Do I Have Neecha Bhanga Raja Yoga? Check Your Own Chart

Neecha bhanga raja yoga, meaning a cancelled fall that turns into a rise, is the combination people most often hope is hiding in their chart. It begins with bad news: one of your planets has to be sitting in the sign where Vedic astrology rates it at its weakest, which is called its sign of debilitation. The yoga is the claim that a second feature of the same chart undoes that weakness and pays it back with interest.

Two things decide your answer, and both are facts about your own chart rather than opinions. First, do you have a debilitated planet at all. Second, if you do, where are the two planets that can cancel it.

Most people asking this question do not have the yoga, and a good number have nothing in the chart to cancel in the first place. On 26 August 2026 we placed all seven classical planets for 1,575 real birth charts held by AstroMedha users. 838 of them, 53%, had no debilitated planet at all. For those charts the question closes there.

Every figure on this page comes from that same set of 1,575 charts. They belong to people who signed up to AstroMedha and gave a birth date and place, so read the percentages as a large real count rather than a census of the country.

First check: is any planet of yours debilitated

A planet is debilitated in exactly one sign, and it is always the sign opposite the one where it is exalted, meaning at its strongest. These seven placements are fixed and you can read them off your chart in about ten seconds.

Rahu and Ketu are the Moon's two orbital nodes, points in the sky rather than physical bodies, and classical authorities do not agree on a debilitation sign for them, so this yoga is not read for them.

Read those signs from a sidereal chart, which is the kind Vedic astrology uses. A Western horoscope places the same planets about 24 degrees further on, as of 2026, so a Western Sun in Libra is usually a Vedic Sun in Virgo, and Virgo does not debilitate the Sun. A chart from a Western app will disagree with this table for most of your planets. Our free kundli calculator returns sidereal placements and asks for no account.

Among the 1,575 charts, 577 people had exactly one debilitated planet, 145 had two, 13 had three and 2 had four. So a second debilitated planet is uncommon but far from rare, and it matters, because each debilitation is judged on its own.

Second check: where the two cancelling planets sit

Classical texts give several ways a debilitation can be cancelled. The two below are the ones we assert, because every authority includes them and neither leaves room for argument once you can see the placements:

1. The lord of the sign your planet is debilitated in sits in a kendra, which means the 1st, 4th, 7th or 10th house counted from your rising sign, or the same count taken from your Moon's sign.
2. The planet that is exalted in that same sign sits in one of those four houses, counted the same way.

Both conditions name a specific planet, and which planet it is depends only on which of your planets is debilitated. This table is the whole rule:

Two rows deserve a second look, because they explain why two of the seven planets get their debilitation cancelled far less often than the rest.

The Moon debilitated in Scorpio has only one condition available to it. No planet is exalted in Scorpio, so condition 2 has no subject and cannot be met. Everything rests on where Mars sits.

Venus debilitated in Virgo also has one condition in practice. Mercury both rules Virgo and is exalted in it, so conditions 1 and 2 ask about the same planet and either both pass or both fail together.

The measured effect is exactly what that predicts. Across our corpus, 74% of debilitated placements met at least one condition, but the Moon managed 50% and Venus 59%, the two lowest scores of the seven. The structure of the rule, rather than anything about the person, produces that gap.

Run the check on your own chart

Four steps, and you need your date, time and place of birth for step 3.

1. Open your free kundli and check each planet against the debilitation sign in its row of the first table. If none of them matches, you do not have this yoga.
2. Look up that planet's row in the second table. You now have the names of one or two planets to find.
3. Find each of those planets in your chart and note its house number. Houses 1, 4, 7 and 10 are the kendras. If either named planet is in one of them, the debilitation is cancelled.
4. If neither is, repeat the count from your Moon instead of your rising sign. Call the sign your Moon occupies house 1, count forward, and check the same four positions. Astrologers weigh this second count differently from the first, because it passes many more charts, and the Mars case further down shows how far that can go.

