Hora Lagna, Ghati Lagna and Bhava Lagna: How to Calculate

Three Lagnas That Run on a Clock (होरा लग्न, घटी लग्न, भाव लग्न)

The ordinary lagna is a piece of geometry: the degree of the zodiac on the eastern horizon at the moment and place of birth. Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra adds, in its chapter on special lagnas, three points that are not geometry at all. The bhava lagna, the hora lagna and the ghati lagna (also written ghatika lagna) all start from the Sun’s degree at sunrise and then move through the zodiac at a fixed speed, counted only by the time that has passed since sunrise. Nothing about the horizon or the latitude enters once the starting point is fixed.

The idea behind the starting point is simple. At sunrise the Sun is on the eastern horizon, so the Sun’s degree and the lagna very nearly coincide. On the worked day below the Sun stood at Scorpio 14.6° at Delhi’s sunrise and the true lagna at that moment was Scorpio 13.7°, 0.9° apart. The small gap is expected: a panchang’s sunrise is the moment the Sun’s upper edge appears, lifted by refraction, while its centre is still a little below the true horizon. From that shared start, the three special lagnas run on at their own fixed rates.

The Rule: One Sign per 5, 2.5 or 1 Ghati

A ghati is a sixtieth of the day from one sunrise to the next, which in clock time is 24 minutes. The three rates are:

So to find any of them by hand: take the time from sunrise to birth, convert it to signs at the rate in the table, and add that to the Sun’s sidereal longitude at sunrise. A birth 3 hours 18 clock-minutes after sunrise is 8.25 ghatis. That is 1.65 signs (1 sign 19.5°) for the bhava lagna, 3.3 signs (3 signs 9°) for the hora lagna and 8.25 signs (8 signs 7.5°) for the ghati lagna, each added to the Sun’s degree. Anything over twelve signs drops a full round.

Two details trip people up. The first is the day boundary: the Vedic day runs from sunrise to sunrise, so a birth at 4 a.m. counts from the previous morning’s sunrise, not from the coming one, and is about 21 hours along. The second is the Sun’s position. The rule uses the Sun at sunrise, not at birth. Because the Sun moves only about a degree a day, the two differ by about a degree at most; a program that uses the birth-time Sun is making a small but real change to the rule.

A Worked Day: Delhi, 1 December 2026

The site’s panchang gives Delhi’s sunrise on 1 December 2026 as 06:56 IST. The rows below are hypothetical births every two hours after it, with the three special lagnas from the rule and, for comparison, the true lagna at the same clock time and place computed by the same function as the ascendant calculator.

Every special-lagna cell in the table sits at 14.6°, the Sun’s degree at sunrise. Two hours is a whole number of signs at all three rates (one, two and five signs), so from row to row only the sign changes. Between the rows the degree does move: a birth one hour after sunrise would put the bhava lagna at Scorpio 29.6° and the ghati lagna at Capricorn 29.6°. Twelve hours after sunrise, at 18:56, the hora lagna is back in Scorpio, one full round later. The ghati lagna completes a round every 12 ghatis, 4 hours 48 clock-minutes, so the same twelve hours carry it two and a half rounds and leave it in the opposite sign, Taurus. A birth at 08:56 and another at 20:56 therefore share a hora lagna exactly, even though their true lagnas, Sagittarius 10.4° and Cancer 4.6°, have nothing in common.

The arithmetic also shows how sensitive each point is to the recorded birth time. The bhava lagna moves at the average pace of the true lagna, a quarter of a degree per clock-minute; the hora lagna twice that; the ghati lagna five times, a degree and a quarter for every clock-minute. A birth time five clock-minutes out puts the ghati lagna more than six degrees out, and one twenty clock-minutes out can move it by most of a sign. Of the three, the ghati lagna is the one that needs the most exact time.

The Bhava Lagna Is Not the Lagna

Twelve signs in a day is also the true lagna’s average speed, so it is natural to expect the bhava lagna and the true lagna to stay together. They do not. The bhava lagna moves at one even pace, while the true lagna moves quickly through some signs and slowly through others, depending on the angle at which each part of the zodiac meets the horizon at that latitude. Sampled every hour through the worked day, the two were in different signs in 14 of the 24 hourly rows, and the widest gap, at 17:56, put the true lagna 24.6° ahead of the bhava lagna. They come back close together by the next sunrise: the bhava lagna has completed exactly one round, and the true lagna one round plus the Sun’s daily motion of about a degree.

A second, unrelated confusion is with bhava chalit. The bhava chalit chart redraws house boundaries around the true lagna degree; it has nothing to do with the bhava lagna of this page despite the shared word. The difference is set out on the bhava chalit versus lagna chart page.

Not the Same “Hora” as the Planetary Hour

The hora lagna’s hora is 2.5 ghatis, a fixed hour of clock time. The planetary horas that the hora tool lists are a different division: daylight is cut into twelve horas and night into twelve, each ruled by a graha in the Chaldean order. Their length changes with the season. On the worked day, with sunrise at 06:56 and sunset at 17:23 in Delhi, each daytime planetary hora lasted 52.3 clock-minutes and each night-time one 67.8 clock-minutes. The two share a name and nothing else; the hora lagna does not change sign when a planetary hora changes.

Why Two Programs Can Disagree

Beyond the birth time and the ayanamsa, which move every chart point, two settings are particular to these three lagnas. One is the length of a ghati. One convention takes it as exactly 24 clock-minutes; the stricter reading takes a sixtieth of the actual sunrise-to-sunrise day, which is never exactly 24 hours because sunrise drifts a little from one morning to the next. The difference is seconds at the start of the day, but it accumulates hour by hour, and the ghati lagna turns every clock-minute of it into a degree and a quarter. The other is the sunrise itself: a program that times sunrise to the Sun’s centre, or ignores refraction, starts the count a few clock-minutes differently, and any error in the start moves the ghati lagna five times as far as it moves the bhava lagna.

The other special points worked on this site use different rules again. The arudha lagna is counted from the lagna lord’s position, and the Indu lagna from the kala values of two 9th lords; neither depends on the time since sunrise. For how the lagna itself fits into a chart, see the how to read your kundli guide and rashi and lagna.

What This Page Does Not Say

It gives the rule and the arithmetic only. It does not say what a hora lagna or ghati lagna in any sign or house means, does not treat any birth hour as better than another, and reads nothing about wealth, status or any other matter from these points. Where a reader finds such readings elsewhere, they belong to the particular author or school giving them. In Hindi: होरा लग्न, घटी लग्न और भाव लग्न कैसे निकालें.