Hora Timings

The hora in depth: where the planetary hour comes from and how to read it

The table above gives twenty-four rows: a graha and a clock window for each. This section explains what stands behind those rows. It covers what the classical texts actually say about the hora, the exact arithmetic the engine uses to name and time each one, how to read every field the result can return, real output for real dates, and the places where this calculator stops. It also separates this hourly hora from the Hora D2 divisional chart, which shares the word and nothing else.

One thing to hold on to throughout: a hora is a property of a day at a place. It is the same for everyone standing in that city on that date. Nothing in this calculator reads your birth chart, and nothing in it is a prediction about you.

What the classical texts say about the hora

Two of the texts in this app's source library define the planetary hour in plain words, and they agree on the rule that names each one.

Saravali, Ch. 7 Sl. 1-3, first lists the seven weekday lords in order - the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn - and then says there are 24 horas, which the translation glosses as planetary hours, in each day, counted from one sunrise to the next. The first hora is ruled by the lord of the weekday, and each later one by the lord of the sixth weekday counted from the one before.

The translator's note under Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra (BPHS) Ch. 27 Sl. 13 gives the same rule at more length. Hora, it says, means planetary hour. Each day from sunrise to sunrise is divided into 24 parts; the horas are ruled by the seven grahas from the Sun to Saturn; the first hora of the day belongs to the lord of the weekday; the second to the lord of the sixth weekday counted from the first ruler; the third to the lord of the sixth weekday counted from the second; and so on, until the first hora of the next day is taken over by the lord of that day itself.

That last clause is the interesting one. The rule is self-closing: follow it for twenty-four steps and it hands the twenty-fifth hour to the next weekday's own lord, without anyone having to arrange it. The section on the arithmetic below shows why.

Why the hora lord mattered to the classical authors

Neither text introduces the hora as a daily planner. Both introduce it as a source of strength for a graha in a birth chart. BPHS Ch. 3 Sl. 35-38, listing what makes grahas strong, says that the lords of the year, the month, the day and the hora are each stronger than the last, in ascending order - so the hora lord is the strongest of the four. BPHS Ch. 27 Sl. 13 puts numbers on it inside Kaal Bal, the temporal part of Shad Bala: 15, 30, 45 and 60 Virupas go to the lord of the year, the month, the weekday and the hora respectively. The note adds that whichever graha rules the birth hora gets the Hora Bal.

Saravali says the same in its own way. Ch. 4 Sl. 36 states that the Hora Bala goes to the hora lord, the month's strength to the lord of the month, the day's to the lord of the weekday of birth and the year's to the lord of the year. Ch. 5 Sl. 42 then describes the effect as a doubling ladder: the lord of the month gives two-fold results against the year lord, the week lord two-fold of the month lord, and the hora lord two-fold of the week lord.

So in the classical frame, the planetary hour running at the moment of birth names one graha that receives a full measure of temporal strength. The shorter the time unit, the larger the share - the reverse of what one might guess.

The one passage that points at choosing a time

The use most people have in mind today - picking an hour to begin something - has a single direct basis in this corpus. Saravali Ch. 7 Sl. 5-6 says the good effects of a bhava (a house of the chart) can be better reaped if an enterprise relating to that house is started in an ascendant ruled by the lord of that house, or when that lord is in an Upachaya house, or on the weekday, hora, year or month ruled by that house lord. It then grades the four time units: 25 per cent by the year lord, 50 per cent by the month lord, 75 per cent by the lord of the week and 100 per cent by the hora lord.

Read carefully, this passage says something narrower than the popular version. It does not grade hours as good or bad in general. It ties an hour to a person's own chart: the hora that helps is the one ruled by the lord of the house the undertaking belongs to, and which graha that is depends on your ascendant. The calculator on this page gives the hour-by-hour lords; the step of matching a lord to a house of your own chart is a separate reading and is not done here.

Why the seven lords run in this order

The engine holds the order as a fixed list named for its usual label, the Chaldean order: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon. After the Moon it wraps round to Saturn again. Each hora takes the next name in that list.

The classical texts never print that list. They give the rule quoted above: each next hora goes to the lord of the sixth weekday from the last. The two are the same thing stated two ways, and it is easy to check. Count six weekdays from Sunday, counting Sunday as one, and you land on Friday, whose lord is Venus. In the engine's list, the name after the Sun is Venus. Six weekdays from Friday is Wednesday, Mercury; the name after Venus is Mercury. Six from Wednesday is Monday, the Moon. The pattern holds all the way round.