The same birth date, fifteen hours apart, opposite answers

Here are two charts we computed for the same day and the same city. The only difference between them is the time of birth.

Chart A, born 12 January 1985 at 06:20 in New Delhi. Rising sign Sagittarius. Jupiter sits in Capricorn, its debilitation sign, in the 2nd house. Condition 1 asks about Saturn, which sits in Scorpio in the 12th house. Condition 2 asks about Mars, which sits in Aquarius in the 3rd house. Neither is in a kendra. Counted from the Moon in Virgo, Saturn falls 3rd and Mars falls 6th, so that route fails too. Computed in full, this chart carries three named yogas and neecha bhanga is not one of them.

Chart B, born 12 January 1985 at 21:50 in New Delhi. Rising sign Leo. The planets occupy the same signs, because signs barely move in fifteen hours. Jupiter is still debilitated in Capricorn, now in the 6th house. Saturn is still in Scorpio, now the 4th house. Mars is still in Aquarius, now the 7th house. Both cancelling planets landed in kendras, and both conditions pass. Computed in full, this chart carries five named yogas, one of them neecha bhanga raja yoga on Jupiter, graded Strong.

Same date. Same city. Same signs for every planet. One chart has the yoga and one does not, and the whole difference is the rising sign, which changes roughly every two hours. This is why no general answer can tell you whether you have this combination, and why a reading that has not seen your birth time is guessing.

Why debilitated Mars always seems to pass

Of the 148 charts in our corpus with Mars debilitated in Cancer, 148 met a cancellation condition. Every single one. No other planet comes close.

The cause is arithmetic. Mars is debilitated in Cancer, and the lord of Cancer is the Moon. Condition 1 allows the count to be taken from your Moon's sign, and the Moon is always in the first sign from itself, which is always a kendra. So the literal rule cancels every debilitated Mars in every chart ever cast. A rule that returns yes for a hundred percent of cases is not telling you anything about your chart.

The honest way to read a debilitated Mars is to drop the count-from-the-Moon route for this one placement and ask the stricter question: is the Moon, or is Jupiter, in the 1st, 4th, 7th or 10th house from your rising sign. Measured that way, 68 of 131 timed charts with a debilitated Mars pass, which is 52% and behaves like a real test.

Here is a worked case. A chart computed for 4 July 1987 at 16:10 in New Delhi has Scorpio rising and Mars debilitated in Cancer in the 9th house. The Moon sits in Virgo in the 11th house and Jupiter sits in Aries in the 6th. Neither is in a kendra from the rising sign, so under the strict reading this debilitation is not cancelled. Our calculator still reports the yoga here, because it applies the classical rule as written, and the classical rule as written passes every debilitated Mars.

How much a cancellation is actually worth

The two readings give different answers, and the size of the gap is worth seeing in figures. Both rows below come from the same 1,575 charts.

At chart level, 580 of the 1,575 people, 37%, carry at least one cancelled debilitation under the loose reading. Under the strict reading it is 371 of the 1,404 charts that have a real birth time, or 26%.

By planet, under the strict reading: Sun 60%, Saturn 57%, Mercury 54%, Mars 52%, Jupiter 49%, Venus 39%, Moon 32%.

So about a quarter of people have a debilitation cancelled under the strict reading, while about three quarters of debilitated placements can be called cancelled once the count from the Moon is allowed. Both statements are true of the same 1,575 charts, which is why one astrologer tells you that you have this yoga and the next tells you that you do not, without either of them being dishonest.

If your debilitated planet is also combust

A planet is combust, meaning it sits close enough to the Sun that its own light is lost in the glare, and Vedic astrology reads that as a weakening. Our calculator uses the standard orbs: the Moon within 12 degrees of the Sun, Mars within 17, Mercury within 14, Jupiter within 11, Venus within 10 and Saturn within 15.

