Accuracy first — every position comes from DE440, NASA JPL's most precise planetary ephemeris.
Accuracy first — every position comes from DE440, NASA JPL's most precise planetary ephemeris.
Rahu Kaal is a window of roughly an hour and a half each day that tradition sets aside for not starting anything new. It moves with the weekday, and with your city's sunrise and sunset — so it is worth looking up rather than remembering.
Calculating…
Rahu Kaal is one eighth of the daylight, so its length and its position both follow your sunrise and sunset. Two cities a few hundred kilometres apart can differ by half an hour, and the same city shifts through the year as the days lengthen and shorten. A page that prints one fixed time for each weekday is quoting a single city on a single day. That is why this one asks where you are.
The tradition is about beginnings, not about the clock. A journey begins when you leave, a purchase when you pay, an agreement when it is signed. Work already under way is not held to have started in this window, so there is no need to stop what you are doing at the hour it opens — and nothing here is thought to reach back and spoil something begun earlier.
The same eight parts of daylight also carry Yamaganda and Gulika Kaal, and the weekday gives each of them a different part — so the three never overlap, and a day has three windows to keep clear rather than one. Among them sits Abhijit, the short auspicious muhurat around midday, which is the one period of the day looked for rather than avoided.
Not your birth chart. Rahu Kaal is the same window for everyone in a city on a given day, which is what makes it easy to look up and also what limits it: it says nothing about whether a day suits you personally. That is a different question, answered by counting from your birth star. How closely it is kept varies too — the practice is followed most carefully in South India and treated more loosely elsewhere.
Two different kinds of statement sit on this page. The timing is arithmetic: the daylight between your sunrise and sunset, cut into eight equal parts, with the weekday choosing one. Any source working from the same sunrise lands on the same minutes, which is why a disagreement is almost always a different city rather than a different tradition. That the window is inauspicious is the tradition's reading of it — held for a very long time and by a great many people, and still a reading rather than a measurement. The page gives you the first exactly; the second is yours to weigh.
19 September 2026 · Saturday
09:11 – 10:4309:11 am – 10:43 am
1h 32mPart 3 of 8
| Day | Rahu Kaal |
|---|---|
20 September 2026 · Sunday | 16:48 – 18:2004:48 pm – 06:20 pm1h 32m |
21 September 2026 · Monday | 07:40 – 09:1107:40 am – 09:11 am1h 31m |
22 September 2026 · Tuesday | 15:15 – 16:4603:15 pm – 04:46 pm1h 31m |
23 September 2026 · Wednesday | 12:13 – 13:4412:13 pm – 01:44 pm1h 31m |
24 September 2026 · Thursday | 13:43 – 15:1401:43 pm – 03:14 pm1h 31m |
25 September 2026 · Friday | 10:42 – 12:1210:42 am – 12:12 pm1h 30m |
26 September 2026 · Saturday | 09:11 – 10:4209:11 am – 10:42 am1h 30m |
Rahu never takes the first part, so the time just after sunrise is always free of Rahu Kaal — though not necessarily of Yamaganda or Gulika, which do fall there on some weekdays.