How Common Is Neecha Bhanga Raja Yoga? A Count Across 200,000 Charts

Somewhere between 6.6% and 40.7% of birth charts, and which end of that range you land on is decided by nothing except which version of the classical rule the astrologer in front of you happens to use. The figure most of them mean, and the one AstroMedha's calculator asserts, is 36.8%. Slightly more than one chart in three.

A yoga is a named combination of placements that classical Vedic astrology treats as a single unit with a single verdict. Neecha bhanga raja yoga, which translates as the cancellation of a fall, is the claim that a planet sitting in its weakest sign has that weakness undone by a second feature of the same chart, and rises higher for having started low. It has a reputation for being rare and precious. The measurement below says it is neither.

On 26 August 2026 we ran the test twice, on two populations that share nothing except the calculator that read them. The first is 200,000 birth moments generated at random across sixty-one years and ten Indian cities. The second is every real birth chart held by AstroMedha, 1,575 of them, of which the 1,400 that carry a real birth time returned 37.8% on the same reading. The two agree to within about one percentage point on every figure on this page, which is the reason we are willing to state a population rate at all.

The five answers, and what separates them

Five readings of the same classical rule are in common circulation. Each one is defensible, each is used by working astrologers, and they disagree with each other by a factor of six.

Every row there counts houses, so the real column is the 1,400 AstroMedha charts that carry a real birth time rather than all 1,575. The rest of this page is the arithmetic behind those numbers, in the order the questions arrive, and every denominator is printed beside its figure so any line of it can be checked.

What was counted, and against what

Population A is 200,000 birth moments drawn at random from 1 January 1950 to 31 December 2010, with the date, the clock minute and the city all chosen uniformly, across New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, Lucknow and Guwahati. Sixty-one years is deliberate. Saturn takes 29.5 years to circle the zodiac and Jupiter 11.9, so a window of sixty-one holds two Saturn circuits and five Jupiter circuits, and neither slow planet gets over-counted by where the window happens to start. The whole run is seeded, so it reproduces identically.

Population B is every profile row AstroMedha holds, 1,661 of them, as of 26 August 2026. Eighty-six carry no birth place, and without coordinates there is no rising sign and no houses to count, so they are dropped and 1,575 charts remain. Of those, 175 sit on the 12:00 placeholder the signup form fills in when someone does not know their birth time, and our calculator treats that as no time at all rather than assert a rising sign it cannot support. That leaves 1,400 charts with a real birth time, and any figure below that depends on houses is quoted against 1,400.

Both populations were read by the same production calculator the site serves from, at the same commit. As a check on our own arithmetic, we reimplemented the cancellation test independently and compared it against the shipping code on every chart in both populations. The two verdicts agreed on 200,000 of 200,000 simulated charts and 1,575 of 1,575 real ones.

First gate: is there anything in the chart to cancel

Before any question about cancellation, a chart has to contain a debilitated planet. Debilitated means sitting in the one sign of the twelve where classical Vedic astrology rates that planet at its weakest, which is always the sign directly opposite the one where it is exalted, meaning at its strongest.

54.4% of the 200,000 charts had no debilitated planet at all, and for those people the question closes there. The real charts came in at 53.0% across all 1,575 of them, since spotting a debilitation needs the birth date and place but no birth time.

Across the whole population that is 114,101 debilitated placements, an average of 0.571 per chart. Two debilitated planets, which reads as unlucky, turns up in about one chart in twelve. Three turns up in about one in eighty-three. Nobody in 200,000 charts had six or seven.

Each debilitation is judged separately, on its own pair of cancelling planets, so a chart with two of them can end up with one cancelled and one standing. Under the reading our calculator asserts, 37.2% of charts with two land there and 56.1% have both cancelled; under the strict rising-sign reading one-and-one is the commonest of the three outcomes, at 49.0%. The companion page do I have neecha bhanga raja yoga works through the Sun-and-Saturn pair specifically, which is the combination readers ask about most.

Is debilitation exactly one chance in twelve?

Close, but not exactly, and the deviations are large enough to matter. A planet occupies one sign of twelve, so the flat expectation is 8.33%. Here is what the sky actually did across 31,411 consecutive days, from 1 January 1950 to 31 December 2035, read straight off the ephemeris rather than from a sample of births.

Planets do not move at a constant rate through the zodiac, because their orbits are ellipses rather than circles and each one crosses part of its path more slowly than the rest. So each planet lingers in some signs and hurries through others. The Moon, whose orbit is closest to circular, is the flattest of the seven, ranging only from 8.27% to 8.37% across all twelve signs. Mars ranges from 6.89% in Capricorn to 9.91% in Virgo, and Saturn from 6.50% in Leo to 9.60% in Capricorn. Debilitated Mars is a third more common than debilitated Venus, and that gap is astronomy rather than anything about the people.

