What is vimshottari dasha?
Explainer · reviewed August 2026
Vimshottari dasha is the 120-year planetary period system ePandit uses for timing. It starts from the lord of the Moon’s birth nakshatra and proceeds through a fixed nine-planet sequence with fixed year lengths.
On this page
Sequence and lengths in our engine
Sequence: Ketu → Shukra → Surya → Chandra → Mangal → Rahu → Guru → Shani → Budha.
Year lengths match the mahadasha table documented on the mahadasha page, and the day-length constant is 365.24219. We state the constant because two engines using different values drift apart by days over a 120-year cycle, and if our timeline disagrees with another app you are entitled to know which knob differs.
The starting point is a balance, not a whole period. Your birth Moon falls somewhere inside a nakshatra: the nakshatra index is the Moon's sidereal longitude divided by 13°20′, and the fraction already travelled through it is the remainder divided by 13°20′. The first mahadasha belongs to that nakshatra's lord, and what remains of it at birth is (1 − that fraction) × the lord's full length; every later period follows from the fixed sequence, and an antardasha within it lasts (mahadasha years × antardasha years) ÷ 120. Because all of this is set by the Moon's longitude, and the Moon moves about 13.2° a day, it is set by your birth time: roughly one degree of Moon is four months of dasha, so an unknown or assumed birth time shifts every boundary in the timeline.
View your dasha timeline in the app
ePandit checks these rules against your own birth chart, and shows which are sourced to a classical text and which are our engine's.