Rahu kaal today — the hour to start nothing new

Sunrise05:41 amSunset07:13 pmToday’s slot6th eighth

Each row is computed separately, from that day’s own sunrise and sunset in Delhi. The slot column is which eighth of the daylight the window falls in — the part that is fixed by the weekday and never changes.

Take the time between sunrise and sunset and cut it into eight equal parts. One of those eight is Rahu Kaal, and which one depends only on the weekday: Sunday the 8th, Monday the 2nd, Tuesday the 7th, Wednesday the 5th, Thursday the 6th, Friday the 4th, Saturday the 3rd. The first eighth after sunrise is never Rahu Kaal on any day of the week.

That is the entire calculation. It is why the window is roughly ninety minutes in Delhi and not exactly ninety anywhere — a Delhi June gives about a hundred and two minutes, a Delhi December about eighty. Any site quoting a flat “90 minutes” is quoting the average of a twelve-hour day nobody actually has.

Rahu Kaal is a custom about beginnings. The tradition holds it back for starting something — a journey, a purchase, a signature, a first meeting. It says nothing about work already under way, and there is no rule anywhere requiring you to stop what you are doing, cancel a train, or sit still for ninety minutes.

It is also not a prediction. Nothing on this page forecasts that something bad will happen to you between those two times, and any page that tells you so has left the tradition behind and gone into scaring you. Plenty of people observe it for important beginnings and ignore it for ordinary ones, and that is a completely normal way to hold it.

One practical note: in South India the same window is usually called Rahu Kalam, and it is computed identically.

Two more eighths of the same daylight, each fixed to the weekday the same way, each traditionally held back for a narrower kind of beginning. They are computed for Delhi today.

• 05:41 amto07:22 am

  Yamaganda Kaal

  Avoided for travel and for anything to do with health.

• 09:04 amto10:45 am

  Gulika Kaal

  Avoided for lending, borrowing and long-term commitments.

• Aaj ka choghadiyaEight good and bad hours
• Aaj ki tithiThe lunar day, and when it turns
• Full panchangAll five limbs, 40 cities

The slot is the same everywhere on a given weekday; the clock times are not, because they are a fraction of your own daylight. Chennai’s Rahu Kaal opens and closes earlier than Ahmedabad’s on the same Tuesday.

• Agra
• Ahmedabad
• Amritsar
• Bengaluru
• Bhopal
• Bhubaneswar
• Chandigarh
• Chennai
• Coimbatore
• Dehradun
• Delhi
• Guwahati
• Haridwar
• Hyderabad
• Indore
• Jaipur
• Jammu
• Jodhpur
• Kanpur
• Kochi
• Kolkata
• Lucknow
• Ludhiana
• Madurai
• Mumbai
• Nagpur
• Patna
• Prayagraj
• Pune
• Raipur
• Ranchi
• Srinagar
• Surat
• Thiruvananthapuram
• Tirupati
• Udaipur
• Ujjain
• Varanasi
• Vijayawada
• Visakhapatnam

How this page is worked out

Sunrise and sunset are computed by our own calculation engine for Delhi’s own coordinates (28.6139°N, 77.2090°E), using the disc-centre-with-refraction convention Indian panchangs use. Rahu Kaal, Yamaganda and Gulika are exact eighths of the real interval between them, taken at the slot the weekday fixes. Each of the seven rows above is a separate computation for that day’s own sunrise, not today’s repeated. All times are Indian Standard Time.