Vargottama planets: how often they occur and how to find yours
A planet is vargottama when it holds the same sign in the birth chart and the Navamsa. This page derives the exact degree bands from the engine, measures how often each planet and the ascendant land in them across 200,000 sampled births, and sets out how to read the result and where it stops.
What vargottama is
The Navamsa, written D9, divides every 30-degree sign of the birth chart into nine arcs of 3 degrees 20 minutes and assigns each arc to a sign by a fixed rule: a movable sign starts its count from itself, a fixed sign from the ninth sign after itself, a dual sign from the fifth. The Navamsa page sets out the construction and its classical sources in full. A planet whose Navamsa sign is the same as its birth-chart sign is called vargottama, from varga (division) and uttama (best). The tradition reads the repetition as a strengthening: the planet shows the same face in the deeper chart as in the surface chart, so what it promises in the birth chart it also holds at the finer resolution. Classical commentators place that strength at the grade of own-sign placement, which is why a vargottama planet in a neutral sign is read as though it were at home.
Because the Navamsa rule is fixed, vargottama is a matter of arithmetic. For any sign there is exactly one of the nine arcs that maps back onto the sign itself, and a planet is vargottama if and only if its degree falls inside that arc. The rest of this page does three things with that fact: derives the arcs from the engine so they can be trusted, measures how often real-world planetary motion lands inside them, and sets out how to read the result and where it stops.
The degree bands, derived from the engine
The bands below come from the engine. The generating script walks every sign from 0 to 30 degrees in steps of a hundredth of a degree, passes each position through the engine's divisional-sign function with a divisor of nine, and records the arc where the returned Navamsa sign equals the parent sign. The result matches the classical statement (first Navamsa of movable signs, fifth of fixed, ninth of dual) and the match is the check: if the engine's Navamsa rule were wrong, the bands would have come out somewhere else.
| Sign | Type | Navamsa that returns to the sign | Vargottama band (degrees within the sign) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aries | Movable | 1st | 0°00' to 3°20' |
| Taurus | Fixed | 5th | 13°20' to 16°40' |
| Gemini | Dual | 9th | 26°40' to 30°00' |
| Cancer | Movable | 1st | 0°00' to 3°20' |
| Leo | Fixed | 5th | 13°20' to 16°40' |
| Virgo | Dual | 9th | 26°40' to 30°00' |
| Libra | Movable | 1st | 0°00' to 3°20' |
| Scorpio | Fixed | 5th | 13°20' to 16°40' |
| Sagittarius | Dual | 9th | 26°40' to 30°00' |
| Capricorn | Movable | 1st | 0°00' to 3°20' |
| Aquarius | Fixed | 5th | 13°20' to 16°40' |
| Pisces | Dual | 9th | 26°40' to 30°00' |
The lower bound of each band is included and the upper bound belongs to the next arc, so a planet at exactly Aries 3 degrees 20 minutes 00 seconds is in the second Navamsa (Taurus) and is not vargottama. Three patterns in the table are worth noticing. The movable band sits at the very start of the sign, where a planet has just changed sign. The dual band sits at the very end, where a planet is about to change sign. Only the fixed band sits in the body of the sign. This has a practical consequence for the ascendant and the Moon, covered under limits: a vargottama ascendant in a movable or dual sign is always a few minutes of birth time away from a different sign altogether.
How often it happens: 200,000 sampled births
If planetary positions were spread evenly across every sign, each body would be vargottama one ninth of the time, 11.11 percent. Real planets do not move evenly. They speed up and slow down, the five from Mars to Saturn stop and run backwards for weeks or months each cycle, and a birth cohort born in a particular span of decades samples only part of the slow planets' orbits. To measure how far the real shares sit from one ninth, the script generates synthetic birth moments and casts each one.
