leaves 25% down to nothing. In years, that works out as follows.

Read down the Venus row to see how much this matters. Two people born under Bharani, a Venus-ruled star, one in pada 1 and one in pada 4, begin life 15 years apart on the same ladder. Every later period, including the ones landing on their working years, is shifted by that gap. This is the layer that converts a personality description into dates, and it is why "career for my nakshatra" stays an incomplete question until the pada is attached to it.

The order of the periods after the first is fixed and never varies: Ketu, Venus, Sun, Moon, Mars, Rahu, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, then back to Ketu. Only your entry point moves. So knowing your nakshatra tells you the sequence you are walking, and knowing your pada tells you roughly where on that sequence you were standing at birth.

All 27 nakshatras with their four padas

Ruling planet is the vimshottari lord of the nakshatra. Each pada cell gives the navamsa sign that quarter maps to, followed by that sign's ruling planet, which is the pada's dispositor.

The repeating pattern down the pada columns is real, and worth knowing rather than treating as a quirk of the table. The navamsa cycle runs continuously through the twelve signs while the nakshatra cycle runs at a different rate, so the two lock into a three-step repeat. Nakshatras 1, 4, 7 and onward start their padas at Aries. Nakshatras 2, 5, 8 and onward start at Leo. Nakshatras 3, 6, 9 and onward start at Sagittarius. Knowing which of those three families your star belongs to gives you the four dispositors before you look anything up.

The 12 vargottama padas

A pada is vargottama when its navamsa sign is the same as its birth-chart sign, so the placement does not change identity between the two charts. Twelve of the 108 padas are built that way, one for each sign, and they are fixed for everyone born in them.

Classical practice reads a vargottama placement as an undiluted one: the sign says the same thing twice instead of the ninth chart softening or redirecting what the birth chart showed. For a career reading that means the pada dispositor's instruction arrives with no second opinion attached, which tends to read as consistency rather than as raw strength. Three nakshatras hold two vargottama padas each: Punarvasu in padas 3 and 4, Chitra in padas 2 and 3, and Uttara Ashadha in padas 1 and 2. In each of the three the two padas sit in adjacent signs rather than the same one, because each of those nakshatras straddles a sign boundary and the navamsa keeps step with the birth chart across it. The remaining six vargottama padas stand alone in their nakshatra.

The D-10 cross-check, and the one thing a pada cannot give you

The dashamsha or D-10 is the tenth divisional chart and the classical chart for profession and public standing. It divides every sign into ten parts of 3 degrees each. A career reading that never opens it has left its most on-topic page unread, so it belongs here. What it will not do is resolve from a nakshatra pada.

Here is why, and it is arithmetic rather than opinion. A pada is 3 degrees 20 minutes wide and a D-10 division is 3 degrees wide. A 3 degree 20 minute window cannot fit inside a 3 degree window, so every pada crosses at least one D-10 boundary. Computing this across the whole zodiac confirms it with no exceptions: all 108 padas out of 108 straddle a D-10 boundary. Your nakshatra and pada narrow your D-10 sign to two candidates and can never narrow it to one.

Only the actual degree settles it, which means the actual birth time. On 331 of 365 sampled days in 2026, the Moon's D-10 sign at one minute to midnight is a different sign from its D-10 sign at midnight that same morning. A chart cast without a birth time is therefore casting the Moon's career placement as a coin flip, which is why AstroMedha withholds the D-10 table on a timeless chart rather than printing one it cannot stand behind.

When the birth time is real, the D-10 read is per-planet rather than per-star, and that is the second reason a nakshatra page cannot carry it. These are the placements a career reading prints, in reading order.

Each of those is then read with its dignity, meaning how comfortable the planet is in the sign it landed in. Saturn in Capricorn or Aquarius in the D-10 is in its own sign, the sign it rules, and reads as at home in long service. Saturn in Aries is debilitated there, meaning it sits in its weakest sign, and reads as long service under strain. The Sun exalted in Aries in the D-10, meaning placed in its strongest sign, reads as rank and recognition arriving readily; the Sun in Libra is debilitated and reads as rank arriving slowly. None of this can be inferred from a birth star, because the Sun's D-10 sign and the Moon's nakshatra are two independent facts about the same moment.

How precise does the birth time have to be

Measured across 365 consecutive days of 2026 on the same ephemeris AstroMedha computes charts from, the Moon covers a median 13.085 degrees a day, ranging from 11.791 degrees on its slowest day to 15.312 on its fastest. At those speeds one pada takes between 5.2 and 6.8 hours, with a median of 6.1 hours. One full nakshatra takes between 20.9 and 27.1 hours.

Sampling the Moon every fifteen minutes across 120 days turns that into a plain answer about what a date alone can settle. The single most-occupied pada of a calendar day held a median 26% of that day and never exceeded 28% of it on any day sampled. So a date with no time attached leaves the pada genuinely open, with no best guess better than one in four. The nakshatra fares better without being settled: the most-occupied nakshatra of a day held a median 71% of it and reached 80% or more on only 38 of the 120 days.

The practical rule that follows is short. A birth date on its own identifies your nakshatra correctly about seven times in ten and your pada about one time in four. A birth time accurate to the hour settles both, because an hour of uncertainty sits well inside a 6.1 hour pada. A birth time accurate to the minute additionally settles the D-10, which an hour does not, since a D-10 division of the Moon lasts around 5.5 hours but its boundary can fall anywhere inside your hour of doubt.

Two people, one birth date: what the difference looks like

Both charts below are computed on real positions for 22 July 1988 in Mumbai, one born in the morning and one in the evening of that single day.