How the weekdays fall out of the hours

There are seven lords and twenty-four horas. Twenty-four divided by seven leaves a remainder of three, so after a full day the sequence has gone round three whole times and moved three names further on. The first hora of the following day is therefore three places along the list from the first hora of this one.

Start with the Sun on Sunday. Three places on - past Venus and Mercury - is the Moon: Monday. Three more, past Saturn and Jupiter, is Mars: Tuesday. Then Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, and back to the Sun. That is the order of the weekdays, and it is exactly what the BPHS note means when it says the first hora of the next day is taken over by the lord of that day himself. The weekday lords and the hourly lords are one cycle read at two speeds.

The engine's own output confirms it. Run with no place for the week of 11 to 17 October 2026, the first hora, the first night hora and the last hora of each day came back as follows.

The middle column carries a second classical echo. Twelve horas after the start, the sequence has moved twelve places, which is five beyond one full round. Sunday night therefore opens on Jupiter, the lord of Thursday - the fifth weekday counted from Sunday. The translator's notes in BPHS Ch. 3 on the Kaal Velas describe the night portions in just those terms: the first portion of the night goes to the lord of the fifth weekday counted from the day in question.

How the engine times each hora

Naming the lords needs only the weekday. Timing the windows needs three instants: sunrise, sunset and the next day's sunrise. Everything on this page, and on the choghadiya, Rahu Kaal and panchang calculators, is cut from the same three instants in one engine call.

1. 1.The date. If you type one, it is taken as that calendar date at the place you name, and an impossible date such as 31 February is refused, not rolled forward. If you leave it blank, the day is today at that place. The field accepts dates from 1900 to 2100, including future ones.
2. 2.The weekday. It is the weekday of that local calendar date. This sets the first lord: Sunday the Sun, Monday the Moon, Tuesday Mars, Wednesday Mercury, Thursday Jupiter, Friday Venus, Saturday Saturn.
3. 3.The three instants. With a resolved place, sunrise and sunset are computed from the Sun's position for that latitude and longitude, at the standard altitude of 50 arc-minutes below the horizon, for the chosen date and for the next one. The methodology page describes the astronomy and what it has been checked against.
4. 4.The day horas. The interval from sunrise to sunset is divided into twelve equal parts. These are horas 1 to 12.
5. 5.The night horas. The interval from sunset to the next sunrise is divided into twelve equal parts. These are horas 13 to 24.
6. 6.The lords. Hora 1 takes the weekday lord; each later hora takes the next name in the fixed order, straight through from day into night with no restart at sunset.
7. 7.The clock. Each boundary is converted to the local clock of the place, using its real timezone including any daylight-saving shift, and rounded to the minute for display.

Because the daylight and the night are divided separately, a day hora and a night hora are rarely the same length, and neither is usually sixty minutes. Only near an equinox, when day and night are close to equal, do all twenty-four come out near an hour each.

Where the engine and the BPHS note part company

This is a real difference and it should be stated plainly. The translator's note under BPHS Ch. 27 Sl. 13 describes the day from sunrise to sunrise as divided into 24 equal parts of one hour. Saravali Ch. 7 says only that there are 24 horas from one sunrise to the next, without saying how long each is. The engine does something else: twelve equal parts of the daylight, then twelve equal parts of the night. Its rule is recorded in this app's rules document, and it is the same day-and-night split the engine applies to the choghadiya.

Both methods start at the same sunrise and give the same lord to the first hora, so the day's order of names never differs. What differs is where the boundaries fall, and the gap grows as day and night become more unequal. Take New Delhi on 21 June 2026, where the engine puts sunrise at 5:24 AM. On the equal-hour reading, the seventh hora (Mars, that Sunday) would run from 11:24 AM to 12:24 PM. The engine's seventh hora runs from 12:23 PM to 1:33 PM. By early afternoon the two readings are a full hora apart.

The practical consequence: if you compare this table with another almanac or app and the names match but the times drift apart through the day, the likely cause is this choice of division, not an error in either sunrise. The result always tells you which frame it used, so the comparison can be made honestly.

