State PSC Exams: Your Chart Against the Notification Calendar

A state Public Service Commission cycle is four dates, not one year. There is the notification, the preliminary paper, the main paper and the interview, and the gap between the first and the last is measured in quarters rather than weeks. A birth chart reads those four dates separately, because the periods running in your chart on the prelims morning are usually not the ones running on interview day.

This page does not carry any commission's calendar. Commission dates move, sometimes twice inside one cycle, and a page that hard-coded them would be wrong within a season. Your dates are the input. Write down the five that matter to you before you read on: notification, prelims, prelims result, mains, interview. Everything here is a way of reading your own chart against those five.

Every position quoted below is sidereal, computed with the Lahiri ayanamsa against the Swiss ephemeris. That is the same calculation behind every free tool on this site, and it is why a sign named here will often differ from the one a newspaper horoscope gives you. Where a date appears, it is a computed ingress or a computed period boundary.

Why four dates and not one

Two things change between your prelims and your interview, and they change at different speeds.

The first is your own running period. Vedic astrology dates a life with Vimshottari, a 120-year cycle divided among the nine planets in a fixed order with a fixed number of years each. The cycle nests three deep, and the innermost level runs from about five days to about seven months. Over an eighteen-month exam cycle you pass through several of those, and they are not alike. Reading the whole campaign as one block averages away the difference you wanted to know about.

The second is the sky. Jupiter changes sign about once a year and Saturn about once every two and a half years, so at least one of them almost always shifts inside an eighteen-month cycle. In the window computed on this page, Jupiter changes sign nine times and Saturn five. A candidate whose prelims falls under a supportive Jupiter can easily be sitting the interview after it has moved on.

Neither of those is a reason for despair or for confidence. They are the reason the four dates get four separate answers instead of one.

The houses a government-service question is read from

A house is one of twelve segments counted from your lagna, which is the sign that was rising on the eastern horizon at the minute you were born. Each house carries a department of life. A state-service question uses three of them, and it uses each one for a different stage.

The order matters and it is the opposite of what most candidates assume. A competitive exam is decided in the 6th house, not the 10th. The 10th house says what kind of work fits you and how visible it will be. The 6th house says whether you can out-sit a hundred thousand other people for a fixed number of posts. Those are separate questions, and a chart can answer yes to one while saying very little about the other.

The 11th is separate again, because a result is an event rather than an effort. That distinction is why a candidate can clear a paper and then wait months for a list, and why the mains date and the mains result date belong in different rows of your calendar.

Your 10th, 6th and 11th lords, without any calculation

Every sign is ruled by a planet, so once you know your lagna the ruling planets of your 10th, 6th and 11th houses are fixed. Read them off this table. Those three planets matter more to you than any others, because a planet delivers the affairs of the houses it rules when its own period runs.

If you do not know your birth time, read the table from your Moon sign instead. That is the standard fallback, and it is what AstroMedha's own career reading does when a birth time is missing: houses are then counted from the Moon rather than from the horizon. It is a coarser frame and it is still a real one. Your Moon sign, also called your rashi, is on the free rashi tool, which computes it from your birth date alone; your rising sign is on the free kundli tool.

Three rows repeat a planet inside the table, and each repetition tells you something about how your cycle is likely to run.

A Gemini rising has Mars ruling both the 6th and the 11th, and a Sagittarius rising has Venus doing the same. For those two, the house of the contest and the house of the result belong to one planet, so a single period carries the fight and the outcome together. When that planet's period runs, the whole cycle tends to resolve inside it rather than spilling across two chapters.

An Aries rising has Saturn ruling the 10th and the 11th, which ties the post and the appointment to one planet. Those three are the whole list: no other rising sign has one planet on two of these houses.

A separate group of four is worth naming beside them, because the doubling is with the rising sign itself rather than inside the table. A Pisces rising has Jupiter ruling both the first house and the 10th, so this candidate's sense of who they are and the work they do sit under the same planet, which usually shows up as a person who cannot treat a job as only a job. A Scorpio rising has Mars ruling the first house and the 6th, which is the chart of someone whose identity is bound up in the contest. A Virgo rising has Mercury on the first and the 10th, and a Taurus rising has Venus on the first and the 6th, and both read the same way as their counterparts above.

