How Common Is Kala Sarpa Yoga? A Count Across Our Charts

Kala Sarpa Yoga is the arrangement in which all seven of the classical planets sit inside one half of the zodiac, the half marked off by the two points where the Moon's path crosses the Sun's. Vedic astrology calls those two points Rahu and Ketu. They always sit exactly opposite each other, so the line between them cuts the circle in two, and the question the yoga asks is whether everything else has fallen on one side of that line.

On 26 August 2026 we ran every birth chart held in AstroMedha through the same calculation the site runs for a live reading. After dropping three rows with a birth date still in the future, and collapsing 70 entries that were the same birth submitted twice, 1,588 distinct births remained.

111 carry the full pattern and 50 carry the partial form. That is 6.99% full, 3.15% partial, and 10.14% for either, or about one chart in fourteen for the full pattern and one in ten for either. The 95% interval on the full figure runs from 5.84% to 8.35%, which is the range the true rate for the wider population would sit in nineteen times out of twenty on a sample this size.

The rest of this page is the working: what was counted as a yes, how much the answer moves when the boundary is drawn differently, and the largest thing our charts turned up, which is that Kala Sarpa Yoga is not spread evenly across birth years at all.

What counts as a yes

The full form is unambiguous. All seven of the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn fall inside one of the two halves. Nothing sits on the other side.

The partial form, called anshik in the tradition, is the one that needs a decision. Six planets fall inside and the seventh does not. AstroMedha counts that as the yoga only when the seventh sits within 10 degrees of Rahu or Ketu, close enough to the boundary that the enclosure is all but complete.

The reason for the 10 degrees is visible in our own charts. Here is how seven planets actually land about the nodal line across all 1,588:

A six-and-one split is the second most common way seven planets fall around any line you care to draw. Counting every one of them as partial Kala Sarpa Yoga would put the yoga on 512 of our 1,588 charts, 32.24%, which is roughly one person in three. A yoga that fits a third of everybody carries almost no information, and the word rare stops meaning anything.

The number moves with one setting, so here is the setting

Everything beyond the full form depends on how far the odd planet is allowed to sit from a node. Run the same 1,588 charts at five different settings and the published prevalence changes by a factor of three:

Ten degrees is the ordinary conjunction orb for the nodes, an orb being the working distance inside which two points in a chart are treated as sitting together. It lands the whole yoga near one in ten, which is a defensible prevalence for something described as uncommon.

The next question is where those odd planets actually sit, because a setting only matters if charts cluster near it. Across the 401 six-and-one charts, the distance from the odd planet to its nearest node comes out like this:

Most six-and-one charts are not near misses. In 168 of them the odd planet sits more than 45 degrees away, a quarter of the whole half-circle from the boundary, and calling that an enclosure would be generous. Fifty charts fall inside 10 degrees and 85 inside 15, so moving the setting by five degrees changes 35 people's answer. Anyone quoting a Kala Sarpa prevalence without naming their orb has left out the part that decides the number.

Three separate counts land in the same place

A rate measured on our own users is only worth reading if our users are not peculiar. Three counts, built from different material, agree:

• Our real charts. 1,588 births as entered by the people who created them: 6.99% carry the full pattern.
• A synthetic control. 12,000 charts built from random dates between 1960 and 2005, random clock times and Indian latitudes, computed on the same ephemeris, meaning the same astronomical tables of where each planet stood at each moment: 7.15% full and 3.74% partial.
• The sky itself. Across the 29,585 days from 1 January 1950 to 31 December 2030, sampled once a day at noon Greenwich time, all seven planets sat inside one nodal half on 2,060 of them, 6.96%.

The people who sign up for AstroMedha are, on this measure, an ordinary sample of humanity. Nobody is drawn here by carrying the yoga, and nothing about our intake tilts the figure.

Kala Sarpa Yoga is not spread evenly across birth years

Six of the seven planets move slowly. On any given day they are either all inside one nodal half or they are not, and if they are not, no child born that day can carry the full pattern at any hour, anywhere on Earth. The Moon then travels the whole zodiac every 27.3 days, so once those six are enclosed the Moon joins them for roughly half the time: 2,060 of the 4,198 enclosed days, 49.1%.