The method, stated so it can be repeated. Dates are drawn uniformly from 1 January 1950 to 31 December 2010, with a random clock time on each date, and the chart is cast for Delhi (28.6139 N, 77.2090 E) in Indian Standard Time so that an ascendant can be computed. Positions come from the Swiss Ephemeris with the True Pushya Paksha ayanamsa; Rahu is the mean lunar node and Ketu sits opposite it. Each body's sidereal longitude is tested against the band table above. The sample is 200,000 moments with a fixed random seed, which puts the sampling error on each share near 0.07 percentage points; a 24,000-moment run with a different seed gave the same picture. The engine's own time-share check, a day-by-day scan of the ephemeris described in the next section, agrees with the sample to within two tenths of a point for every body, which is the cross-check that the random draw is doing what it should.
| Body | Vargottama charts (of 200,000) | Share | Uniform expectation | Difference (points) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sun | 22,271 | 11.14% | 11.11% | +0.03 |
| Moon | 22,358 | 11.18% | 11.11% | +0.07 |
| Mars | 20,836 | 10.42% | 11.11% | −0.69 |
| Mercury | 22,424 | 11.21% | 11.11% | +0.10 |
| Jupiter | 20,644 | 10.32% | 11.11% | −0.79 |
| Venus | 21,944 | 10.97% | 11.11% | −0.14 |
| Saturn | 21,774 | 10.89% | 11.11% | −0.22 |
| Rahu (mean node) | 21,822 | 10.91% | 11.11% | −0.20 |
| Ketu | 21,822 | 10.91% | 11.11% | −0.20 |
| Ascendant | 22,186 | 11.09% | 11.11% | −0.02 |
Rahu and Ketu share a row for a structural reason. The two nodes are always 180 degrees apart, opposite signs always share a modality (Aries and Libra are both movable, Taurus and Scorpio both fixed, and so on), and the two nodes sit at the same degree within their respective signs. So Rahu is in its band exactly when Ketu is in its band. Any chart with a vargottama Rahu has a vargottama Ketu.
The second table counts, for each chart, how many of the seven classical planets are vargottama, and sets the result beside the simplest model, in which each planet is an independent one-in-nine draw.
| Vargottama planets in the chart (of 7) | Charts | Share | Independent one-in-nine model |
|---|---|---|---|
| None | 89,864 | 44.93% | 43.85% |
| One | 75,767 | 37.88% | 38.37% |
| Two | 27,402 | 13.70% | 14.39% |
| Three or more | 6,967 | 3.48% | 3.40% |
Roughly 45 charts in 100 have no vargottama planet among the seven, 38 have one, 14 have two and between 3 and 4 have three or more. The sample sits slightly above the independent model at both ends and slightly below it in the middle, which is the signature of mild clustering: Mercury and Venus travel close to the Sun, and the slow planets' deficits pull the middle counts down. None of this changes the practical reading. A chart with one vargottama planet is ordinary. A chart with three is unusual, about one in thirty, and a chart with four or more is rarer still.
Why the slow planets sit below one ninth
Three things decide whether a body's share lands on one ninth. The first is speed variation inside a sign: a planet moving slowly through the band spends more time there than a planet moving quickly through it. The second is retrograde motion: Mars, Jupiter and Saturn stop, reverse and stop again once each cycle, and dwell for weeks around the stations, so the stretch of zodiac where a station falls is over-weighted in any birth cohort. The third is sampling of a long period: a 61-year window holds about 32 Mars cycles, five Jupiter cycles and two Saturn cycles, and the stations drift from one cycle to the next, so inside any finite window some ninths of the zodiac have hosted a station more often than others. The Sun has no stations, and the Moon runs round the zodiac about 800 times in 61 years, so both average out.
The script checks this directly. It scans the ephemeris day by day at noon UT and counts the share of days each body spends inside a vargottama band, for the 1950 to 2010 window the births were drawn from and for a longer 1900 to 2020 window.
| Body | Days in band, 1950 to 2010 | Days in band, 1900 to 2020 | Monte Carlo share, 1950 to 2010 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sun | 11.10% | 11.12% | 11.14% |
| Moon | 11.15% | 11.12% | 11.18% |
| Mars | 10.44% | 11.17% | 10.42% |
| Mercury | 11.04% | 11.07% | 11.21% |
| Jupiter | 10.30% | 11.21% | 10.32% |
| Venus | 10.95% | 11.04% | 10.97% |
| Saturn | 10.96% | 11.08% | 10.89% |
| Rahu and Ketu | 11.02% | 11.11% | 10.91% |
The deficits for Mars and Jupiter in 1950 to 2010 are real for people born in those years, and they vanish when the window is widened: Mars goes from 10.44 to 11.17 percent and Jupiter from 10.30 to 11.21 percent. The lesson is that the shares in the first table describe a birth cohort. Someone compiling the same table for births between 1980 and 2040 would get different deficits, on different planets. The uniform figure of one ninth is the right long-run expectation; the departures from it are the fingerprint of the decades sampled.