Where one planet holds two of your three, its condition matters roughly twice as much as it otherwise would. Checking that condition is the next section.

The Sun and Saturn, and what each one actually decides

Two planets come up in every government-service reading, and they are doing different jobs.

The Sun stands for authority, rank, recognition and the state itself. In AstroMedha's own period readings the Sun's keywords are leadership, recognition, government and health, and a Sun period is read as a push to be seen: orals, interviews, anything with an examiner in the room. That last part is why the Sun matters more at the interview stage than at either written stage.

Saturn stands for service, discipline, structure, long hours and delay. Its keywords in the same readings are discipline, hard work, karma, delays, structure, service and justice. A candidate asking about a government post is asking about a Saturn institution staffed through a Sun-shaped selection, which is why both planets keep appearing.

Their condition in your chart is checkable rather than atmospheric. The first check is the sign each one occupies. Every planet has one sign where it is exalted, meaning it works at full strength there, and the sign opposite where it is debilitated, meaning the faculty it carries takes longer to come good than the person's actual ability suggests. A planet in one of the signs it rules itself works without being propped up.

The first two rows are worth reading together. The Sun falls in Libra, which is exactly where Saturn is at its strongest, and Saturn falls in Aries, which is where the Sun is at its strongest. That is not a coincidence of the table. The two planets are classical opposites, and the same reading holds them as mutual enemies in the friendship scheme AstroMedha computes with. For a candidate this has one plain consequence: a chart that gives the Sun full strength usually asks Saturn to work harder for it, and the reverse. It is uncommon for both halves of the government question to be easy in the same chart, and a reading that tells you they are is flattering you.

What a weak Sun changes in practice is worth stating, because a label with no instruction attached is useless. It means recognition arrives later than the work earns it. The written stages are largely unaffected, since a paper is marked without a face attached to it. The interview stage is where it shows, so the instruction is to over-prepare the personality test rather than assume the written marks will carry it, and to treat a first cycle as a rehearsal you fully intend to convert on the second. A weak Saturn is a different instruction: endurance is the thing that has to be built rather than the thing you already have, so the daily routine matters more for you than the syllabus does.

Where Saturn and Jupiter actually are, 2026 to 2029

Jupiter and Saturn are what turn a chart into a calendar. Both spend part of each year retrograde, meaning they appear from Earth to move backward through the zodiac, and a backward run can carry a planet into the sign it has just left. That is why several runs below reopen.

Computed ingress dates, from 26 August 2026 to the end of 2029.

Saturn

Jupiter

Saturn's first entry into Aries on 3 June 2027 lasts four and a half months before it reverses into Pisces on 20 October 2027, and it settles in Aries from 23 February 2028. If a Saturn window opens for you on that first Aries entry, you get it in two instalments, and the four months in between are the earlier conditions coming back rather than a new development. The same pattern repeats at the top of the table in August 2029.

Your 10th house, dated

The sky is the same for every candidate in the country. What differs is which of your houses those signs fall in, and that is decided by your rising sign. Find your row in whichever of the four tables below carries it.

Jupiter in your 10th house. The strongest window for visibility and a step up. Its use in an exam cycle is for the stages where you are seen: the interview, the document verification, any stage with a person on the other side of the table.

Jupiter aspecting your 10th house from another sign. A planet in Vedic astrology influences the houses it looks at as well as the one it sits in, and Jupiter looks at the 5th, 7th and 9th houses counted from itself. This reading is weaker than occupancy: good work is seen and earns standing, while the heavy lifting of your year sits elsewhere.

Aquarius and Pisces risings should read their rows with the end date in view. Aquarius loses Jupiter's support on the 10th after 26 June 2027 and does not get it back inside this period; Pisces after 24 July 2028. A candidate on either of those charts choosing between a 2027 cycle and a 2029 cycle is not choosing between two equivalent years.