So the yoga arrives in windows. Between 1950 and 2050 there are 52 of them, covering 14.3% of all days. Here are the windows from 1970 to 2035, resolved to the hour on our own ephemeris:

Look at the gap in the middle of that table. The window shut on 29 January 1987 and did not open again until 1 November 1995, eight years and nine months later. Nobody born in that stretch carries full Kala Sarpa Yoga, whatever they have been told.

Our own charts agree, and the agreement is the reason to trust the table. We hold 242 charts for people born between 1988 and 1994, a group sitting entirely inside the closed stretch. Not one of them carries the full pattern. Widening the check: of the 110 full-pattern births in our data from 1950 onwards, every single one falls inside a window computed above. One further full-pattern chart belongs to someone born in 1946, before the scanned range.

Decade by decade, the share of our charts carrying the pattern tracks the share of days on which it was astronomically possible:

The 1970s through the 2000s carry 1,457 of our charts between them, and all four rows land close. The 1960s and 2010s rows hold 46 and 34 charts, too few to read anything from.

Where the window stands today

The most recent window opened on 13 March 2026 and shut on 11 July 2026, shortly after 18:30 India time. The most recent full Kala Sarpa birth in our own data is 7 July 2026, four days before it closed.

The next window opens on 27 April 2034. A child born between 12 July 2026 and 26 April 2034 cannot carry the full pattern, at any hour, in any country. Seven years and nine months, the second longest closed stretch since 1950 after the one from 1987 to 1995.

The partial form keeps appearing throughout a closed stretch, because the Moon can be one of the six planets inside the enclosure rather than the odd one out. Our 1991 group, born deep inside the closed years, holds one partial chart and no full ones.

Which planet breaks the enclosure

When a chart lands six-and-one, it is worth knowing which planet stayed outside, because that planet is what stands between the person and the yoga. Across all 401 six-and-one charts:

Mercury and Venus almost never break an enclosure, and the reason is orbital rather than astrological. Measured on the same ephemeris across 1950 to 2030, Mercury never strays further than about 28 degrees from the Sun and Venus never further than about 47. Whenever the Sun is inside a nodal half, those two are nearly always inside with it. Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and the Moon are tethered to nothing and go where they like, so between them they account for 368 of the 401.

Among the 50 charts that qualify as partial, the odd planet is the Moon 13 times, Saturn 9, Venus 8, Mars 8, Mercury 6, Jupiter 4 and the Sun twice.

The twelve named forms

When the yoga is present it is given one of twelve names, taken from the house Rahu occupies counted from the Lagna, the sign rising over the eastern horizon at the moment of birth. Rahu in the 1st gives Anant, the 2nd Kulik, and so on round to Sheshnag in the 12th.

Naming needs a Lagna, and a Lagna needs a birth time and a birth place. 140 of our 161 charts carrying the yoga have both. Their names come out like this:

The expected column is what each name would get if the yoga were indifferent to Rahu's house, scaled to how often Rahu actually falls in each house across all 1,339 of our charts that have a Lagna.

Ghatak runs high, 24 against 13.1 expected, and the whole table gives a chi-square of 23.16 on 11 degrees of freedom, p = 0.017. The p figure is how often a table this lopsided would turn up by chance if the twelve names really were evenly likely: about once in every sixty tables. We are not claiming an effect from it, for two reasons. With twelve buckets and 140 charts, one bucket running high is close to what chance alone produces. And the same test on the 12,000-chart synthetic control comes out flat: chi-square 9.72 on 11 degrees of freedom, p = 0.56, with Ghatak landing on 107 against 105.9 expected. The honest reading is that the twelve names are roughly equally likely, and that our Ghatak count is a sample of 140 doing what samples of 140 do. Ask us again when the table holds a thousand.

If nobody asked for your birth time, the name you were given is close to a coin toss

The Lagna moves through all twelve signs in a day, so without a birth time there is no Lagna, and the count falls back to the Moon's sign instead. The two references disagree far more often than people expect.