Combustion and debilitation are separate conditions and can both apply to the same planet. In our corpus, 110 of the 914 debilitated placements were also combust. Mercury accounted for 39 of them, Mars 27, Venus 19, Saturn 10, Jupiter 9 and the Moon 6. Mercury and Venus lead the list because they never travel far from the Sun to begin with.

Cancelling a debilitation does nothing about combustion. The two rules answer different questions: one is about the sign a planet occupies, the other is about how far it stands from the Sun. Of the 110 placements that were both debilitated and combust, 81 met a cancellation condition, so the yoga and the burn coexist far more often than not.

Chart B above is the clean illustration. Its Jupiter is debilitated in Capricorn, cancelled by two conditions, and combust at 1.8 degrees from the Sun against an 11 degree orb. That is a deep combustion and the cancellation does nothing about it. A reading that names the yoga and stays quiet about the combustion has given you half the chart.

If you have two debilitated planets

Each debilitation is judged separately, on its own two conditions, so having two does not double anything and does not cancel anything out. You can end up with one cancelled and one not.

The Sun in Libra together with Saturn in Aries is the pairing readers ask about most, and the two signs sit opposite each other in the zodiac. Every planet in Vedic astrology aspects the sign directly opposite it, so each of these two looks straight at the other's debilitation.

In our corpus 13 charts carried that exact pair. Under the loose reading the Sun's debilitation was cancelled in 8 of them and Saturn's in 10. Among the 11 that had a real birth time, the strict reading cancelled the Sun in 6 and Saturn in 8. So the common outcome is that one of the two is genuinely cancelled and the other is either weakly cancelled or not cancelled at all, and which is which depends entirely on where Venus, Saturn, Mars and the Sun actually sit in that chart.

Does the cancellation hold in the navamsa

The navamsa, meaning the ninth-part chart, is the divisional chart, that is, a chart built by subdividing each sign, that Vedic astrology uses to test whether a promise in the main chart has substance behind it. A debilitated planet that lands in its debilitation sign again in the navamsa is generally read as keeping the weakness whatever the main chart says.

Across the 914 debilitated placements in our corpus, 95 stayed in the same sign in the navamsa and so remained debilitated there. Another 108 reached their exaltation sign in the navamsa, which is the strongest follow-through available.

The group that matters most is the 676 placements that passed a cancellation test. Of those, 62 are still debilitated in the navamsa and 83 are exalted in it. Both groups carry the same headline yoga and face very different prospects, and no rule about kendras separates them. Checking the navamsa is the cheapest way to tell a promise with support behind it from a promise without.

When it delivers, if it delivers

A yoga describes a capacity in the chart. The vimshottari (the 120-year cycle of planetary periods Vedic astrology uses for timing) decides when that capacity gets its turn. Each planet holds the chart for a fixed run of years, called its dasha, meaning its period, and a cancelled debilitation that never runs its own period tends to stay quiet.

The two windows worth marking are the mahadasha, meaning major period, of the debilitated planet itself, and the mahadasha of whichever planet cancelled it. The classical description of this yoga, difficulty first and elevation afterwards, maps onto that sequence.

Chart B again, with its own dates. The debilitated and cancelled Jupiter runs its own 16 year mahadasha from 19 September 2018 to 19 September 2034. Saturn, the planet in the 4th house that cancels the debilitation, runs next, from 19 September 2034 to 19 September 2053. For that chart the combination holds the floor for almost 35 years starting in 2018. Anyone born on that day at that hour who was told about this yoga without being told those dates was told the smaller half of it. Your own period dates come out of our free dasha calculator, and the mechanism behind them is at what is vimshottari dasha.

Four ways people get this wrong

Confusing the sign a planet rules with the sign that weakens it. Saturn in Capricorn is Saturn in a sign it rules, which is a strong placement. Saturn is debilitated in Aries and nowhere else. A reader recently asked us about a neecha bhanga on a Saturn in Capricorn, and that chart had no debilitation in it to cancel. Check the first table before anything else.

