How Common Are Exalted and Debilitated Planets?

Across the 1,661 birth charts computed on AstroMedha, 741 of them, or 44.6%, carry at least one planet exalted, which in Vedic astrology means that planet stands in the single sign out of twelve where the tradition holds it works best. 780 charts, or 47.0%, carry at least one planet debilitated, which is the sign opposite that one, where the same planet is held to work worst. Slightly under half of all people have each kind of placement, and 465 charts, 28.0% of the set, have neither.

Those counts were taken on 26 August 2026 from the profiles saved on the site. Every chart was recomputed for this page through the same sidereal engine the product runs, on the Lahiri ayanamsa, which is the correction Indian astrology applies for the slow drift of the fixed stars against the seasons. So the signs here are the ones your kundli shows, and not the tropical positions a Western Sun-sign horoscope uses. Seven planets are counted: the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn. Rahu and Ketu are left out because the profile the site builds carries a dignity for the seven classical grahas only, which is a decision rather than an omission. Classical authorities disagree about where the lunar nodes exalt, so a reading asserts nothing about them, even though the underlying constants do carry the modern Taurus and Scorpio convention.

The rate for each planet, out of 1,661 charts

Counting every planet in every chart gives 11,627 placements. 939 of them are exaltations and 978 are debilitations, so about one placement in twelve lands either way, which is roughly what twelve signs would produce before you look at anything else.

The own-sign column is not comparable across rows, and the reason changes how the table reads. Mars, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn each rule two signs, so they have two chances at an own-sign placement and their rates run near double. The Sun rules Leo alone and the Moon rules Cancer alone. Mercury rules Gemini and Virgo, but Virgo is also its exaltation sign and the engine ranks exaltation above ownership, so all 157 Mercury-in-Virgo charts sit in the exalted column and the 128 in the own-sign column are Mercury in Gemini.

How many does one chart carry?

Most charts carry one or none. Here is the full spread.

Two exalted planets puts a chart among 178 of the 1,661, which is 10.7%. Three or more narrows it to 17 charts, which is 1.0%. Three or more debilitated planets appears in 19 charts, 1.1%. At the far edge of the set, one chart holds five of the seven exalted and one holds four, while two charts carry four debilitated planets and none carries five.

Counting exalted and own-sign placements together, which is nearer to how a Vedic astrologer weighs overall strength, 324 charts (19.5%) have none of the seven in a friendly sign, 576 (34.7%) have one, 517 (31.1%) have two, and 244 charts (14.7%) have three or more.

One combination is commoner than most readers expect. 325 charts, 19.6% of the set, hold an exalted planet and a debilitated planet at the same time. That is close to one chart in five where the honest answer to "is my chart good or bad" is that it is both, in different departments, and which department is which matters more than the tally.

The commonest exaltation, counted as the only one in its chart, is Jupiter at 127 charts (7.7%), then Mercury at 123 (7.4%), Venus at 79 (4.8%), the Moon at 70 (4.2%), the Sun at 63 (3.8%), Mars at 54 (3.3%) and Saturn at 47 (2.8%). The commonest pair is the Sun with Venus, in 44 charts (2.7%), and there is a reason it beats every other pair. Venus never strays far from the Sun: over 30,000 days sampled between 1900 and 2100, the furthest it ever reached was 47.3 degrees. The Sun exalts in Aries and Venus exalts in Pisces, which are neighbouring signs, so those two exaltations sit comfortably inside the distance Venus is permitted to travel.

Score your own chart in a minute

The free kundli tool at /free-tools/kundli returns every planet's sidereal sign without an account. Read your seven signs off it and check them against the first two columns of the table above. Nothing else is needed, because exaltation and debilitation are decided by sign alone and do not depend on the house or the degree.

Each of the fourteen placements has its own page, if you want the reading rather than the count:

• Sun: exalted in Aries, debilitated in Libra
• Moon: exalted in Taurus, debilitated in Scorpio
• Mars: exalted in Capricorn, debilitated in Cancer
• Mercury: exalted in Virgo, debilitated in Pisces
• Jupiter: exalted in Cancer, debilitated in Capricorn
• Venus: exalted in Pisces, debilitated in Virgo
• Saturn: exalted in Libra, debilitated in Aries

Exaltation is not a one-in-twelve lottery

Twelve signs would put every planet at 8.3%, and most of the table sits near that. Mars does not and Saturn does not, and the two have different explanations.