How to check your own chart
The check needs one thing per planet: its degree within its sign, from a sidereal chart that names its ayanamsa. The sign alone is not enough.
- Write down each planet's sign and its degree and minute within the sign, plus the same for the ascendant. If the chart shows seconds, round to the minute; the bands are wide enough that seconds rarely matter.
- Classify the sign. Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn are movable. Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius are fixed. Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces are dual.
- Movable sign: the planet is vargottama if its degree is below 3 degrees 20 minutes.
- Fixed sign: the planet is vargottama if its degree is 13 degrees 20 minutes or more and below 16 degrees 40 minutes.
- Dual sign: the planet is vargottama if its degree is 26 degrees 40 minutes or more.
- Note the grade. If the sign is the planet's exaltation sign, it is an exalted vargottama; if the planet rules the sign, an own-sign vargottama; if the sign is its debilitation sign, a debilitated vargottama. Otherwise it is a plain vargottama in a friend's, neutral's or enemy's sign.
A worked check on a public chart. The India independence chart (15 August 1947, 00:00 IST, New Delhi, cast with the same engine) has Sun at Cancer 29 degrees 07 minutes, Moon Cancer 5 degrees 07 minutes, Mars Gemini 8 degrees 35 minutes, Mercury Cancer 14 degrees 48 minutes, Jupiter Libra 27 degrees 01 minutes, Venus Cancer 23 degrees 41 minutes, Saturn Cancer 21 degrees 36 minutes and an ascendant of Taurus 8 degrees 52 minutes. Cancer and Libra are movable, so the band is the first 3 degrees 20 minutes: only the Moon is anywhere near it and at 5 degrees 07 minutes it is in the second Navamsa, Leo. Gemini is dual, so Mars would need to be past 26 degrees 40 minutes; it is at 8 degrees 35 minutes. Taurus is fixed, so the ascendant would need to sit between 13 degrees 20 minutes and 16 degrees 40 minutes; it is at 8 degrees 52 minutes. No vargottama body on that chart, which puts it with the 45 percent of charts in the sample that have none. For a positive case, a planet at Leo 14 degrees 50 minutes is in the fifth Navamsa of a fixed sign, which is Leo again: vargottama. A Venus at Pisces 27 degrees is in the last ninth of a dual sign and is also at Venus's deepest exaltation degree, which makes it the one planet whose classical peak and vargottama band coincide.
What the tradition reads into it
The classical reading has two parts. The first is strength: a vargottama planet is treated as holding own-sign grade dignity for the purpose of judging what it can deliver, which is why the formal strength scores that read a planet across many divisions, such as the Vimshopaka bala score, reward a planet whose birth-chart sign and Navamsa sign agree. The second is consistency between the outer life and the inner. The birth chart is read as the surface of a life, what happens and is seen to happen; the Navamsa is read as the layer beneath it, the quality of what happens and how the person holds it. When the two charts put a planet in the same sign, the tradition expects that planet's affairs to look from the outside much as they feel from the inside: a vargottama Venus whose marriage looks steady is expected to feel steady, a vargottama Saturn whose work looks laborious is expected to feel laborious. The Navamsa layer page develops that two-layer reading at length.
