How Common Is Gajakesari Yoga? A Count Across Our Charts

Gajakesari yoga, meaning the elephant-and-lion pairing of Jupiter and the Moon, is present in 550 of the 1,657 birth charts stored on AstroMedha, which is 33.19 percent. The count was run on 26 August 2026 against every chart in the database on that date. Roughly one chart in three.

A configuration one person in three shares is a starting condition rather than a distinction. What varies between the 550 is the state Jupiter is in while it forms the pattern: exalted in 45 of them, debilitated in 36, burnt by the Sun in 34, and falling in the 12th house from the rising sign more often than in any other house. All of that is counted below. Every figure comes from charts computed by AstroMedha's Vedic engine rather than from a published estimate, and no individual chart, name or birth detail appears anywhere on this page.

What was counted, and against what

The rule has one test. Take the sidereal sign the Moon occupied at birth, count forward to the sign Jupiter occupied, counting the Moon's own sign as 1, and check the answer against 1, 4, 7 and 10. Those four are the kendras, the angles of a chart: the sign itself, the one three signs on, the one opposite, and the one three signs back. Nothing else is part of the rule.

The population is every birth chart saved in AstroMedha's profile table as of 26 August 2026. There were 1,661 rows. Three carry a birth date later than the count date, which is a data-entry slip rather than a birth, and one has a birthplace that resolves to no timezone, so those four were dropped. 1,657 charts were computed. They belong to 1,632 accounts and, after folding together repeat entries for the same person, 1,611 distinct people. 1,631 of the charts are the account holder's own and 26 were entered for somebody else. The profiles were created between 27 March and 25 August 2026.

Birth years run from 1946 to 2026, with a median of 1997, and eight in ten of the charts fall between 1977 and 2007. Thirty years is a little over two of Jupiter's twelve-year circuits of the zodiac, so this population does not hold an even sample of the signs Jupiter can be in. That leaves the headline count untouched and it does bend the figures for Jupiter's sign and its condition, by amounts measured further down.

Every chart was cast the same way: Swiss ephemeris positions, the Lahiri sidereal ayanamsa, Whole-Sign houses, and the birth timezone resolved at the birth date and place rather than at today's date, so a birth in a daylight-saving zone is not shifted by an hour. Sign positions for the Moon and Jupiter do not depend on the birthplace, only on the instant, so the yes-or-no count is unaffected by a missing or approximate location. Anything counted from the rising sign does depend on it, and each such figure below carries its own smaller denominator.

The split across the four angles

The 550 do not sit in one place. Counting from the Moon, Jupiter falls in each of the four kendras at close to the same rate.

The gap between the largest group and the smallest is 27 charts. Tested against an even four-way split that comes to a chi-square of 2.77 on 3 degrees of freedom, which happens by chance about 43 times in 100. So the four angles arrive at effectively the same rate, and there is no observed tendency for the pattern to favour any one of them.

The same-sign case is the one AstroMedha's detection labels Strong rather than Notable, because Jupiter and the Moon share a sign there instead of standing at an angle. 140 of the 550 carry that label and 410 carry Notable. If you have the yoga, there is about a one-in-four chance you have the conjunction version.

Why the answer lands on a third

The rule accepts 4 of the 12 possible distances between the Moon's sign and Jupiter's. Four twelfths is a third. That is the whole mechanism, and the measurement bears it out at the level below the headline.

An even spread would put 138 charts in each row. The largest cell is 168 and the smallest 122, which looks lumpy until it is tested: chi-square 12.36 on 11 degrees of freedom, a result that arises by chance about a third of the time. A sample of 1,657 is not large enough to smooth twelve buckets, and the departures cancel out. Three of the four kendras sit a little above the even line and one sits below it, and the four together come to 550 against an expected 552.

The reason to labour this is that the headline is an estimate rather than a constant. 550 out of 1,657 carries a 95 percent interval of 30.97 percent to 35.50 percent. Against a true rate of exactly one third the observed count is 0.12 standard deviations low, which is as close as a sample this size can reasonably land. Anyone quoting 33.19 percent to two decimals is quoting more precision than the count contains. One chart in three is the claim that survives.

A second measurement, from a different population

A rate that matches its own arithmetic could still be an artifact of who signs up to an astrology app. To check, the same rule was run over a synthetic population with no users in it at all: 117,832 birth moments, one every six hours from 1 January 1946 to 26 August 2026, which is the same span the real birth dates cover. Nobody is born on that schedule, which is the point. It is what the rate looks like when birth timing carries no human pattern whatsoever.

39,310 of the 117,832 carry the yoga, or 33.36 percent.

The real charts came in at 33.19 percent. The two differ by 0.17 percentage points, well inside the sampling interval of the smaller one. So the answer holds whether you count real people who chose to enter their birth details on an astrology site or count the sky on a fixed timetable, and the frequency is a property of the rule rather than of the population.

Where our real charts do depart from the sky

The yes-or-no rate matches. Jupiter's condition does not, and the difference is worth stating because it changes one of the numbers people care about most.