Mars first, because its explanation is astronomical and applies to everybody. Sampling 300,000 random moments spread evenly between 1600 and 2400 and asking the engine where each planet stood, Mars is in Capricorn, its exaltation sign, 6.9% of the time, and in Cancer, its debilitation sign, 10.0% of the time. The sign it spends least time in is Aquarius, at 6.8%, and the most is Leo, at 10.1%. Mars does not travel at a constant speed, and the signs it crosses quickest are the ones it is least often found in. So a Mars debilitation is about 1.45 times as likely as a Mars exaltation, for anyone, born anywhere, in any century. That reframes what a rare and lucky placement means here: exalted Mars really is uncommon, debilitated Mars really is ordinary, and the two were never a coin toss.

The same 300,000-moment measurement puts the other six much closer to even. The Sun is in Aries 8.4% of the time and in Libra 8.2%. The Moon is in Taurus 8.3% and in Scorpio 8.4%. Mercury is in Virgo 8.7% and in Pisces 7.9%. Jupiter is in Cancer 8.6% and in Capricorn 8.0%. Venus is in Pisces 8.3% and in Virgo 8.4%. Saturn is in Libra 9.2% and in Aries 7.7%. Saturn is the only other planet with a visible tilt, and it tilts towards exaltation, which makes the number in our own data more interesting rather than less.

Why Saturn is the rarest exaltation in this particular set

Saturn stands in Libra 9.2% of the time when you sample the sky evenly across eight centuries. In AstroMedha's 1,661 charts it is exalted in only 83, which is 5.0%, the lowest rate in the table. That gap is not a computation error and it is not a claim about the people who use the site. It is Saturn's orbit meeting their birth years.

Saturn takes about twenty-nine and a half years to circle the zodiac and holds each sign for roughly two and a half of them. Asking the engine for Saturn's sign on 1 July of every year from 1946 to 2026, it stood in Libra across 1954 to 1955, 1983 to 1985, and 2013 to 2014, and nowhere near Libra in between. Meanwhile 1,102 of the 1,661 charts, 66.3% of the set, belong to people born between 1990 and 2009. Cross-tabulating birth year against Saturn's sign confirms what that implies: of the 83 charts with Saturn in Libra, not one belongs to somebody born between 1990 and 2009. They cluster in 1983 and 1984, at 28 and 33 charts, with a small tail around 2012 to 2014.

The mirror image explains the Saturn debilitation rate of 9.4%, which sits above the 7.7% the sky at large would give. Saturn occupied Aries across 1998 to 2000, which lands squarely in the densest slice of the user base. 133 of the 156 charts with Saturn in Aries were born between 1990 and 2009, with 48 in 1998, 62 in 1999 and 23 in 2000.

This is the honest caveat on every number here, and it cuts both ways. The rates describe the people who use AstroMedha, whose median birth year is 1997. For the fast movers, meaning the Sun, Moon, Mercury and Venus, the birth-year clustering makes almost no difference, because they cycle through all twelve signs every year or two and any large group of birthdays averages them out. For Jupiter, which takes twelve years to come round, and Saturn, which takes twenty-nine, the composition of the group is doing real work. Running the same seven-planet count over 200,000 uniformly random birth moments between 1950 and 2010 gives 45.4% of charts with at least one exalted planet against our 44.6%, and 29.4% with neither an exaltation nor a debilitation against our 28.0%, so the population totals land close even where individual planets diverge.

Dignity answers only part of "how strong is my chart"

The question people actually ask is how many of their planets are working well. Sign dignity is one of three flags the engine attaches to each planet, and the other two change the picture, because a planet can hold a friendly sign and still be impeded.

A planet is combust, meaning it sits close enough to the Sun to be lost in its glare, and Vedic practice treats that as a genuine weakening. Each planet has its own tolerance, and the engine uses 10 degrees for Venus, 11 for Jupiter, 12 for the Moon, 14 for Mercury, 15 for Saturn and 17 for Mars. Across the same 1,661 charts, Mercury is combust in 705 of them, 42.4%. That is the commonest impediment in any chart, and it is close to unavoidable: over 30,000 sampled days, Mercury never got further than 27.8 degrees from the Sun, so a 14-degree limit covers half the distance it is ever permitted to move. Mars is combust in 265 charts (16.0%), Venus in 246 (14.8%), Saturn in 144 (8.7%), Jupiter in 109 (6.6%) and the Moon in 83 (5.0%). The Sun is never combust, since the condition is defined by distance from it.