The grade of the sign matters as much as the repetition. An exalted vargottama (Sun in the first ninth of Aries, Moon in the middle ninth of Taurus, Mars in the first ninth of Capricorn, Mercury in the last ninth of Virgo, Jupiter in the first ninth of Cancer, Venus in the last ninth of Pisces, Saturn in the first ninth of Libra) doubles an already favourable placement and is the strongest of the three cases. An own-sign vargottama (the Sun in the middle of Leo, the Moon at the start of Cancer, Mars at the start of Aries or the middle of Scorpio, and so on) is read as strength with stability. A debilitated vargottama (Sun at the start of Libra, Moon in the middle of Scorpio, Mars at the start of Cancer, Mercury at the end of Pisces, Jupiter at the start of Capricorn, Venus at the end of Virgo, Saturn at the start of Aries) is the contested case. One school holds that any vargottama is a strengthening and that a debilitated planet so placed delivers its difficult register reliably, without the swings a merely debilitated planet shows. The stricter school holds that repeating a weak sign repeats the weakness. Tempora's reading sits with the second while keeping the first's point about predictability: the planet is consistent, and what it is consistent about is the debilitated register, so any real recovery has to come from the cancellation conditions set out on the neecha bhanga page, which look at the lord of the debilitation sign and at the planet that is exalted there.
For readers coming to this from the career or marriage pages, the practical use is as a filter. Before reading the D10 for career or the D9 for partnership, note which planets are vargottama. Those planets' significations are the ones expected to behave the same way across the divisions; the others may promise one thing on the surface and deliver something else in the deeper chart, and that gap is where most of the interpretive work lies.
Limits
One measure among several. Vargottama is a single yes-or-no reading of two charts. Shadbala adds positional, directional, temporal, motional, natural and aspect strength; Vimshopaka bala grades dignity across sixteen divisions with weights; Ashtakavarga counts benefic support sign by sign. A vargottama planet in an enemy's sign can score poorly on all three. Houses and aspects are not part of the test at all: a vargottama Mars in the 8th house under Saturn's aspect is still in the 8th house under Saturn's aspect.
Birth time, for the ascendant and the Moon. The ascendant moves about a degree every four minutes on average, so a 3 degree 20 minute band spans roughly 13 minutes of birth time, more or less depending on the sign and the latitude. A birth time recorded to the nearest quarter hour cannot settle whether the ascendant is vargottama. Because the movable and dual bands sit at the very start and very end of their signs, a vargottama ascendant in those signs is also only minutes away from a different ascendant sign altogether, which changes the whole chart. The Moon moves about half a degree an hour, so an hour's error moves it half a degree and can carry it across a band edge. The other planets move a few arc-minutes a day or less, so for them the recorded date is enough.
The ayanamsa. Sidereal degrees depend on the ayanamsa, the offset that anchors the zodiac to the stars. This site computes with True Pushya Paksha; most published charts use Lahiri, and at present the two differ by about 1.13 degrees (computed by the engine against the Swiss Ephemeris Lahiri value). A planet standing closer than 1.13 degrees to a band edge is therefore vargottama under one ayanamsa and not the other. For positions spread evenly that is about one planet in thirteen, so a Lahiri-based listing will disagree with this page on roughly that share of planets, and both will be internally consistent. The Saturn transit page sets out why the two anchors differ and why neither is an error.
Mean node. Rahu here is the mean lunar node. Software that uses the true node places Rahu up to about 1.7 degrees away, which can move a node across a band edge. The nodes also rule no signs, so the exalted, own-sign and debilitated grades above do not apply to them in the same way; traditions differ on their exaltation signs.
No outcome test yet. The frequencies on this page are facts about planetary motion and the Navamsa rule. They say nothing about whether vargottama planets deliver more, or more consistently, in dated life events, because Tempora has not yet run that comparison against an outcome set. The classical reading is reported as the classical reading. When a tested result exists it will be published with its base rate and its failure condition, as every scored claim on this site is.
Reading it on your own chart
The table at the top of this page is enough to run the check by hand once you have the degrees. The degrees are the part that needs an engine. Kaal Imprint draws your chart for free from your date, time and place of birth, on the same Swiss Ephemeris and True Pushya Paksha calculation this page uses, lists every planet's sign and degree, and then answers a question you ask against the chart and your current planetary period. The strength layers described here, vargottama among them, sit underneath that answer, and the marriage timing and compatibility pages show how the Navamsa is then read for specific questions.
Frequently asked questions
What does vargottama mean?
A planet is vargottama when it occupies the same sign in the birth chart (D1) and in the Navamsa (D9), the chart that divides every sign into nine parts of 3 degrees 20 minutes. The word means best of the divisions. Because the Navamsa is built by a fixed rule, vargottama happens only in one specific ninth of each sign: the first ninth of a movable sign, the fifth ninth of a fixed sign and the last ninth of a dual sign. Classical commentators read a vargottama planet as carrying strength of the own-sign grade and as acting consistently across the life, because what the surface chart shows is repeated in the deeper chart.