Saturn in your 10th house. Weight, scrutiny and long hours on the career house. In an existing job it reads as a season to deliver rather than switch. In an exam cycle it reads differently and more usefully: the selection process itself gets heavier and slower, and the candidate who keeps going through a postponement, a re-exam or a court stay is the one it favours.

Saturn aspecting your 10th house. Saturn looks at the 3rd, 7th and 10th houses counted from itself. Same weight, held at a distance: more scrutiny than usual on your work, without the full occupancy season.

Scorpio is the one rising sign missing from both Saturn tables. Its 10th house is Leo, which Saturn does not reach or look at once in this whole period, so a Scorpio-rising candidate has neither the weight nor the scrutiny on that house and reads their cycle from the 6th house table below and from their own ladder. Taurus, Libra and Aquarius are the near-misses: each gets Saturn on the 10th for only the eight weeks between 8 August and 5 October 2029, which is too short to plan a campaign around.

The 6th house is where a competitive exam is actually fought

Saturn transiting your 6th house is the single most useful transit a state services candidate can have, and it is the one most people never look for because the 6th has a bad reputation. AstroMedha's own reading of it is direct: for an entrance or a government exam this is the useful Saturn, because endurance beats brilliance in this window and the candidates who out-sit the field are the ones who get through.

Three rising signs out of twelve, which is the honest arithmetic of a transit that spends two and a half years in a sign. If yours is not on that list you do not have this particular tailwind in this period, and your answer sits in the ladder rather than in the sky.

A Scorpio rising has the longest run of it, from 23 February 2028 to 8 August 2029, which is close to eighteen months of unbroken Saturn on the competition house. For a Scorpio-rising candidate that span is the one to put the serious attempt inside, and the practical form that takes is scheduling the grinding half of preparation there: full-length timed papers, the optional subject nobody enjoys, the revision rounds that do not feel like progress while you are inside them.

The Libra rows are the near-term ones. A Libra-rising candidate has Saturn on the 6th until 3 June 2027, gets it back from 20 October 2027 to 23 February 2028, and then loses it. A cycle whose prelims falls before June 2027 and whose mains falls in that winter window is being sat almost entirely inside the supportive configuration. A cycle that starts in mid-2028 is not.

The Sun's annual pass over your 10th house

The Sun crosses one sign a month, so it crosses your 10th house once a year for about thirty days. These are the computed windows for the two full cycles inside this period, and they repeat within about a day of the same dates each year.

Now the caveat, because a table this tidy invites more weight than it can carry. AstroMedha's dated career windows are built from Saturn and Jupiter only, and the Sun is deliberately left out of them. A planet that crosses a sign in thirty days colours a month; it does not define a season, and a calendar built on it would change its verdict every four weeks. Use the row above to separate two interview slots three weeks apart when everything slower is silent between them. Do not use it to choose between two exam cycles.

Whether you are in Sade Sati during your cycle

Sade Sati is the roughly seven-and-a-half-year period when Saturn transits the sign before your Moon's sign, your Moon's own sign, and the sign after it. It is read from the Moon and never from the rising sign, so this table is keyed to your Moon sign, which is fixed by your birth date and roughly the hour. Five Moon signs are touched by it inside this period.

What it means for an aspirant is specific, and it is not a prohibition on sitting the exam. The same effort buys less visible progress inside the period, and fatigue may arrive earlier in the day than it usually does, so progress has to be measured on the work actually done rather than on how the week felt. The instruction that comes with it is to keep the daily routine small and unbreakable, protect sleep, and avoid stacking three attempts inside it where you have a choice about the third. It is a season and not a verdict on your ability, which matters in practice, because a candidate who reads it as a verdict stops preparing.

An Aries Moon has it running across this entire period, so for that candidate there is no waiting it out inside any realistic exam horizon. The advice above becomes the operating routine rather than a temporary measure.

The part a table cannot give you

Everything so far can be looked up from your rising sign and your Moon sign. Your ladder cannot, and it is the part that separates your prelims from your mains.

