01What is a vivah muhurat?
A vivah muhurat is an elected time, not a predicted one. Muhurta (classical electional Jyotish) is the branch that asks the opposite question from a birth chart: given that a thing is going to be done, when should it begin? For a marriage the texts read the day through the panchang, the five limbs of the Hindu calendar, and treat three of them as decisive: the nakshatra the Moon stands in, the tithi, and the vara or weekday. A day that satisfies all three is a vivah muhurat; the ceremony is then placed inside one of its clean hours. The wedding is the most carefully elected of all muhurats in the tradition, which is why it has more exclusions attached to it than any other occasion on this site: the seasonal blackouts around Guru and Shukra asta, the Chaturmas months, and the malefic yogas all bear on it. Everything this page describes is the classical rule, attributed as such.
02Which nakshatras are auspicious for marriage?
Eleven of the twenty-seven nakshatras are named for vivah in the muhurta literature, and this finder uses exactly that set: Rohini, Mrigashira, Magha, Uttara Phalguni, Hasta, Swati, Anuradha, Mula, Uttara Ashadha, Uttara Bhadrapada and Revati. They are not an arbitrary list. The texts sort the nakshatras into seven classes by temperament (fixed, soft, swift, movable, mixed, fierce and sharp), and each class is matched to the kind of work it suits. Marriage draws mainly on the fixed and the soft, for the obvious reason that the tradition reads the ceremony as the founding of something meant to last. Two of the eleven come from classes normally kept away from auspicious work, and the fact that the texts admit them anyway is the most interesting thing on the list.
The four dhruva (fixed) nakshatras
Rohini, Uttara Phalguni, Uttara Ashadha and Uttara Bhadrapada are the dhruva or sthira class, the fixed stars. The tradition assigns them to whatever is meant to stay put: laying a foundation, planting a tree, entering a house, and marriage. All four appear in the vivah list, and three of them are the Uttaras, which is why a wedding season so often seems to cluster on the same handful of stars. If you are choosing between two otherwise equal days, the tradition's preference is the fixed one.
The mridu (soft) nakshatras
Mrigashira, Anuradha and Revati carry the mridu or maitra classification: the soft, friendly stars, assigned in the texts to ornaments, music, friendship and the making of ties. Chitra, the fourth of the class, is used for the household occasions rather than the wedding itself. These are the stars that give the vivah list its character: the fixed ones supply permanence and the soft ones supply the agreeable quality the ceremony is read as needing. Hasta and Swati fill out the list from the swift and movable classes.
Magha and Mula, the two the texts admit anyway
Magha belongs to the ugra (fierce) class and Mula to the tikshna (sharp) class, and both classes are otherwise kept well away from an auspicious beginning. They are in the vivah list all the same, on the strength of their lords and their pitri and moksha associations, and North Indian and South Indian practice differ on how freely to use them. We include them because the classical list includes them, and we say so here rather than leaving you to wonder why a fierce star turned up in your results.
03Which tithis are excluded for a wedding?
Two exclusions are absolute in this finder: the Rikta tithis and Amavasya. Rikta means empty, and it is the fourth, ninth and fourteenth tithi of each paksha: the 4th, 9th and 14th of both the waxing and the waning fortnight, six days in a lunar month. Amavasya, the new moon, closes the dark fortnight and is given to the ancestors rather than to a beginning. Neither is a judgement about the couple; both are categories of the calendar, applied identically to every chart. The tithi is also the limb most people can check for themselves. Our daily panchang names the running tithi and its paksha for any date and place, which is the quickest way to sanity-check a date somebody has proposed to you.
The five tithi groups, and where Rikta sits
The fifteen tithis of a paksha repeat a cycle of five named groups: Nanda (1, 6, 11), Bhadra (2, 7, 12), Jaya (3, 8, 13), Rikta (4, 9, 14) and Purna (5, 10, 15). Bhadra, Jaya and Purna carry the tradition's preference for a marriage, Nanda is used with less enthusiasm, and Rikta is the one that is dropped. Knowing the grouping is useful because it explains the spacing of the results: a clean run of dates cannot include two consecutive Riktas, so gaps of five days are structural.
Why Amavasya is excluded and Purnima is not
Amavasya is dropped outright: the Moon is dark, and the muhurta texts read the Moon's strength as the single most important thing about a day chosen for a beginning. The full moon at the close of the bright fortnight has the opposite standing and is retained. This is also the reason the bright fortnight generally throws up more results than the dark one, not by a rule of its own but by the arithmetic of a waxing Moon meeting the same nakshatra and weekday tests.