Across the 1,339 of our charts that carry both a real clock and a place, the name taken from the Moon differs from the name taken from the Lagna in 1,224 of them, 91.4%. They agree about once in twelve, which is what two unrelated reference points would do. Being told you have Takshak Kaal Sarp by a site that never asked for your time of birth is a one-in-twelve guess dressed as a finding.

Twenty-one of the 161 charts carrying the yoga in our data have no usable birth time, so their name came from the Moon and should be treated as provisional until the time is supplied. AstroMedha states which reference it used on every reading rather than leaving the reader to assume.

Check your own chart against these numbers with the free Kaal Sarp calculator. It reports the full or partial verdict, the split, the odd planet and its distance from the node, and which reference named the type.

What this count does not say

Everything above is a count of geometry. AstroMedha holds no outcome data for these charts: no marriages, no careers, no illnesses, no incomes. Nothing here shows that carrying the yoga changed anything for anybody, and looking would take a different study.

What the count does settle is the rarity question, which is the one people arrive with. One chart in fourteen for the full pattern is uncommon and ordinary at the same time. In a room of a hundred people of mixed ages, about seven carry it.

There is a sharper way to say it. In a school year group of 300 children all born within the same twelve months, the number is not seven times three. It is either far higher or exactly zero, depending on the year. A group born in 1986 sits in the strongest year since 1950, when 22.7% of days produced the full pattern. A group born in 1992 has none at all, because the window never opened. Thirty-nine of the 81 years between 1950 and 2030 produce zero.

That is the honest shape of the thing. Kala Sarpa Yoga is not rare the way a one-in-a-million diagnosis is rare. It is a feature of the sky that switches on for a few months at a time and then goes away for years, and roughly one person in fourteen was born while it was on.

How this was measured, so you can check it

Where the charts came from. Every birth chart stored in AstroMedha on 26 August 2026, 1,661 rows. Three carried a birth date in the future and were dropped. Seventy more were the same birth entered twice, matched on identical date, time and coordinates, and were counted once. 1,588 distinct births remain. No name, email or place left the calculation; only dates, times and coordinates were read.

How each chart was computed. Lahiri sidereal positions on a Swiss-grade ephemeris, the same computation behind the free tools and the paid readings. Positions were taken at the birth instant converted to universal time using the timezone offset stored with each profile.

Birth times. 1,339 of the 1,588 charts carry a real clock together with a place, so they have a Lagna. 189 sit at the 12:00 placeholder AstroMedha writes when someone skips the time, and those charts are given no Lagna, because a wrong rising sign is worse than none. The remaining 60 carry a real clock but no stored coordinates, which also leaves them without a Lagna. Whether the yoga is present does not depend on the Lagna, so all 1,588 count toward the headline figure. The placeholder charts show the yoga at 7.94% against 10.46% for the charts with a real clock and a place, a gap well inside sampling noise at those sizes. Only the twelve-name table is restricted to charts with a Lagna.

The sky scan. The enclosure of the six slow planets was tested every six hours from 1 January 1950 to 31 December 2050, and the boundary dates quoted above were then resolved to the hour. Six hours is far finer than needed: the fastest of those six moves about two degrees a day, so a window cannot open and shut between samples. The all-seven count was run separately, once a day at noon Greenwich time, from 1950 to 2030.

What would falsify it. Produce a birth certificate dated between 12 July 2026 and 26 April 2034 for a chart that a Swiss-grade sidereal calculation puts all seven planets inside one nodal half. Our scan says there is none, and one counterexample would settle it.

Want your own chart read against these numbers rather than handed a label? Create a free account and AstroMedha computes the full verdict, the partial verdict with the actual distances, and the named form from your Lagna instead of a guess.

Related reading

• Kala Sarpa Yoga: what the pattern is
• What is Kaal Sarp Dosha
• Kaal Sarp Dosha remedies
• How common is Mangal Dosha?, the same count run on a different rule
• Free Kaal Sarp calculator