How Many Muhurtas in a Day? 30 Names and Their Length

A full day and night contain 30 muhurtas: fifteen between sunrise and sunset and fifteen between sunset and the next sunrise. Each one has a name. If the twenty-four hours are cut into 30 equal pieces, one muhurta comes to 48 minutes, which is two ghatis of 24 minutes each, and that is the usual answer to “1 muhurta kitne minute”. A second way of counting divides the daylight and the darkness separately into fifteen, and then the length depends on the season and the city: at New Delhi in 2027 a daytime muhurta will run from 41.3 min in December to 55.9 min in June.

The names below are read from one source, Rama Daivajna’s Muhurta Chintamani, the handbook of electional astrology whose tithi lords are set out on the tithi devta page. Three consecutive verses of its Vivaha Prakarana, the chapter on marriage, give the day’s fifteen, the night’s fifteen, and the muhurtas it forbids on each weekday, the list this page reads for the question of “durmuhurta”.

The Fifteen Day Muhurtas: Vivaha Prakarana 52

गिरिशभुजगमित्राः पित्र्यवस्वम्बुविश्वे ऽभिजिदथ च विधाताऽपीन्द्र इन्द्रानलौ च निरृतिरुदकनाथोऽप्यर्यमाथो भगः स्युः क्रमश इह मुहूर्ता वासरे बाणचन्द्राः

The verse ends with its own count. “Vasare” is “in the day”, and “bana-chandrah” is a word-numeral: in the jyotisha texts an arrow (bana) stands for 5 and the moon (chandra) for 1, and such digits are read from the right, so the pair says 15. One name hides a pair. “Indranalau” is Indra with Anala, the fire, in the dual, and it takes a single slot: counting it as two would give sixteen names, one more than the verse announces. The order runs from sunrise.

The Fifteen Night Muhurtas: Vivaha Prakarana 53

शिवोऽजपादादष्टौ स्युर्भेशा अदितिजीवकौ विष्ण्वर्कत्वाष्ट्रमरुतो मुहूर्ता निशि कीर्तिताः

The night verse is shorter because it borrows a list. After Shiva come “eight bhesha from Ajapada”: bha is a nakshatra and isha its lord, so these are the deities of eight nakshatras in a row, starting with Aja Ekapada, the deity of Purva Bhadrapada. The table below takes all eight straight from the nakshatra list this site uses, which runs Purva Bhadrapada to Mrigashira, wrapping past Revati back to Ashwini. Then the verse adds six more by name, Aditi, Jiva, Vishnu, Arka, Tvashtra and Marut, which makes fifteen.

How Many of the Names Are Nakshatra Deities

Set beside the nakshatra table, nineteen of the 30 names are, word for word, the deity of a nakshatra: nine by day and ten by night, eight of them the night lords that verse 53 takes from the list on purpose. The other eleven, Girisha, Bhujaga, Ambu, Abhijit, Vidhata, Udakanatha, Shiva, Jiva, Arka, Tvashtra and Marut, carry no nakshatra’s name. Some are other words for a figure the table names differently. Ambu means water, and the table gives the deity of Purva Ashadha as Apas, the waters; Bhujaga means serpent, and Ashlesha’s deity is Sarpas (Nagas). This page does not merge names that the two lists keep apart, so they stay in the unmatched column. Abhijit is not one of the table’s twenty-seven at all.

How Long Is One Muhurta: 48 Minutes, or a Fifteenth

The fixed reckoning divides 24 hours by 30 and gets 48 minutes, two ghatis, at every place and on every date; the ghati and pala page converts the smaller units. This site uses that muhurta wherever a window is a whole number of them. Its pradosh kaal is 144 minutes, three muhurtas of 48, and the panchang’s Brahma muhurta is 96 minutes before sunrise, two of them.

The proportional reckoning, the one behind the 8th day muhurta that panchangs print as Abhijit, takes the day from sunrise to sunset and divides it by fifteen, and does the same with the night up to the next sunrise. In summer the day muhurtas stretch and the night ones shrink; in winter it is the other way round. A day muhurta and the night muhurta after it always add up to about 96 minutes, because the day and the night together make roughly 24 hours. At New Delhi, on the first of each month:

Across 2027 the Delhi day muhurta will be longest, 55 min 52 s, on nine days between 15 June and 25 June, when the table gives 13 h 58 min of daylight, and shortest, 41 min 16 s, on six days between 17 December and 27 December. Several dates share each extreme because the table counts daylight in whole clock-minutes and the length barely changes near the turn of the season. The night muhurta runs from 40 min 8 s in June to 54 min 44 s in December. The day muhurta first reaches 48 minutes on 17 March and drops back below it on 28 September, so on 195 days of the year it is the longer of the two. Daylight is counted from the moment the Sun’s upper edge meets the horizon, with refraction allowed for, which is why the stretch of longer days is a little more than half the year.

