Vivah (Marriage) Muhurat Rules: Adhika Maas, Kharmas, Chaturmas and How This Site Filters Dates

A Hindu marriage muhurat is not one rule but a stack of them. A candidate date has to pass a series of checks on the Moon's nakshatra, the tithi, the weekday, the Sun's sign, the visibility of Jupiter and Venus, and finally the rising sign (Lagna) during the window. Most days in a year fail at least one check, which is why a year's worth of marriage dates is a short list and why the same list looks different on different websites.

This guide walks through the checks that the Marriage Muhurat calendar on this site applies, in the order they are applied, and says plainly where a rule is approximate or unverified. It is about choosing dates. It does not replace matching the couple's horoscopes or a priest's own judgement.

The site accepts eleven nakshatras for marriage: Rohini, Mrigashira, Magha, Uttara Phalguni, Hasta, Swati, Anuradha, Mula, Uttara Ashadha, Uttara Bhadrapada and Revati. This follows a list on which several panchang methodology sources converged. Other lists differ at the edges, for instance by including or leaving out Mula, or by limiting Magha, Mula and Revati to particular padas.

The site uses the whole nakshatra for these three boundary stars, so it is more permissive than a pada-level reading. If your tradition counts only certain padas, treat a Magha, Mula or Revati date as one to confirm.

Eight tithis are accepted in each fortnight: Dwitiya, Tritiya, Panchami, Saptami, Dashami, Ekadashi, Dwadashi and Trayodashi. That leaves out Pratipada, Chaturthi, Shashthi, Ashtami, Navami and Chaturdashi, the three Rikta tithis (Chaturthi, Navami, Chaturdashi) among them, and also Purnima and Amavasya. Sources disagree about a few of these, and this is the list on which the checked sources converged.

The nakshatra and the tithi must both be good at the same time, not just on the same day. A day on which a good nakshatra runs in the morning and a good tithi in the evening, with no overlap, does not pass. The calendar looks for a stretch in which both hold together.

Only Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are accepted. Sunday, Tuesday and Saturday are left out. Some regional traditions allow one of them in particular circumstances, and a few almanacs are stricter still, so this is one of the checks where a date missing from this list may be acceptable in your family's reckoning.

The Sun's sidereal sign must not be Karka, Simha, Kanya, Tula, Dhanu or Meena. That removes two different periods. Dhanu and Meena are the Kharmas (also called Malmas): the months when the Sun is in Sagittarius, roughly mid-December to mid-January, and in Pisces, roughly mid-March to mid-April. Marriages are traditionally not held in either. Karka through Tula, roughly mid-July to mid-November, is the solar-month version of the rainy-season and autumn pause that lunar Chaturmas covers.

The site gets this rule from a published marriage-dates explainer that attributes it to a classical muhurta text, and it is applied as a hard filter on every date. Between them these signs leave three windows in the year for the Sun's sign alone: roughly mid-November to mid-December, mid-January to mid-March, and mid-April to mid-July. Chaturmas and Adhika Maas then remove further days from those windows.

Chaturmas is the four-month period when Vishnu is said to sleep, from Devshayani Ekadashi in Ashadha to Prabodhini (Dev Uthani) Ekadashi in Kartik. In the past the site treated the Sun's passage through Karka to Tula as a stand-in for Chaturmas. That is close but not exact, because the two do not start and end on the same days.

The site now removes the exact Chaturmas interval as well, as a separate rule on top of the solar-month rule. It starts at the beginning of Devshayani Ekadashi and ends at the end of Prabodhini Ekadashi, and the solar rule stays in force. Keeping both closes the gaps at either end. In 2023, the days from 29 June to 16 July, when the Sun was still in Mithuna after Devshayani, were wrongly listed before. In 2026, 17 to 21 November, when the Sun is already in Vrischika but Prabodhini Ekadashi has not ended, are now excluded.

Two caveats remain. Some references say Chaturmas begins from the Dwadashi after Devshayani, while the site starts at the Ekadashi tithi, so the first day can differ by up to a day. Only a handful of published Ekadashi dates were checked against the computed windows. And a Kshaya Masa, a rare lunar month that is dropped from the calendar, is not handled.

About every three years the lunar calendar adds an extra month, the Adhika Maas (also called Purushottam or Mala Maas), to keep the lunar months in step with the seasons. Marriage is not held in it. A published marriage-dates explainer states that every day of the leap month is removed and that the first and last partial days are treated as inauspicious too.

