Rahu Kaal: what it is, how it moves, and what it actually forbids
Computed rather than looked up in a table — Rahu Kaal at New Delhi on 31 July 2026 runs 10:46 to 12:28 IST — one eighth of a day that is 101 minutes long, not the ninety of the printed template.
An eighth of the daylight, not an event in the sky
The most common misunderstanding about Rahu Kaal is that something happens overhead during it. Nothing does. Rahu is a shadow point — the Moon’s north node, the intersection where eclipses become possible — and it has no body to rise or set. Rahu Kaal is instead a bookkeeping rule: the daylight between sunrise and sunset is divided into eight equal parts, and one of those eight is assigned to Rahu according to the day of the week.
That construction has two consequences worth stating plainly. First, the period is a convention rather than an observation, which is why its clock times differ between two almanacs that disagree about sunrise. Second, because it divides real daylight rather than a nominal twelve hours, each part is longer in summer and shorter in winter — a Rahu Kaal in Srinagar in June runs past ninety-five minutes, while the same date in Kanyakumari gives something close to seventy-eight.
Rahu Kaal is also strongest in South Indian practice. In Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra it is consulted almost daily and treated as near-binding; in much of the north the tithi, the nakshatra and the yoga carry more weight and Rahu Kaal is a secondary check. Neither reading is wrong, and a family that has never structured its day around it is not being careless.
Which eighth belongs to which weekday
The assignment is fixed and easy to memorise, and it is the same everywhere: the eighth part of the day allotted to Rahu depends only on the weekday. The clock windows in the table below are the ones you see printed everywhere, and they are correct only for an idealised day running exactly 06:00 to 18:00. Real days do not, which is the whole point of the next section.
| Weekday | Rahu Kaal part | Window on an ideal 06:00–18:00 day | Yamaganda part | Gulika part |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sunday | 8th | 16:30 – 18:00 | 5th | 7th |
| Monday | 2nd | 07:30 – 09:00 | 4th | 6th |
| Tuesday | 7th | 15:00 – 16:30 | 3rd | 5th |
| Wednesday | 5th | 12:00 – 13:30 | 2nd | 4th |
| Thursday | 6th | 13:30 – 15:00 | 1st | 3rd |
| Friday | 4th | 10:30 – 12:00 | 7th | 2nd |
| Saturday | 3rd | 09:00 – 10:30 | 6th | 1st |
Yamaganda and Gulika (Mandi) are built the same way from the same eight parts. They are treated as lighter cautions than Rahu Kaal in most traditions, and some households ignore Yamaganda entirely.
Why the printed times are usually wrong for you
A single 06:00 to 18:00 template is a reasonable approximation for a place near the Tropic of Cancer at the equinoxes and a poor one everywhere else. Take Delhi in late June: sunrise near 05:24 and sunset near 19:22 give a daylight span of about fourteen hours, so each eighth runs about a hundred and five minutes and Monday’s Rahu Kaal sits closer to 07:09–08:54 than to the printed 07:30–09:00.
Longitude compounds the drift. India keeps one clock, set to the meridian at 82.5 degrees east, so a city in Gujarat sees the Sun rise nearly forty minutes later by that clock than a city in Assam on the same date. A table computed for one and read in the other is not slightly off; it is off by most of a window boundary. This is the single most common reason two people quote different Rahu Kaal times for the same day and both believe the other is mistaken.
The fix is simply to compute rather than copy. Sunrise and sunset for real coordinates, the true daylight span, then eight true eighths. Every Rahu Kaal on this site is built that way, which is also why our figures will differ by a few minutes from a printed almanac that rounds sunrise to the nearest five.
What it bars, and what it does not
Rahu Kaal is a restriction on BEGINNING things. Setting out on a journey, opening a shop for the first time, signing a purchase, starting a course of treatment that can wait, holding an inaugural puja — these are the acts the caution addresses. The reasoning offered by the texts is that Rahu governs sudden reversal and things that hide their nature, and a beginning made under it is thought to be harder to steer later.
It is not a curfew. Work already under way continues; a journey already begun does not pause; routine trade in an established shop is unaffected; and no tradition asks anyone to delay urgent medical care for it — an emergency is timed by the emergency. Several classical readings also exempt acts that are themselves inauspicious or defensive, on the sensible logic that a difficult hour suits a difficult errand.
One more honest caveat. Rahu Kaal is a daily, city-wide caution and nothing more; it cannot rank one open day above another, and it says nothing about whether the date is right for the specific rite you have in mind. The ceremonial layer — tithi, nakshatra, the solar month, the visibility of Venus and Jupiter — sits above it, and your own chart sits above that.
Frequently asked questions
Does Rahu Kaal apply at night as well?
In the mainstream reckoning, no — the eight parts divide daylight only, so the period exists between sunrise and sunset and there is no night equivalent. A minority of regional almanacs extend the same eightfold division across the night and publish a nocturnal Rahu Kaal, but it is not the common practice and this site does not compute one.
Our flight departs inside Rahu Kaal and cannot be changed. What do people do?
The usual practice is to make the symbolic departure earlier: step out of the house, take a few steps in the intended direction and place a small item of luggage outside before the window opens, then leave physically at the scheduled time. Whether you find that satisfying is a personal matter, but it is a long-standing accommodation and no tradition asks anyone to miss a booked journey.
Related guides
How this guide is maintained
Everything computed on this site â the sunrise and sunset behind every window on this page, and the tithi, nakshatra, yoga and karana behind the date tables â comes from a Lahiri sidereal ephemeris and a NOAA sunrise model applied to the exact coordinates of the city shown, with New Delhi as the reference city for anything not city-specific. Where this guide describes a rule that genuinely varies between texts, regions or family traditions, it says so in the paragraph rather than picking a side quietly, and where the site’s own date scorer takes a documented shortcut, the shortcut is named.
What no guide on this site can do is weigh your own chart. The tables here are a panchang shortlist — the classical tests a calendar can settle — and the personal layer that decides between the surviving dates is a separate step. Start with the occasion pages for computed dates, and see how we compute muhurat for the full method.
Written and maintained by Savan Vyas. A rule applied wrongly here is a bug, and corrections are genuinely welcome.
For a full personalised muhurat matched to your own birth chart, ask Soma on AskSoma.