Jupiter spends about a year in each sign and takes about twelve years to go round, so a population concentrated in a narrow band of birth years does not get an even sample of its signs. Eight in ten of these charts were born between 1977 and 2007, a little over two of Jupiter's circuits, and the ends of that window do not line up with sign boundaries. Pisces comes out at 4.83 percent against 7.63 percent in the control, a shortfall of nearly 3 percentage points. The whole table tests at chi-square 47.46 on 11 degrees of freedom, which is a real skew rather than sampling noise.

Pisces and Sagittarius are Jupiter's own signs, the two it rules, so the shortfall carries straight through: 12.85 percent of our charts have Jupiter in a sign it rules, against 16.32 percent of the control. Exaltation, meaning the one sign where classical practice reads a planet at its strongest, falls in Cancer for Jupiter, and Cancer is over-represented here, so exalted Jupiters run slightly high at 9.84 percent against 8.29 percent. Read the condition figures in the next section as a description of this particular set of people, not of birth charts in general.

The 550 are not one thing

Having the yoga fixes where Jupiter sits relative to the Moon. It says nothing about whether Jupiter is in any shape to act, and that is measured separately.

Dignity is a planet's standing in the sign it occupies. Exalted is the sign where a planet is read as strongest, debilitated is the sign opposite that one, own sign means one of the two signs the planet rules, and neutral is everything else. For Jupiter those are Cancer, Capricorn, and Sagittarius with Pisces.

The two columns track each other closely, and that is the finding rather than a footnote: holding the yoga does not improve the odds that the Jupiter forming it is well placed. Just over one holder in five has Jupiter exalted or in a sign it rules, and one in fifteen has it debilitated.

Combustion is the second condition. A planet is combust, meaning it sits close enough to the Sun in the chart that classical practice reads what it stands for as burnt away, and the orb used for Jupiter here is 11 degrees. 34 of the 550 holders have a combust Jupiter, 6.18 percent. Across all 1,657 charts it is 109, or 6.58 percent, and in the 117,832 control it is 7.30 percent. Again no difference worth reading.

Motion is the third. Jupiter is retrograde, meaning it appears from Earth to move backwards through the zodiac, which it does for about four months in a year. 166 of the 550 holders have a retrograde Jupiter, 30.18 percent, against 29.39 percent across all our charts and 28.37 percent in the control. The pattern neither seeks out nor avoids a retrograde Jupiter. Retrograde motion is reported here as a fact about the chart and is not being treated as a defect.

So how rare is the version people mean?

Stack the conditions and the number falls fast.

About one chart in sixteen has the yoga with a Jupiter that is both dignified and uncombust. That is the configuration behind the descriptions of standing and recovery, and it is just under a fifth of the group that answers yes.

Adding the rising sign narrows it further, with a caveat about the denominator. 90 of those 103 charts carry a birth time precise enough to give a rising sign, and in 52 of the 90, or 57.78 percent, Jupiter also falls in an angle or a trine from that rising sign. Measured against the 1,408 charts in the whole set that have a usable rising sign, that is 3.69 percent, or about one chart in twenty-seven.

Each rung of that ladder is a different question, and none of them is the yoga. The yoga is the first row.

Does the yoga tell you where Jupiter lands in your life?

Reading the chart from the Moon settles whether the pattern exists. Reading it from the lagna, the rising sign coming up over the eastern horizon at birth, settles which area of life anything shows up in. The two frames turn out to be independent of each other.

464 of the 550 holders have a birth time precise enough for a rising sign. Their Jupiter houses, set against the 944 non-holders who also have one:

Chi-square 14.21 on 11 degrees of freedom, which happens by chance about 22 times in 100. The two columns are the same distribution. Whether you have Gajakesari yoga carries no information about which house your Jupiter occupies.

Among the holders the most common single placement is the 12th house at 11.64 percent, and 23.28 percent have Jupiter in the 6th, 8th or 12th, the three houses classical practice reads as the hardest ground for a planet to deliver from. Only 6.47 percent have it in the 10th, the house of work and public standing. So close to a quarter of the people with the yoga have its Jupiter in the part of the chart where Jupiter has the most trouble showing itself. That is not a contradiction in the rule. The Moon-relative count decides that the pattern exists, the lagna-relative house decides where in a life it surfaces, and the second is drawn independently of the first.

Where it ranks against the other yogas

One in three sounds common in isolation. The useful comparison is against the other yogas the same detection covers, run over the same 1,657 charts.

Two columns are given because eight of the twelve need a rising sign to be detected at all, so counting those eight over charts that have none would understate them. Gajakesari sits sixth on both columns. It is three to six times more common than any of the five Pancha Mahapurusha yogas at the bottom of the table, the rarest of which reaches 5.40 percent, and it is less common than the five house-lord and conjunction combinations above it. The median chart in the full set carries 3 of the twelve, rising to 4 among the charts with a birth time. Only 65 charts, 3.92 percent, carry none at all, and among charts with a rising sign that falls to 15, or 1.07 percent. If a yoga on your list feels like it should be special, those are the numbers to hold it against.