North and South on the Longest and Shortest Days

The table holds 21 June 2027 and 21 December 2027, each among Delhi’s longest and shortest days of 2027, for nine cities from north to south. Delhi is read from the site’s daily panchang table, the rest from the same sunrise formula that drives the city panchang pages.

Latitude does nearly all the work. On 21 June a day muhurta in Jammu will be 6.4 minutes longer than in Kochi; on 21 December it will be 6.2 minutes shorter. Between those two dates Kochi’s day muhurta moves by only 4.6 minutes and stays close to 48 all year, while Jammu’s moves by 17.2. Longitude shifts the clock time of sunrise but not the length of the day, so two cities at the same latitude get nearly the same muhurta length.

Abhijit and Nishita: The Two Eighth Muhurtas

Fifteen is odd, so the 8th part sits in the middle, with seven before it and seven after. By day it is Abhijit, the 8th name in verse 52, and the halfway point between sunrise and sunset, local noon, always falls inside it; a build-time check confirms that for every day of the site’s Delhi table and for both dates in every city above. Its length is simply that day’s muhurta from the tables: 41.3 min to 55.9 min at Delhi through 2027.

At night the 8th part holds the midpoint between sunset and the next sunrise. This site takes nishita kaal to be that part, as its Maha Shivratri 2027 page explains, and in verse 53 the 8th night muhurta is Brahma, the lord of Rohini. Nishita is therefore not a fixed hour such as midnight on the clock but a span whose length is that night’s muhurta: between 38.8 min and 56.1 min across the cities and dates in the table. This site does not print a clock window for nishita or for any muhurta.

Durmuhurta: The Weekday List in Verse 54

रवावर्यमा ब्रह्मरक्षश्च सोमे कुजे वह्निपित्र्ये बुधे चाभिजित्स्यात् गुरौ तोयरक्षो भृगौ ब्रह्मपित्र्ये शनावीशसार्पौ मुहूर्ता निषिद्धाः

The verse closes with “muhurta nishiddhah”, “the muhurtas are forbidden”, and it is the Muhurta Chintamani’s weekday list: twelve entries over seven days, nine different names. It sits in the marriage chapter, among the rules for fixing a wedding. What makes it hard to apply is that it names deities, not positions, and several of its words fit more than one slot in verses 52 and 53. The table shows every slot the two lists allow for each word. The verse itself does not choose between them, and neither does this page.

Four words have two candidates each: Brahma, Vahni, Toya and Isha. Brahma may be Vidhata of the day or the night’s Brahma, the 8th of the night and so the part this site reads as nishita, and Vahni may be the day’s Indragni or the night’s Agni. Raksha, given for Monday and Thursday, is not the name of any muhurta in either list, and the verse does not say which one it means. Wednesday’s entry is plain: Abhijit, the 8th day muhurta. The site’s shubh muhurat tool notes that some traditions do not count Abhijit on Wednesdays, and this verse is one place where such a rule is written down, inside the marriage chapter.

The muhurta lists for an occasion, a marriage, a griha pravesh or a vehicle purchase, are on the muhurat hub, and the day-and-night division into eight watches is on the prahar page; godhuli bela covers the dusk muhurta from the same chapter. The daily panchang gives sunrise and sunset, which is all the proportional reckoning needs. In Hindi: एक दिन में कितने मुहूर्त होते हैं: 30 नाम और अवधि.

In Brief

• How many: 30 in a day and night, fifteen by day and fifteen by night
• Fixed length: 48 minutes, two ghatis
• Proportional length: daylight or darkness divided by fifteen; 41.3 min to 55.9 min by day at New Delhi in 2027
• Abhijit: the 8th day muhurta, around local noon
• Nishita: on this site, the 8th night muhurta, around the middle of the night
• Durmuhurta: Muhurta Chintamani, Vivaha Prakarana 54, names twelve weekday entries and leaves several of their positions open