A worked hora table for Mumbai and New Delhi

The example printed higher on this page is the no-place table. The three below were produced by running the same engine function with a place, and every figure is its real output.

Mumbai, Monday 1 January 2024

Sunrise 7:12 AM, sunset 6:12 PM, next sunrise 7:12 AM. The rules document records the unrounded figures for this day: sunrise 07:11:35 and sunset 18:11:54, giving 660.32 minutes of daylight. One twelfth of that is 55.03 minutes, so each day hora lasts about 55 minutes. The night is about 13 hours, and a twelfth of it is 65 minutes.

Monday opens on the Moon. The engine's day horas were: Moon 7:12 to 8:07 AM, Saturn 8:07 to 9:02, Jupiter 9:02 to 9:57, Mars 9:57 to 10:52, Sun 10:52 to 11:47, Venus 11:47 AM to 12:42 PM, Mercury 12:42 to 1:37, Moon 1:37 to 2:32, Saturn 2:32 to 3:27, Jupiter 3:27 to 4:22, Mars 4:22 to 5:17 and Sun 5:17 to 6:12 PM.

The night continues the same sequence with longer slots, from Venus at 6:12 to 7:17 PM through to Jupiter at 6:07 to 7:12 AM. The next name in the order is Mars, and the day that begins at 7:12 AM is Tuesday.

Notice how the hora grid sits against the day's other divisions. Rahu Kaal that Monday was 8:34 to 9:57 AM, one eighth of the daylight. It overlaps the second half of the Saturn hora and the whole of the Jupiter hora. The two systems divide the same daylight by different numbers, so their boundaries only occasionally coincide - here, both happen to end at 9:57 AM.

New Delhi at the two solstices

In June a Delhi day hora is roughly twenty minutes longer than a night hora; in December the relation is reversed. A table that assumed sixty-minute horas from 6:00 AM would be wrong at both ends of the year, and wrong in opposite directions. The June table also shows minute rounding at work: consecutive day horas print as 70, 70 and 69 minutes long, because each boundary is rounded to the nearest minute independently. The underlying slots are exactly equal.

Reading the hora result, field by field

• The date label. The weekday and date the table was built for. Check it first: the whole sequence hangs on the weekday, and a table read under the wrong day name is wrong in every row.
• The twenty-four rows. Each has a graha and a window. Rows 1 to 12 are the daylight, rows 13 to 24 the night. Row 1 is always the weekday's own lord.
• The basis. Either true local sunrise and sunset, or a fixed 06:00 to 18:00 clock day. This is the single most important line after the rows themselves.
• Sunrise, sunset and next sunrise. Printed only when the basis is true sunrise. On the fixed clock they are left empty on purpose: 06:00 is not a sunrise and is not presented as one.
• The place and the clock. The place the Sun was computed for, and the timezone the times are printed in.
• The fallback, when there is one. A short code and a sentence saying why the fixed clock was used.

The hora day is not the calendar day

A hora day runs from sunrise to the next sunrise, as both Saravali and the BPHS note say. So the last several rows of any table fall after midnight on the clock while still belonging to the day you asked about. In the Mumbai example, the Sun hora from 12:42 to 1:47 AM is part of Monday's sequence even though the calendar already reads Tuesday. If you want the hora for 2 AM on a given calendar date, look at the table for the date before it.

The three reasons a table falls back to the fixed clock

The third case is rare but real. Asked for Tromso in northern Norway on 21 June 2026, the engine found no sunrise or sunset - the Sun stays up - and returned a fixed table on the Europe/Oslo clock, Sun 6:00 to 7:00 AM through Mercury 5:00 to 6:00 AM, with the reason stated. The app does not invent a sunrise where there is none.

On the fixed clock the order of the lords is still correct for the weekday. Only the times are approximate. As the Delhi figures show, a fixed-clock row can be more than an hour away from the sunrise-based row with the same number, so a no-place table is best read as the day's sequence of lords, not as a schedule.

What each hora lord stands for in the texts

A hora takes its character from its graha. The table below reports what the classical texts say about each of the seven - its benefic or malefic class from BPHS Ch. 3 Sl. 11, the half of the day in which BPHS Ch. 3 Sl. 35-38 calls it strong, and a selection of the things Saravali Ch. 7 Sl. 7-13 says it rules. Each graha also has its own longer page: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn.