Your Vimshottari cycle starts at a point fixed by your Moon's nakshatra, which is one of the twenty-seven equal segments the zodiac is divided into, each one owned by one of the same nine planets. Your first period belongs to the owner of the segment your Moon occupied, and it starts partly spent: a Moon a quarter of the way through its segment begins life with three quarters of that planet's years still to run. Two candidates born on the same day in the same city, two hours apart, run different periods for the rest of their lives.

The cycle nests three deep. The mahadasha is the outer period, running from six to twenty years. Inside it run nine antardashas, which are sub-periods sharing the same span in the same fixed order and proportion. Inside each of those run nine pratyantars, which are sub-periods of the same shape again, lasting weeks rather than years. On any given day you are running three lords at once.

That third level is where an exam date lives. A mahadasha lasting a decade cannot tell your prelims from your mains. An antardasha, the middle level, runs from about four months to about three and a third years depending on which two planets stack, so it usually cannot either. A pratyantar, the innermost level, runs from about five days to about seven months, with the middle of that range near seven weeks, and at that resolution it lands on one stage and not the next.

What you read, once you have the three lords for a date, is which of your houses each of them rules and how each one sits in your chart. A pratyantar belonging to your 6th lord, well placed, is a different prelims morning from a pratyantar belonging to a planet that rules nothing to do with your work and sits badly.

One honest warning about precision. Every date on your ladder is counted from your Moon's exact position, so the ladder inherits exactly the precision that one figure has and no more. A segment of the zodiac is 13 degrees 20 minutes wide and the Moon covers about 13 degrees a day, so a chart computed from a guessed birth time can put the whole ladder years out. If your birth time is approximate, treat the ladder as indicative and lean on the transit tables above, which are facts about the sky and do not care what hour you were born.

A worked example, computed end to end

Sample inputs, so the arithmetic can be checked. Born 7 November 1999 at 04:55 in Ranchi (23.34 N, 85.31 E, UTC+5:30). This is a computed sample chart and not a customer's. Five dates entered by the candidate: notification 12 October 2026, prelims 14 March 2027, mains 20 September 2027, interview 8 May 2028, final result 10 July 2028.

The structure. Libra rising at 5.57 degrees. From a Libra rising the 10th house is Cancer, so the Moon rules it; the 6th house is Pisces, so Jupiter rules it; the 11th house is Leo, so the Sun rules it. Saturn rules the 4th and the 5th, Mars the 2nd and the 7th, Mercury the 9th and the 12th, and Venus the first house and the 8th.

Where those rulers sit. The Moon, this chart's 10th lord, is in Libra in the first house at 7.00 degrees, in Swati. Jupiter, the 6th lord, is in Aries in the 7th house at 4.20 degrees and was moving backward at birth. The Sun, the 11th lord, is in Libra in the first house at 20.25 degrees and debilitated, since Libra is the Sun's fall. Saturn is in Aries in the 7th house at 19.82 degrees and also debilitated, since Aries is Saturn's fall. Venus is in Virgo in the 12th house and debilitated as well. Mars is in Sagittarius in the 3rd, Mercury in Scorpio in the 2nd and moving backward at birth, Rahu in Cancer in the 10th house, Ketu in Capricorn in the 4th. No planet in this chart is combust, meaning none sits close enough to the Sun to be overpowered by it; the nearest is the Moon at 13.3 degrees against an orb of 12.

What that structure says, before any dates. Three things stand out and one of them is hard news.

The 10th lord sitting in the first house ties this candidate's career to their own visibility and effort rather than to an inherited platform. Rahu occupies the 10th house itself, which classically reads as a career built by an unconventional route rather than the expected one. Neither Jupiter nor Saturn aspects the 10th house in this chart. Two natal aspects do reach it. One is Mars from the 3rd, which puts the planet of drive and competition looking at the career house. The other is Ketu from the 4th, and that one is automatic rather than informative: Ketu always sits opposite Rahu, so wherever Rahu occupies a house Ketu's seventh aspect falls on it.