Holding Gajakesari does not raise the odds of holding any of the others. 56.91 percent of the 550 also have a Dhana yoga against 57.75 percent of all charts, and 56.36 percent have a Raja yoga against 56.67 percent. The yogas are drawn independently of each other in this data.

Gajakesari is one of the four in that list that needs no birth time, since it reads only the Moon's sign and Jupiter's sign. That is part of why it turns up so often in readings done from a rough birth record, and why its share barely moves between the two columns while Dhana yoga's jumps ten points.

How much would a wrong birth time change the count?

Every chart was recomputed at four other clock times to find out, keeping the same date and place.

The Moon covers about 13 degrees a day and holds a sign for a little over two days, so half an hour rarely moves it across a boundary and a whole day frequently does. 99 of the 1,657 charts, 5.97 percent, have the Moon within one degree of a sign edge, and 221, or 13.34 percent, within two degrees. Those are the charts where the answer is genuinely fragile.

The practical reading: a birth time known to the hour is good enough for this count in 99 cases out of 100, a birth time guessed to the nearest few hours is good enough in 95, and a birth date with no time at all leaves the answer open for close to a third of people.

That last figure matters for the headline. 194 of the 1,657 charts carry exactly 12:00, which is the placeholder written when someone skips the birth-time field. Those 194 return the yoga at 34.54 percent against 33.01 percent for the 1,463 charts with a real clock, a gap of 1.5 percentage points that is well inside the noise on a group that size. 56 of the 194, or 28.87 percent, would answer differently at the two ends of their birth date, so their individual answers are unsettled even though the group average is not.

Three other cuts of the same data land in the same place: restricting to the 1,611 distinct people gives 33.40 percent, restricting to the 1,631 charts people entered for themselves gives 33.11 percent, and restricting to the 1,408 charts with a usable rising sign gives 32.95 percent. No slice of this population moves the answer off a third.

Check the count on a chart you can reproduce

Two birth moments, computed the same way as the 1,657 and named in full so you can enter them yourself in the free kundli tool and get the same output.

1 January 2000, 06:30 IST, New Delhi. The Moon is in Libra at 13.94 degrees and Jupiter is in Aries at 1.38 degrees. Counting Libra as 1, Aries is 7. Seven is a kendra, so the yoga is present, and because the two stand opposite rather than together it carries the Notable label. Jupiter is neutral in dignity, direct in motion, and 105.3 degrees from the Sun, so nowhere near combustion. The rising sign is Sagittarius, which puts Jupiter in the 5th house. That chart carries five yogas in total.

15 August 1995, 10:00 IST, Chennai. The Moon is in Pisces at 24.66 degrees and Jupiter is in Scorpio at 11.97 degrees. Pisces to Scorpio is 9 counting inclusively, and 9 is not a kendra, so the yoga is absent. That chart carries none of the twelve.

The second is not a worse chart for the absence. It is one of the roughly two in three.

What to do with a yes

A yes here places you with a third of everyone who has ever looked their chart up. The reading AstroMedha attaches to it is about judgement, standing with others, and a tendency for difficulty to be followed by recovery, and that reading is the same on all 550 charts. What separates one holder from another is everything measured on this page: which of the four angles Jupiter occupies, whether it is dignified, whether it is clear of the Sun, which house it falls in from the rising sign, and when Jupiter's own stretch in the Vimshottari dasha, the 120-year sequence that assigns each planet a continuous period of your life, actually arrives.

None of that is answerable from a page, because all of it depends on your birth date, time and place. Do I have Gajakesari yoga walks the same count through step by step for your own chart. The free kundli tool gives you the Moon's sign, Jupiter's sign, both dignities and your current period with no account, and the free dasha calculator lays out the period sequence with dates. A free account runs the full detection and names every yoga in your chart rather than the one you came looking for.

Method, and what this count is not

The population is AstroMedha's users and the people they entered charts for. They skew Indian, they skew towards birth years between 1977 and 2007, and they are self-selected by having looked up a birth chart at all. This is a census of our charts, not of humanity. The uniform control above exists precisely so that claim does not have to be taken on trust: on the yes-or-no rate the two agree to within 0.17 percentage points, and on Jupiter's sign they visibly do not, which is why the sign and condition figures are printed beside the control rather than on their own.

Everything was computed on 26 August 2026 from the profile table as it stood that day, using the production Vedic engine at the same commit the backend serves from. The counts will move as people sign up. Nothing here was estimated, rounded from a published figure, or carried over from another source, and no individual birth record is disclosed by any figure on this page.

Related reading

• Do I have Gajakesari yoga, the same rule applied to your own chart step by step
• How common is Mangal Dosha, the same kind of count for a different combination
• Gaja Kesari yoga: meaning, rules and effects, the classical reading in full
• Vedic concepts explained, the hub for yogas, doshas and chart terminology
• Free kundli, your birth chart with planets, houses and current period
• Free dasha calculator, the period sequence with dates

Counted 26 August 2026 across 1,657 birth charts by AstroMedha's Vedic engine, running the Swiss ephemeris against the Lahiri sidereal ayanamsa with Whole-Sign houses. Every denominator is named beside its figure so any of it can be checked.