The seven figures above sum to 57.13%, which predicts 0.571 debilitated placements per chart. The 200,000 births measured 0.571. Two independent methods, one reading the sky and one reading a population of birth moments, landing on the same third decimal is the strongest single check on this page.

Whether you have a debilitated Saturn is mostly a question of your birth year

This is the finding that surprised us, and it is the one thing on this page that changes how you should read any statement about how common this yoga is.

Saturn spends 8.06% of its time in Aries, but it does not sprinkle that time evenly. It arrives in blocks lasting a year or two and then stays away for close to twenty-seven years at a time. Here is every stretch in which a birth could carry a debilitated Saturn, scanned day by day from 1950 to 2035.

Every date in that table is the day Saturn's own crossing falls on, and the closing date is the last full day inside Aries, so a birth falling within a day of a boundary needs its own chart cast rather than a look at the table. Well inside the boundaries the reading is unambiguous, and it is worth reading again with a birth date in mind. Nobody born between 29 April 1971 and 15 April 1998 has a debilitated Saturn. That is just under twenty-seven consecutive years, which covers most of the people reading this. Anyone in that range who has been told they have a neecha bhanga on Saturn has been told something the sky rules out, and no chart reading is needed to see it. The next window opens in early June 2027.

Jupiter behaves the same way on a twelve-year clock, and its stay in Capricorn is broken into pieces because of retrograde motion, which is the stretch when a planet appears to travel backwards against the stars and re-crosses ground it has already covered.

Mars moves fast, so it comes round to Cancer every two years or so for about seven weeks at a stretch and spreads across birth years far more evenly. Between 1990 and 2035 it makes 28 separate visits totalling 1,673 days. The longest by far is 5 October 2009 to 25 May 2010, 233 days, because a retrograde loop turned back and re-crossed the sign without ever leaving it. The next longest is 20 October 2024 to 20 January 2025, ninety-three days.

The consequence for the headline number is direct. Break the 200,000 births down by year of birth and the share carrying any debilitated planet swings from 19.4% for 1988 births to 100% for 1970, 1997 and 1999 births. The share carrying a cancelled debilitation, counted from the rising sign only, swings from 9.5% for 2007 to 65.3% for 1985. A single national or global percentage for this yoga is an average over cohorts that differ from each other by a factor of five, and your own birth year is not the average.

It also means any published rate depends on the years the sample covers. Our sixty-one-year window puts debilitated Saturn at 7.5% of charts. Restrict the same method to births from 1985 to 2005 and it becomes 10.3%, because the 1998 to 2000 block is a larger share of a shorter window. Both numbers are correct. Neither is the number for your birth year.

Why every cancellation condition lands on one chance in three

Two conditions do nearly all the work in the classical rule, and both are widely agreed:

1. The lord of the sign your planet is debilitated in sits in a kendra, meaning the 1st, 4th, 7th or 10th house counted from your rising sign.
2. The planet that is exalted in that same sign sits in one of those four houses.

A third rule is in circulation and some astrologers weight it as heavily: the debilitation counts as cancelled when the debilitated planet is itself in one of those four houses. It fires on 33.2% of placements, and crediting it is what moves the headline from 36.8% to 40.7%. The two numbered above are the ones our calculator asserts, and the rest of this section is about them.

Both of those name a specific second planet and ask a yes-or-no question about where it landed. Four houses out of twelve is one third of the chart, and where any given planet falls relative to the rising sign is spread almost perfectly evenly, because the rising sign turns through all twelve over the course of a day while the planets barely move. So each condition is a one-in-three test, and the measurement confirms it to the decimal.

If the two conditions were independent coin flips at one third each, either one firing would come out at 1 - (2/3)², which is 55.6%. Measured separately, the five planets that have two different cancelling planets came in at 54.8% to 56.6%. The classical rule, in other words, has no hidden structure in it at all. It is two independent one-in-three tests, and the fame of this yoga rests on a combination that a fair die reproduces.

Among the placements that pass, which condition did the work is worth knowing, because astrologers weight them differently:

The two planets that get one test instead of two

Two of the seven are structurally worse off, and it has nothing to do with the person holding the chart.

The Moon, debilitated in Scorpio, has only one condition available. No planet is exalted in Scorpio, so condition 2 has no subject and can never fire. Everything rests on where Mars, the lord of Scorpio, sits. Measured across 16,662 debilitated Moons: condition 2 fired 0 times, and the overall cancellation rate from the rising sign is exactly 33.3%, one test instead of two.