The hard news is the Sun. It rules the 11th house of the result arriving, it is the significator of government service in this system, and it sits in the one sign where it is at its weakest. Both halves of the government question land on the same weak planet. What follows is an instruction rather than a verdict: recognition and the formal result will arrive later than the work earns them, so this candidate should plan a two-cycle campaign from the start and should treat the interview as the stage that needs disproportionate preparation. A first-cycle miss on this chart is the expected shape of the thing, not evidence of a ceiling.

The chapter this cycle runs inside. This chart entered a Jupiter mahadasha on 28 May 2017, running to 28 May 2033. Jupiter here rules the 3rd and the 6th, and the 6th is the house of rivals and competition. So the entire exam campaign, from first notification to final list, runs under the lord of the competitive house. For a candidate choosing between a contested selection with a cut-off and a safe qualifying route, that is an argument for the contested one, and it is the sort of argument that only appears when you look at what the outer period lord rules in this specific chart.

The five dates, read separately. The antardasha running from 9 April 2025 to 9 December 2027 belongs to Venus, which rules this chart's first and 8th houses. The one that follows, from 9 December 2027 to 26 September 2028, belongs to the Sun. Inside them the pratyantars fall like this.

The notification falls under a Jupiter inner period inside a Jupiter mahadasha, so the 6th lord is running at both the outer and the innermost level on the day the form opens. Applying is better supported at that moment than at any other point in the cycle, which is an argument for filling the form in the first week rather than on the last date.

The prelims falls under a Saturn inner period. Saturn rules this chart's 4th and 5th houses, the base you learn on and the intelligence you apply, and it is debilitated. So the sub-period lord governs exactly what a preliminary paper draws on, and it is in its weakest sign. The instruction is concrete: the ramp is longer than the effort predicts on this chart, so the syllabus needs starting several months earlier than a peer would need to start it, and recall needs more passes rather than longer hours in a single pass.

The mains falls under a Mercury inner period. Mercury rules the 9th house of higher learning and the 12th house of solitude and distant places, and it was moving backward at birth. The classical reading of a backward Mercury is a mind that goes back over ground rather than moving in a straight line, which suits the descriptive, essay-shaped mains paper more than it suits the objective prelims. The 12th-house rulership is the caveat and it is a useful one: this period asks for solitary work in a quiet room away from a group, so a candidate who moved into a crowded shared hostel for the mains months would be working against their own chart.

The interview falls under a Sun antardasha, which began on 9 December 2027 and runs to 26 September 2028. The Sun is this chart's 11th lord, its significator of government, and debilitated. The sub-period of the result-house lord runs across the interview and the final result both, which is the clearest possible statement that this cycle resolves under the weakest planet in the chart. It is also why the two-cycle plan named earlier is a plan rather than pessimism.

The sky on those days. On 12 October 2026, and again on 14 March 2027, Jupiter is in Cancer and Saturn is in Pisces. From a Libra rising that puts Jupiter in the 10th house and Saturn in the 6th at the same time, which is the best transit pairing available to a state-services candidate. Jupiter on the career house with Saturn on the competition house is exactly the combination the tables above were built to find, and this candidate has both across the notification and the prelims.

By the mains on 20 September 2027 the picture has moved. Saturn is in Aries, the 7th house, and Jupiter is in Leo, the 11th house. Jupiter on the 11th is the window where results and offers tend to land, which is a fair reading for a stage whose output is a merit list. Saturn has left the 6th, so the competition tailwind is gone by the mains, and it is still gone at the interview on 8 May 2028, when Saturn and Jupiter are in the same two signs.

Saturn does not enter the twelfth sign from this chart's Libra Moon at any point in the period computed here, so this candidate is not in Sade Sati across the cycle. On the exam days Saturn sits in the 6th and then the 7th house counted from the Moon.

What opens after. The Sun sub-period ends on 26 September 2028 and a Moon sub-period runs from then to 26 January 2030. The Moon is this chart's 10th lord, so the sub-period of the career-house lord opens four months after the final result of the first cycle. If a second campaign is going to happen, its notification and prelims sitting inside that window is a materially different plan from a second attempt taken on momentum three months after the first result. That is the kind of choice this reading exists to inform, and it is invisible from any calendar.