Naming the wrong exaltation lord. Condition 2 asks about the planet exalted in your planet's debilitation sign, which is often not the planet that rules the sign. For Jupiter in Capricorn the exalted planet is Mars, not Saturn and not Venus. The second table gives all seven.

Assuming the cancellation makes the planet strong. Cancellation removes a penalty. It does not add strength, and it leaves every other condition on that planet exactly where it was, including combustion and whatever the navamsa does with it. A cancelled planet can still be burnt by the Sun and still be weak in the navamsa, which is why both are checked above.

Treating one met condition as a raja yoga. Meeting a condition means the debilitation is cancelled. Whether the result rises to a raja yoga, meaning a combination for status and authority, depends on whether the cancelling planet is itself strong, which house your debilitated planet occupies, and whether the navamsa supports it. A cancellation with a weak canceller usually removes the worst of the weakness and stops there.

What we compute for you

Everything above is checkable by hand and the tables give you the whole rule. What a free AstroMedha account adds is the verdict computed from your own birth data rather than counted by you.

Create a free account with your date, time and place of birth. The Your Yogas card on your dashboard then runs this test on your chart and names which of your planets, if any, carries a cancelled debilitation. It grades that alongside the other classical combinations your chart forms. Those include gajakesari, meaning Jupiter in an angle from your Moon, covered at gaja kesari yoga, and dhana yoga, meaning a wealth-giving pairing of house lords, at dhana yoga.

Chart Chat answers the follow-ups from there. It reads your precomputed placements, dispositors, combustion figures and full period ladder, so you can ask which of the two conditions fired in your chart, whether the planet that cancelled it is itself well placed, and what your navamsa does with the same planet.

Your birth time is what makes this answer yours. Without it there is no rising sign, so the check falls back to counting from your Moon alone, and that is the reading which passes almost everything.

Questions people ask next

Is neecha bhanga raja yoga rare? Not as rare as its reputation suggests. In 1,575 real charts, 37% had at least one cancelled debilitation under the classical rule read literally, and 26% of timed charts had one under the stricter reading that counts only from the rising sign.

Can a debilitated planet still give good results without the cancellation? Yes. Debilitation weakens a planet's ability to act on its own significations, and it does not delete them. Placement, house, aspect and period all still apply. The cancellation is one factor among several.

Does the yoga apply to Rahu and Ketu? No. The two nodes are positions rather than bodies, and classical authorities do not settle on an exaltation or debilitation sign for either, so we do not test them for this yoga.

Which planet's cancellation matters most? The one that rules or occupies the part of life you care about. A cancelled Venus speaks to relationships and comfort, a cancelled Saturn to work and endurance. The house your debilitated planet sits in decides where the reversal shows up.

Does AstroMedha check every classical cancellation rule? No. Here is the full list, so you can see exactly what is left out. Five rules are in common circulation:

1. The lord of the debilitation sign sits in a kendra.
2. The planet exalted in that sign sits in a kendra.
3. The debilitated planet itself sits in a kendra.
4. The lord of the debilitated planet's exaltation sign aspects it.
5. The debilitated planet is conjunct or aspected by the lord of the sign it occupies.

We assert the first two. Rule 3 is easy to apply yourself, since it only asks which house your debilitated planet sits in, and you have that from the same kundli. Rules 4 and 5 rest on aspect conventions the authorities read differently, and crediting a chart with a yoga it does not have is the worse mistake.

What if I do not know my birth time? You can still answer the first question, because the sign a planet occupies barely moves across a day, so the first table works from your birth date alone for every planet except the Moon. What you cannot do without a time is count houses, and both cancellation conditions are counted in houses. The fallback is to count from your Moon's sign, which is the loose reading this page keeps warning about. If your birth time is on a hospital record or a birth certificate, it is worth finding before you settle this question.

Related reading

• Neecha bhanga raja yoga, the fall-and-rise yoga
• What is neecha bhanga raja yoga
• Neecha bhanga raja yoga and career
• All Vedic astrology insights
• Free kundli calculator