A planet is retrograde, meaning it appeared to move backwards against the stars at the moment of birth, and the tradition reads that as results arriving through repetition and revisiting rather than on the first pass. Saturn was retrograde in 612 charts (36.8%), Jupiter in 521 (31.4%), Mercury in 350 (21.1%), Mars in 145 (8.7%) and Venus in 114 (6.9%). The Sun and the Moon are never retrograde, so they show zero. Saturn and Jupiter come out high for the same reason they do in any collection of charts: a slow planet spends a large share of each orbit in the backward loop it appears to make as the faster Earth overtakes it. There is more on Saturn retrograde, Jupiter retrograde and Mercury retrograde.

Counting a planet as impeded if it is debilitated or combust or retrograde, this is what a chart typically carries:

The median chart carries two. 648 charts, 39.0% of the set, carry three or more. Only 88 charts, 5.3%, have all seven planets free of every flag. So a chart with two or three weak planets is where most people are, and a chart with none is the outlier rather than the standard everyone else is falling short of.

What a debilitated planet does not settle

A debilitation is a statement about one planet in one sign, and the tradition has never treated it as a verdict. The rule that cancels it is old and specific. Neecha bhanga raja yoga, meaning the cancellation of a debilitation and the rise that can follow it, forms when the lord of the debilitation sign, or the planet that exalts in that same sign, stands in an angle from the ascendant or from the Moon, meaning the first, fourth, seventh or tenth sign counted from it. A page that told you 47.0% of people have a debilitated planet and stopped there would be leaving out the half of the doctrine that decides what the placement does. What neecha bhanga raja yoga is, and whether it works sets out the conditions.

Three further limits are worth naming rather than leaving for you to find.

Dignity is decided by sign, so it says nothing about which house the planet occupies, and the house is where the effect shows up in a life. An exalted Saturn in the sixth house and an exalted Saturn in the twelfth are the same dignity and different readings. The house needs your birth time; the sign does not.

The count is a population statistic and not a ranking. Nothing in this data connects a dignity count to an outcome, because outcomes are not in the data. What the numbers establish is how ordinary or unusual a configuration is, which is the question most people are asking when they ask whether their chart is good.

Of the 1,661 charts, 197 were computed on the app's noon placeholder rather than a stated birth time. Only the Moon can change sign inside a single day, since it moves about 13 degrees against a 30-degree sign, and the other six move far too slowly for a half-day error to matter. Restricting to the 1,464 charts that carry a real clock time moves the Moon's exaltation rate from 7.5% to 7.4%, so the placeholders are not distorting the table.

Where these numbers came from

Every figure above was produced by running each stored birth record through get_all_positions and tagging the result with get_planet_dignity, the same two functions that produce the per-planet strength flags behind every reading on the site. The ephemeris is Swiss-grade, sidereal, Lahiri. Nothing was estimated and nothing was copied from published tables. The comparison figures for the sky at large come from the identical engine run over randomly sampled moments, so a difference between the two sets of numbers is a difference in who was born when, never a difference in method.

Two earlier cross-chart studies sit alongside this one. 100,000 birth charts measured nakshatra, meaning the lunar mansion the Moon occupies at birth, alongside rashi, which is the sign that same Moon sits in, and the planetary period a person is born into. How common Mangal Dosha actually is applied the same approach to a label that turns out to fit three quarters of everybody. If reading a chart at all is new to you, start with how to read your birth chart.

Place your own chart against these numbers

The free kundli tool gives you the seven signs with no account, which is all you need to count your own exaltations against the table above.

Saving your birth details does something the table cannot. The stored chart carries the dignity, combustion and retrogression flags already attached to each planet, along with the houses your birth time produces, and Chart Chat answers from that computed chart rather than from a general description of a placement. A new account gets two free questions. The useful ones are specific: what a debilitated Saturn in your eighth house does during the years your chart's planetary timeline assigns to Saturn, or which of your two exalted planets is carrying more of the chart given where they sit. Those answers depend on your own data, which is why a page of averages cannot supply them.

Own sign means the sign that planet rules.