04Which weekdays are used for vivah, and which are avoided?
Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are the weekdays this finder counts in favour of a marriage, and Tuesday and Saturday are the two it counts against. The reasoning is the planetary lordship of the day: the Moon, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus are the benefics, and Venus in particular is the karaka the tradition assigns to marriage, which is why Friday is so heavily used. Mars rules Tuesday and Saturn rules Saturday, and both are read as malefic for a beginning of this kind. Sunday is neutral here rather than favoured: it neither adds to the day's score nor rules it out. A day that lands on a favourable nakshatra but a Tuesday is not discarded automatically; it is discarded when the nakshatra is unfavourable as well, and otherwise it is simply scored lower than its neighbours.
05Which yogas override the rest of the day?
Certain nakshatra-and-weekday pairs form named yogas that outrank the ordinary scoring, in both directions. Four are auspicious: Amrit Siddhi, Sarvartha Siddhi, Guru Pushya and Ravi Pushya. Four cancel a day outright: Mrityu, Dagdha, Yamaghata and Utpata. These are the classical panchanga tables, one star per weekday for most of them, and they are checked before anything else. A day carrying one of the four cancelling yogas is rated avoid however good its nakshatra and tithi look, because that is how the tradition treats them. The reverse does not hold: an auspicious yoga raises a day's rating but does not rescue one that Amavasya has already excluded. Note that Pushya is not in the vivah nakshatra list (marriage is the one famous exception to that star's near-universal usefulness), so the two Pushya yogas can be reported as running on a day without making it usable for a wedding.
Amrit Siddhi and Sarvartha Siddhi
Amrit Siddhi is a single nakshatra-weekday pair for each of the seven days (Hasta on Sunday, Mrigashira on Monday, Ashwini on Tuesday and so on), and the texts treat it as all-purpose. Sarvartha Siddhi, literally the accomplisher of every purpose, is a wider table of several stars per weekday. Both are read as raising the standing of work begun under them, and both are flagged by name in the results so you can see which of the two a day is carrying rather than only a rating.
The four yogas that cancel a day
Mrityu, Dagdha, Yamaghata and Utpata each pair one nakshatra with one weekday, and the tradition holds an auspicious beginning back when any of them is running. Dagdha means burnt and Utpata means a portent; the names are the tradition's own and we keep them rather than softening them into a colour code. Because each is a single pair, a cancelled day is uncommon, usually one or two in a month-long search, and the result names the yoga responsible instead of returning an unexplained rejection.
06What are Guru asta and Shukra asta, and why do they close the wedding season?
Asta means combustion: the period when Jupiter or Venus is too close to the Sun to be seen rising or setting. The tradition suspends marriages while either is combust, and because Jupiter is combust for roughly a month each year and Venus for longer, these two periods are what produce the familiar blackout weeks in a wedding calendar. The Chaturmas months, when Vishnu is held to sleep, close another long stretch, and the Kharmas period while the Sun transits Dhanu and Meen closes two more. None of these is a panchang limb, so this finder does not screen for them; it works from nakshatra, tithi, weekday and the yoga tables. Check the returned dates against the seasonal calendar before fixing anything, and see the section below for the rest of what is out of scope here.
07What time of day should the ceremony begin?
Once the day is chosen, the hour is chosen inside it. This finder returns the day's good Choghadiya periods (Amrit, Shubh and Labh), with the periods that collide with Rahu Kalam, Yamaganda or Gulika Kalam already removed, and it adds Abhijit, the muhurta straddling solar noon, on every day except Wednesday, when the tradition holds Abhijit not to apply. All of these are computed from the actual sunrise and sunset at the place you enter, which is why the place field matters: an eighth of the daylight in Chennai is not an eighth of the daylight in Amritsar, and a window copied from a national calendar can be half an hour out. Our daily muhurat page shows the same windows for a single date in more detail.
08What does this vivah muhurat finder not check?
It does not read either birth chart. A traditional wedding election also weighs the bride's and groom's own charts: the Moon's position relative to each of them, the running dashas, the strength of the lagna at the chosen hour, and the seasonal exclusions described above. What this page does is the calendar layer of that work, applied uniformly and computed rather than looked up, so you arrive at a family astrologer with a shortlist instead of a blank sheet. We do not sell a consultation or a puja. If you also want the compatibility side of the question, our kundli matching runs the full Guna Milan, and Mangal dosha is checked separately from three references.