Which degrees make a planet vargottama?
Movable signs (Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn): 0 degrees 0 minutes to 3 degrees 20 minutes. Fixed signs (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius): 13 degrees 20 minutes to 16 degrees 40 minutes. Dual signs (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, Pisces): 26 degrees 40 minutes to 30 degrees. These bands were derived by scanning every degree of every sign through the engine's Navamsa rule and recording where the D9 sign equals the D1 sign; they match the classical statement that the first, fifth and ninth Navamsa return to the parent sign for movable, fixed and dual signs respectively.
How common is a vargottama planet?
Each band is one ninth of a sign, so if positions were spread evenly a planet would be vargottama in about 11.1 percent of charts. In a sample of 200,000 synthetic birth moments spread uniformly over 1950 to 2010 at Delhi, computed with the Swiss Ephemeris and the True Pushya Paksha ayanamsa, the shares were Sun 11.14 percent, Moon 11.18, Mercury 11.21, Venus 10.97, Saturn 10.89, Mars 10.42, Jupiter 10.32, Rahu and Ketu 10.91 each and the ascendant 11.09. About 45 percent of charts had no vargottama planet among the seven classical planets, 38 percent had one, 14 percent had two and 3.5 percent had three or more.
Why are Mars and Jupiter vargottama less often than one ninth?
Because a 61-year birth window does not sample their orbits evenly. Each planet spends extra time around its retrograde stations, and the stations fall at particular longitudes that drift slowly from year to year, so within any finite window some ninths of the zodiac are over-visited and others under-visited. A day-by-day scan of the ephemeris confirms this: Mars sits in a vargottama band on 10.44 percent of days between 1950 and 2010 and on 11.17 percent of days between 1900 and 2020; Jupiter on 10.30 percent and 11.21 percent. The deviation belongs to the window. The Sun never retrogrades and the Moon circles the zodiac about 800 times in 61 years, so both sit close to one ninth.
Is a debilitated vargottama planet strong or weak?
It is debilitated in both the birth chart and the Navamsa, which is the opposite of the exalted case. One school reads any vargottama as a strengthening and expects the planet to express its debilitated register reliably and without surprises; the stricter reading is that repetition of a weak sign repeats the weakness, and that any recovery has to come from the debilitation-cancellation rules known as neecha bhanga, which look at the lord of the debilitation sign and the planet exalted there. Tempora reads it as consistency of the weak register: the planet is predictable in its difficulty. Exalted vargottama, for example Venus in the last ninth of Pisces, is the strongest of the three grades; own-sign vargottama sits between the two.
How do I check whether my own planets are vargottama?
Take each planet's exact degree within its sign from a sidereal chart that names its ayanamsa. If the sign is movable and the degree is under 3 degrees 20 minutes, if the sign is fixed and the degree is between 13 degrees 20 minutes and 16 degrees 40 minutes, or if the sign is dual and the degree is at or above 26 degrees 40 minutes, the planet is vargottama. The ascendant follows the same bands but moves about a degree every four minutes, so a 3 degree 20 minute band spans roughly 13 minutes of birth time. Kaal Imprint draws your chart for free from your date, time and place of birth, on the same Swiss Ephemeris and True Pushya Paksha calculation this page uses, and lists each planet's degree so the check takes a minute.
Read next
This page is a computed reference on vargottama placement in Parashari Vedic astrology. The degree bands were derived from the site's divisional-chart engine; the frequencies come from 200,000 synthetic birth moments spread uniformly over 1950 to 2010 at Delhi, cast with the Swiss Ephemeris and the True Pushya Paksha ayanamsa, and from a day-by-day ephemeris scan over 1950 to 2010 and 1900 to 2020. Classical readings are reported from Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra (chapters 6 and 7, Santhanam translation) and the commentarial tradition and have not been tested against a dated outcome set. The page does not constitute financial, medical, legal or personal advice. First published 7 November 2026 by Tempora Research.