Venus, debilitated in Virgo, has one condition in practice. Mercury both rules Virgo and is exalted in it, so conditions 1 and 2 ask about the same planet in the same chart and pass or fail together. Across 13,762 debilitated Venuses the two conditions fired at 33.3% each and both fired together at 33.3%, which is the signature of a single test wearing two names.

The effect on the headline is a clean split of the seven planets into two groups.

Five planets at about 55.6% and two at exactly 33.3%. A debilitated Moon or Venus is not harder to rescue because of anything in the chart. It is harder to rescue because the rule offers it one throw instead of two.

Debilitated Mars passes every time, and that is a defect in the rule

Look again at the Mars row. Under the reading our calculator applies, and under the classical rule as it is normally written, every single one of the 19,883 debilitated Mars placements in 200,000 charts was cancelled. Not most. All of them.

The cause is arithmetic rather than astrology. Mars is debilitated in Cancer, and the lord of Cancer is the Moon. The rule allows the four angles to be counted from the sign the Moon occupies when the birth time is unknown, and the Moon is always in the first sign from itself, which is always an angle. So condition 1 passes for every debilitated Mars in every chart that has ever been cast or ever will be.

A test that returns yes a hundred percent of the time carries no information about the chart it was applied to. The honest reading for this one placement is to drop the count-from-the-Moon route and ask the stricter question: is the Moon, or is Jupiter, in the 1st, 4th, 7th or 10th house from the rising sign. Measured that way, debilitated Mars is cancelled 55.4% of the time, which sits with the other four two-test planets and behaves like a real test.

One chart where the two readings disagree

Here is a chart anyone can reproduce, computed for 1 July 1993 at 06:00 in New Delhi, 28.6139° north, 77.2090° east, UTC+5.5.

Gemini is rising. The Moon sits in Scorpio, its sign of debilitation, in the 6th house. The planet that decides its fate is Mars, lord of Scorpio, and Mars sits in Leo. Counted from the rising sign, Leo is the 3rd house, which is not one of the four angles, so condition 1 fails and the strict reading returns no. Counted from the Moon in Scorpio, Leo is the 10th, which is an angle, so condition 1 passes and the classical rule as written returns yes. Our calculator reports exactly one yoga for this chart, Neecha Bhanga Raja Yoga on the Moon, graded Strong.

Both answers come from the same rule applied to the same chart. Two astrologers reading this chart honestly, each using a convention that is in the textbooks, will tell that person opposite things, and the disagreement is not about the chart. It is about which of the two reference points the rule is counted from. Across the whole population the choice moves the headline from 25.5% to 36.8%.

For contrast, the companion page walks through a pair of charts born the same day fifteen hours apart in the same city, one of which carries the yoga on Jupiter and one of which does not under any reading. We recomputed both while preparing this page and they reproduce exactly.

If you already have a debilitated planet, what are the odds

The population figures above include everyone, and most people are excluded at the first gate. If you already know you have a debilitated planet, the conditional numbers are the ones you want. These are the 91,281 simulated charts that carry at least one, with the real corpus beside them.

Four out of five people who have a debilitated planet can be told, truthfully and by the rule as written, that they have this yoga. That is the reason the phrase turns up in so many readings. It is also the reason the phrase carries so little information on its own, and why the last two rows are the ones worth asking about. Both conditions met, at 14.5%, is a genuinely uncommon chart. One condition met on a Moon count is the ordinary case.

Your rising sign does not change the odds

A reasonable next question is whether some rising signs are luckier here. They are not. Splitting the 200,000 charts by rising sign, the share of debilitated placements that get cancelled from the rising sign runs from 48.9% for Libra to 50.6% for Leo. Twelve values inside a 1.7 point band is what randomness looks like.

At chart level the spread is a little wider, 23.6% to 27.1%, and that comes from the rising sign changing how often a chart has a debilitated planet in the first place rather than changing the odds of rescue. Your rising sign decides which house the debilitation lands in, which is a real difference in what the placement touches in your life. It does not decide whether the cancellation fires.

What a cancellation does not measure

Passing the test removes a penalty. Everything else that was true of the planet stays true, and the largest of those things is the navamsa, the ninth-part chart Vedic astrology uses to test whether a promise in the main chart has substance behind it.

Across the 114,101 debilitated placements, 10.1% were still debilitated in the navamsa and 10.7% landed in the sign where that planet is strongest. Those two groups carry the identical headline verdict from the cancellation test and face very different prospects, and no rule about angles separates them.