Three cautions go with this table. First, the classes describe grahas in a birth chart; the texts in this corpus do not themselves grade a clock hour as benefic or malefic. The engine follows them in this: unlike a choghadiya row, a hora row carries no quality label at all - only a name and a window. Second, the Moon and Mercury are conditional in BPHS. Whether the Moon counts as benefic depends on whether it is waxing or waning, and that changes through the month while the hora table does not. Third, the day and night column is BPHS describing a graha's own strength, not a rule that a Saturn hora is better after sunset; the text does not say that, and neither does this page.

What a hora table leaves out

The limits shown higher on this page are the short version. These are the ones that follow from the mechanism itself.

• It is not personal. No birth detail goes in, so nothing about you comes out. Two people with opposite charts get the identical table for the same city and date.
• It ranks nothing. The engine attaches no score or grade to a hora. Any judgement that one row is better than another is a reading placed on top of the table, not something the calculator computed.
• It ignores the rest of the day's panchang. The tithi, the Moon's nakshatra and the Moon's phase do not enter the hora at all. A Jupiter hora on one day and a Jupiter hora on another are, to this calculator, the same thing.
• It ignores where the grahas actually are. The Venus hora does not know whether Venus is strong, weak, retrograde or combust in the sky that day. The sequence is a calendar cycle, not an observation.
• It does not compute your birth hora strength. The classical use - Hora Bal for the graha ruling the hour of birth - is not derived here.
• Its boundaries are sharp on the page and soft in practice. Times are rounded to the minute, and a place a few kilometres away has a sunrise a few seconds different. A decision that turns on the last minute of a hora is leaning on precision the table does not have.

How sensitive is it to the time and place you enter?

There is no birth time here, so the usual birth-time question does not arise. The sensitive inputs are the place and the date. The place matters because every boundary is measured from its sunrise: the same date gives 7:12 AM in Mumbai and, in December, 7:09 AM in New Delhi, with different day lengths behind them. The further you are from the place you typed, the further every row shifts.

The date matters in a less obvious way, through the sunrise-to-sunrise day. Between midnight and sunrise you are still in the previous day's sequence. Anyone reading the hora for an early-morning event - a flight, a birth, a pre-dawn start - should take the table for the day before and read its last rows.

If you came here wanting the hora lord for your own birth, the same care applies with more force. A day hora lasts between roughly fifty and seventy minutes at Indian latitudes, so a birth time that is uncertain by half an hour can fall on either side of a boundary. The article on what an unknown birth time costs explains which parts of a chart survive that uncertainty and which do not.

How the hora connects to the rest of this app

Hora and choghadiya are one cycle at two resolutions

The choghadiya calculator cuts the same daylight into eight parts where the hora cuts it into twelve. Its seven names each belong to a graha, and the rules document records that the daytime names run in hora order from the weekday's own lord: Udveg for the Sun, Chal for Venus, Labh for Mercury, Amrit for the Moon, Kaal for Saturn, Shubh for Jupiter, Rog for Mars. So on any day, the first choghadiya and the first hora name the same graha. On the Monday in Mumbai, the day opened with Amrit, the Moon's choghadiya, alongside the Moon's hora.

The night shows the same kinship. The night choghadiya opens on the lord of the fifth weekday from the current one, which is also where the thirteenth hora lands. Sunday night opens on Shubh, Jupiter's name, and the engine's Sunday table puts Jupiter in the thirteenth hora. The difference between the two calculators is that the choghadiya grades its slots - excellent, good, neutral or avoid - while the hora does not.

Rahu Kaal, the panchang and the muhurat finder

Rahu Kaal is one eighth of the daylight, chosen by weekday, and it is cut from the same sunrise and sunset as the horas. It will usually straddle two horas, as it did in the Mumbai example. The panchang calculator returns the full hora list together with the tithi, the Moon's phase, the choghadiya and Rahu Kaal for a date, so it is the place to go when you want the whole day on one page.

The muhurat finder works differently, and it is worth being exact about how. It scores windows against your own chart using the Moon's nakshatra, the house the Moon transits, the tithi and paksha, the weekday, an overlap with Rahu Kaal and your personal day number. The hora lord of the window is not one of its inputs. A window it ranks highly may fall in any hora. If the hora matters to you, read this table next to its result; the muhurat feature page describes the scoring in full.