What reading five dates separately changes about what you do

The worked example changes five decisions, and none of them is "sit the exam" or "do not sit the exam".

It changes when the form goes in, because the notification falls in the best supported of the five moments. It changes when the syllabus starts, because a weak 4th and 5th lord running at the prelims argues for an earlier start rather than longer days later on. It changes where the mains preparation happens, because a 12th-lord period suits a quiet room more than a crowded hall. It changes how much preparation the interview gets relative to the written stages, because the result-house lord is the weak planet in this chart and the interview is where a weak Sun actually bites. And it changes whether a second cycle is planned from the start or improvised after a result, because the career lord's period opens four months after the first cycle closes.

A verdict would have changed none of them. "You will clear it" and "you will not clear it" both leave a candidate with nothing to do differently on Monday morning, which is why AstroMedha's exam and career readings never print either one. Every window is instead phrased as what the period supports.

When the answer is a hard season

A large share of the state-services questions that reach AstroMedha come from candidates on a second, third or fourth attempt, and several have been at it since 2023. What a chart adds for them is a shape to the difficulty, which is more useful than encouragement.

A protective period such as Sade Sati says the cost of each attempt is higher than usual right now, which argues for one well-prepared attempt rather than three scattered ones. A weak 11th lord says the result arrives later than the effort earns it, which argues for treating the campaign as multi-cycle from the first day rather than discovering that after a second miss. A Saturn window on the 6th says endurance is unusually well paid in that specific span, which argues for putting the hardest, dullest preparation inside it.

None of those is a prediction, and every one of them changes what a candidate does next week. A candidate who has missed four cut-offs and reads that their 6th lord is weak, and that their last three attempts fell inside a protective period, has an explanation that does not require them to conclude they are incapable, which is the conclusion most of them have already reached alone.

Age limits and attempt limits change the arithmetic and should be said out loud rather than smoothed over. A candidate with one eligible cycle left cannot spend it waiting for a better window, and for that candidate the reading is used to decide which stage gets the deepest preparation rather than which cycle to skip. The tables here still work at that setting, because they tell you which of your own four dates is the weak one.

Compute your own

The free tools cover the structural half without an account:

• Kundli gives you your rising sign and every planetary placement, which is everything the tables here need.
• Rashi gives you your Moon sign, which is the fallback frame when your birth time is unknown and the frame the Sade Sati table is keyed to.
• Nakshatra gives you your Moon's segment, which is what fixes where your Vimshottari cycle starts.
• Dasha calculator gives you the outer two levels you are running today.
• Sade Sati tells you whether you are in that period and when it ends.
• Career timing gives you the career season you are in now and the next dated turning point.

The Career & Timing report is the dated half. It computes the next twelve months as dated windows from your own rising sign, with the Saturn and Jupiter ingresses and the sub-period boundaries marked on them, plus the Dashamsha, a divisional chart: a second chart derived from the first by dividing each sign into ten parts, which is where Vedic astrology reads career. Twelve months covers a notification-to-mains span for most commissions. Where your interview falls beyond that, the sub-period boundary that will be running then is already named in the report, and the twelve-month map is re-run closer to the date.

The Education & Exam report is the other half of the same question, read through the study houses instead of the career houses. It takes your exam goal as an input and returns the learning significators, the six education houses through their lords, and twelve months of dated windows with the Mercury backward spans marked.

If your question is about one specific date rather than a season, Chart Chat answers against your own computed chart, which is where most of the questions on this page came from.

Related reading

• Exams and your chart is the hub this page sits under. It covers the study houses, the twelve-row table for the 4th, 5th and 9th lords, the nine Mercury backward spans to mid-2029, and the Vimshottari mechanics in more detail.
• NEET PG and MDS entrance timing applies the same three-level method to a medical entrance calendar.
• Mercury mahadasha and education goes deeper on the decade run by the planet that carries every written paper.