The Moon is a special case again, and this one is absolute. A planet's navamsa sign is drawn from a run of nine consecutive signs fixed by the sign it occupies, and for Scorpio that run is Cancer through Pisces. Taurus, the sign where the Moon is strongest, is not in it. So a Moon debilitated in Scorpio can never be exalted in the navamsa, in any chart, ever. Across 16,662 debilitated Moons the count was 0, which is what the arithmetic requires.

For Jupiter and Saturn the navamsa figures move noticeably depending on which birth years you sample, for the same reason the birth-year section gives: those two cross their debilitation sign in a handful of long stretches rather than evenly, so the degrees they occupy within the sign are not evenly spread either. We are quoting the aggregate across all seven planets for that reason.

How much a wrong birth time moves the answer

All three cancellation rules are counted in houses, and houses come from the rising sign, which turns through all twelve signs over the course of a day. So the answer is sensitive to the clock, and it is worth knowing how sensitive before trusting a birth time recalled from family memory.

We recomputed all 1,400 real timed charts at four offsets and asked how often the rising-sign verdict flipped.

Half an hour of error changes the answer for about one person in fourteen. Two hours changes it for one in four. If your birth time came off a hospital record or a birth certificate you are fine. If it came from a relative saying "around sunrise", treat a rising-sign verdict on this yoga as provisional and lean on the count from the Moon, which needs only the date.

Check the count on a chart you can reproduce

Nothing here needs to be taken on trust. Put 1 July 1993, 06:00, New Delhi into our free kundli calculator and you should get Gemini rising, the Moon in Scorpio in the 6th house and Mars in Leo in the 3rd. That is the disagreement case worked above, and if your own chart software returns something different for that input, the difference is in the software rather than in this page.

The four steps for your own chart are short. Find any planet sitting in its debilitation sign, from the seven pairs in the ephemeris table above. Look up the lord of that sign and the planet exalted in it. Find both of those in your chart and note their house numbers. If either is in the 1st, 4th, 7th or 10th, the debilitation is cancelled under the reading that most astrologers use, and if you want the strict answer, require it from the rising sign rather than from your Moon. The step-by-step version, with the full lookup table of which planet cancels which, is at do I have neecha bhanga raja yoga.

What to do with the number

The rate is useful mainly for what it tells you to ask next. A verdict of "you have neecha bhanga raja yoga" rests on a one-in-three test, so the follow-up questions carry all the information. Which planet is debilitated, and which house does it sit in, because that is where the reversal would show up. Which of the two conditions fired, and is the planet that fired it strong itself. Does the navamsa support the promise or contradict it. Which period of your life does the debilitated planet actually run, since a capacity that never gets its turn stays theoretical.

A free AstroMedha account computes all of that from your own birth data. The Your Yogas card names which of your planets, if any, carries a cancelled debilitation and grades it beside the other classical combinations your chart forms, including gajakesari, meaning Jupiter sitting in an angle from your Moon. Chart Chat reads your stored placements and period ladder, so the follow-ups above are answerable in your own chart rather than in a population. Create a free account with your date, time and place of birth.

Method, and what this count is not

The simulated population is Indian births, uniformly sampled in date, minute and city. It is not a census of humanity, and birth timing in the real world is not uniform across the clock or the calendar. What it is good for is separating the structure of the rule from the accidents of any one group of people, which is why every figure has a real count printed beside it.

The real population is AstroMedha's users and the people they entered charts for. They skew Indian and they are self-selected by having looked up a birth chart at all. That the two populations agree to within about a point on every measure is evidence the rule's behaviour is structural rather than a property of our customers. Two of the 1,575 rows carry a birth date later than the count date, which is what happens when somebody enters an expected due date. Removing them changes no figure on this page by as much as a tenth of a point.

Everything was computed on 26 August 2026 by the production Vedic calculator at the commit the site serves from, with the Swiss ephemeris, the Lahiri sidereal ayanamsa and Whole-Sign houses. Sidereal means measured against the fixed stars, which is what Vedic astrology uses and what every sign named on this page refers to. No figure was estimated, rounded from a published source or carried over from anywhere else, and no individual birth record is disclosed by any number here.

Related reading

• Do I have neecha bhanga raja yoga, the same rule applied to your own chart step by step
• How common is Gajakesari yoga, the same kind of count for a different combination
• How common is Mangal Dosha, the first page in this series
• Neecha bhanga raja yoga, the fall-and-rise yoga, the classical reading in full
• Which yogas are in my chart, the full set computed at once
• Vedic concepts explained, the hub for yogas, doshas and chart terminology
• Free kundli calculator, your birth chart with planets, houses and current period

Counted 26 August 2026 across 200,000 simulated Indian births and 1,575 real AstroMedha charts by the same Vedic calculator, 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.