The weekday lord in the daily and weekly plans

Inside a signed-in account, the weekly plan and the practice suggestions both need to know which graha rules a given day. They do not keep a second weekday table. They read the first row of that day's hora sequence, which is the weekday lord by construction. Because those plans know your birth place but not where you will be each day, they use the disclosed fixed clock for the windows. The daily guidance and timing features are where that surfaces.

Shad Bala, and what is not built

Since the texts treat the hora chiefly as a source of strength, a reader might expect the Shad Bala calculator to include it. It does not. That calculator's temporal component is built from two things only: whether the birth was by day or by night, and the Moon's fortnight. The Varsh, Maas, Dina and Hora Bal of BPHS Ch. 27 Sl. 13 are not part of its total. The year and month lords in that verse depend on a day-count from an epoch the note itself takes from another work, and the app does not compute it. This page states that openly so nobody reads a strength figure as containing a term it lacks.

The other hora: D2

The word hora has a second classical meaning: half of a zodiac sign, fifteen degrees. Dividing every sign in two produces the Hora chart, D2, which BPHS treats among the divisional charts and which this app computes in the Hora D2 calculator. That one needs a birth date, time and place, and it places your grahas in the Sun's or the Moon's half of each sign. It has no connection to the clock. If you arrived looking for the wealth chart, that is the page you want.

Questions people ask about the hora

Why is my hora not sixty minutes long?

Because, with a place, the engine divides the daylight into twelve parts and the night into twelve parts separately. Unless day and night are equal, the two kinds of hora differ. In New Delhi on 21 June 2026 a day hora came out at about 70 minutes and a night hora at about 50; on 21 December 2026 the figures were about 52 and 68. Exactly sixty minutes appears only on the fixed-clock table, which is used when no sunrise is available.

Another app shows the same lords but different times. Which is right?

If the names agree and the times drift apart through the day, the two are probably dividing the day differently. The translator's note in BPHS Ch. 27 describes 24 equal hours from sunrise to sunrise; this engine uses twelve parts of the daylight and twelve of the night. Both start at the same sunrise with the same lord. Check also that both are using the same place, and that neither is on a fixed 6 AM clock - this app's result states its basis so you can tell.

Which hora am I in at 2 AM?

The one near the end of the previous day's table. A hora day runs from sunrise to the next sunrise, so the hours after midnight still belong to the day that began at the last sunrise. Ask for yesterday's date and read the rows after midnight.

Does the first hora always belong to the weekday's planet?

Yes. That is the rule in both Saravali Ch. 7 and the BPHS Ch. 27 note, and it is how the engine starts the sequence. The connection also runs the other way: because 24 horas leave a remainder of three when divided among seven lords, the lord of each day's first hora is three places on from the previous day's, which produces the order of the weekdays.

Is a Saturn or Mars hora a bad time?

This calculator does not say so, and neither do the texts it draws on. BPHS Ch. 3 classes Saturn, Mars and the Sun as malefic grahas, but that describes their role in a birth chart. No text in this corpus grades clock hours by their lord, and the engine attaches no quality to a hora row. The one passage that links a hora to an undertaking, Saravali Ch. 7 Sl. 5-6, ties it to the lord of the relevant house in your own chart - which for some ascendants is Saturn or Mars.

Do I need to enter a place?

For the order of the lords, no. For usable clock times, yes. Without a place there is no sunrise to count from, so the table uses a fixed 06:00 to 18:00 IST day with sixty-minute horas and says so. At Indian latitudes a real sunrise can sit more than an hour from 6:00 AM and a real hora can be ten or more minutes away from sixty, so the no-place rows drift from the true ones as the day goes on.

Does this tell me the hora lord of my birth?

It can show you the table for your birth date and birth place, and you can find the row containing your birth time - remembering to use the previous date for a birth between midnight and sunrise. Two cautions: a birth time uncertain by half an hour may sit across a boundary, and the app does not go on to compute the Hora Bal that BPHS Ch. 27 awards to that graha.

Is this the same as the Hora chart?

No. The Hora chart, D2, is a divisional chart built by halving each zodiac sign, and it needs full birth details. This page is about the planetary hour of a day. The Hora D2 calculator is the other one.