The Marriage Muhurat calendar follows that: a day is dropped if any part of its sunrise-to-sunrise span lies in an Adhika month. The same exclusion is applied to the Griha Pravesh, Vehicle Purchase and Property Purchase calendars. For Vivah it comes from the published explainer. For the other three it is an owner decision that has not been checked against a source, so treat those as a conservative default rather than a classical ruling.

Marriage is not held when Jupiter or Venus is combust, meaning too close to the Sun to be seen (Guru Asta and Shukra Asta). The site checks both planets each day with the same combustion orbs it uses for the planets pages. The check is sometimes called Guru-Shukra Tara shuddhi.

Do not confuse this check with Tarabala, the nine-star cycle counted from a person's birth star. The Marriage Muhurat calendar does not compute Tarabala, since it needs the couple's birth stars, and works only with the visibility of the two planets.

Four Karanas are prohibited for marriage: Vishti (Bhadra), Shakuni, Chatushpada and Nagava. The site removes each as a time range. See the guide on Karana and Bhadra for how they fall.

Nine of the 27 Nitya Yogas are also prohibited: Vishkambha, Atiganda, Shula, Ganda, Vyaghata, Vajra, Vyatipata, Parigha and Vaidhriti. The published explainer says that only the first, malefic part of such a Yoga (its Visha Ghati) should be discarded, not the whole Yoga. Vyatipata and Vaidhriti are removed whole.

Here is a point to be honest about: the explainer does not give the length of that opening part, and published sources disagree. The site removes the opening 3, 5, 6, 6, 9 and 9 ghatis (a ghati is 24 minutes) of Vishkambha, Shula, Ganda, Atiganda, Vyaghata and Vajra, and the first 30 ghatis of Parigha, taking the larger value where sources differ. These figures are a logged decision and are not verified. An astrologer's ruling or a source that tabulates the lengths would settle them.

Finally, within the stretch where nakshatra, tithi, Karana and Yoga all pass, the site looks for a time when the rising sign is Mithuna, Kanya or Tula, for at least five minutes. If none exists, the date is not listed, because the site will not show a muhurat time it cannot support. The time shown is the longest such window, and the nakshatra and tithi printed are the ones running at that time, not at sunrise.

A window before sunrise belongs, by the Panchang day, to the next calendar date and is labelled that way. An open product question is whether to list dates that have a valid nakshatra and tithi but no good Lagna, with a note. For now they are left out.

Several things that matter in practice are outside this calendar. It does not apply Holashtak. It does not check pada-level rules for Magha, Mula and Revati. And it cannot do any of the checks that need the couple's own charts, such as Nadi, Mool and Mangal dosha and the Ashtakoota points, which belong to horoscope matching, not to a city-wide date list. Use the Horoscope Match tool for those.

It also gives dates for a city, so a date near a month boundary or at the edge of a window can differ for a family living elsewhere.

If you compare this list with Drik Panchang's marriage list, you will see more dates there. Drik's legacy marriage list ignores weekday, tithi and Lagna, and its windows are around four hours long. The two are answering different questions: Drik offers a long list of Panchang-clean days, and this site's main list applies weekday, tithi and Lagna as well.

To make comparison easy, the Marriage Muhurat page has a collapsed section, Compare with Drik Panchang's longer list. It drops weekday, tithi and Lagna and keeps the rest. On the one comparison made, for Delhi in 2026 using notes of Drik's list recorded on 25 October 2026 and not a live read, it listed 75 dates, including all 59 of Drik's and 16 that Drik does not list. The Venus limit of 7 degrees in that view was fitted to that single example, because Drik accepts some dates at 7 to 9 degrees from the Sun and not others at 2 to 7. It has not been checked for other years or cities, and the page labels it an approximation. Treat the Drik list as a comparison fixture, not as ground truth.

Use the calendar to shortlist, then confirm with a person. A date on the list has passed all the checks above with the approximations described. It has not been matched to a couple's charts and has not been read by a priest.

• Shortlist dates on the Marriage Muhurat calendar for your city and year.
• Check that the date is not in an Adhika month, Kharmas or Chaturmas for your tradition.
• If your family counts only some padas of Magha, Mula or Revati, confirm those dates.
• Check Holashtak, Panchaka and Ganda Moola on the day page if your family follows them.
• Match the couple's horoscopes separately.
• Ask your priest to confirm the final muhurat time.