Born 06:45 IST. The Moon is at 185.29 degrees sidereal, which is Libra 5°17', placing it in Chitra pada 4. Chitra's ruling planet is Mars. The pada maps to Scorpio navamsa, so its dispositor is also Mars, and the Moon's D-10 sign is Scorpio, Mars again. The first mahadasha is Mars with 0.72 years unspent at birth, so that opening chapter closed before the first birthday. As of August 2026 this chart is in a Saturn mahadasha running 12 April 2023 to 11 April 2042, with a Mercury antardasha, the sub-period sitting inside it, from 14 April 2026 to 23 December 2028.

Born 18:45 IST. Twelve hours later the Moon is at 191.48 degrees, which is Libra 11°29', placing it in Swati pada 2. Swati's ruling planet is Rahu rather than Mars. The pada maps to Capricorn navamsa, so its dispositor is Saturn, and the Moon's D-10 sign is Capricorn. The first mahadasha is Rahu with 11.50 years unspent, so that chapter ran until nearly the twelfth birthday. As of August 2026 this chart is also in a Saturn mahadasha, but one running 22 January 2016 to 22 January 2035, with a Sun antardasha from 13 January 2026 to 26 December 2026.

The two charts share a birth date, a city, and even the name of the period they are living through, and almost nothing else. The Saturn chapter starts seven years apart and ends seven years apart, so the same working year lands at a completely different point inside it. One chart is being told to push and compete by a Mars dispositor. The other is being told to build slowly and structurally by a Saturn one.

One more detail from that pair is worth keeping, because it explains which parts of a career reading survive a shaky birth time. Saturn's D-10 sign is Capricorn in both charts, its own sign, because Saturn moves too slowly to change a 3 degree division inside a single day. The Sun's D-10 moved from Aries, where the Sun is exalted, in the morning chart to Taurus in the evening one. The slow planets in a D-10 are robust to an uncertain birth time and the fast ones are not, so a reading built on Saturn and Jupiter is the honest fallback when the time is a guess.

Dhanishta in full, as the worked case

Dhanishta is the star this hub carries end to end, because it is the one whose separate per-pada career pages this page consolidates. It runs Capricorn 23°20' to Aquarius 6°40', so it straddles a sign boundary: padas 1 and 2 fall in Capricorn and padas 3 and 4 in Aquarius, and Saturn rules both of those signs. Its ruling planet for the period ladder is Mars, whose mahadasha runs 7 years. Its deity is the Vasus and its symbol is the drum.

Four dispositors, four different instructions, one birth star. A Dhanishta pada 1 birth answers to the Sun and reads toward rank and visible authority, and it also carries the longest run of the opening Mars period, up to seven years of it. A Dhanishta pada 4 birth answers to Mars twice over, once as the nakshatra lord and once as the pada dispositor, which is the most concentrated version of the star, and it exits the Mars mahadasha inside its first two years and moves straight into Rahu's 18. Those two people share a search term and share almost nothing about how their working decade is dated.

The Mercury dispositor of pada 2 deserves one more line, because it is the one most often flattened into the generic Dhanishta reading. Mercury and Mars want different things at work. Mercury wants the deal analysed and the argument won on information; Mars wants the ground taken. A pada 2 birth is running Mercury's instruction inside Mars's period ladder, and the friction between those two is usually the most useful thing a Dhanishta career reading can name.

This page replaces the separate per-pada career pages for Dhanishta. The originals remain readable at career for Dhanishta nakshatra, Dhanishta pada 2 and Dhanishta pada 3. The full star profile sits at Dhanishta nakshatra, with the pada detail at Dhanishta pada 2 and Dhanishta pada 3.

Reading your own, in order

The order matters, because each step needs the one before it.

1. Compute the nakshatra and pada. The free nakshatra finder takes your date, time and place of birth and returns your Moon's nakshatra, pada, ruling planet and deity. Enter the time as accurately as you have it. If your time is approximate, note how close the pada sits to a boundary rather than treating the result as fixed.
2. Read the pada dispositor from the table above. That planet's line in the dispositor table is the instruction your working life keeps receiving. It is more specific than the nakshatra's own ruling planet, and it is the layer a per-star page cannot carry.
3. Locate yourself on the period ladder. The free dasha calculator dates your mahadasha and antardasha from the same Moon position. The balance table above tells you what your pada implied. The calculator tells you what it actually worked out to, and where you are standing now.
4. Date the next move. The career timing tool reads Saturn's and Jupiter's transits against your chart and returns the season you are in along with the next dated turning point.
5. Check the D-10 if your birth time is solid. The navamsa background sits at learn: navamsa, and the full divisional reading including the D-10 comes with a computed chart rather than a lookup.

More career reading is collected at the career insights hub, and the star profiles themselves at the nakshatra library.

What a computed reading adds that this page cannot

Everything above is fixed for everyone born under a given star and pada, which is exactly why it can sit on a public page. Three things change from person to person, and none of them can be tabulated here.

The first is which house your Moon's nakshatra actually falls in, counted from your rising sign. The same Chitra pada 4 placement in the tenth house of career and in the sixth house of daily work read very differently, and the rising sign needs your birth time and birth place, not merely your date.

The second is the condition of your pada dispositor in your own chart. The dispositor table gives you the planet. Your chart gives you where that planet sits, what sign it is in, whether it is exalted or debilitated there, and which houses it rules for you. A Mercury dispositor whose Mercury sits in Virgo, which is Mercury's exaltation, meaning the one sign it is strongest in, is a different working instruction from a Mercury dispositor whose Mercury sits in Pisces, which is its debilitation, meaning the one sign it is weakest in.

The third is the dated ladder itself. The balance table gives you a range. Your own chart gives you the actual figure, the exact dates of every mahadasha and antardasha boundary from birth onward, and which one you are inside today. That is the part answering when rather than what, and it is the reason a nakshatra career reading is worth computing rather than looking up.