Sun Transit 2027: Every Surya Gochar Date and Time

Twelve Crossings, One a Month (सूर्य गोचर)

The Sun opens the year in Sagittarius, which it will enter on 16 December 2026. Its first sign change of the year is into Capricorn at 21:05 IST on 14 January 2027, and its last is into Sagittarius again at 16:33 IST on 16 December 2027. Between those two it enters each of the other ten signs once, in order, with no station and no backward step. The Sun never turns retrograde, so each of its sign changes happens exactly once in the year and none of the dates below has a second spell to qualify it.

The table below gives each crossing in the sidereal (Lahiri) zodiac the rest of the site uses, timed in IST from the JPL DE421 ephemeris. The two right-hand columns are explained in the sections after it: the clock cost of one arcminute at that day’s speed, and how long the Sun then stays before the next crossing.

The last stay, in Sagittarius, runs into the next year and ends when the Sun reaches Capricorn on 15 January 2028. Added together, the twelve stays from one Capricorn crossing to the next come to 365 days 6 hours, which is the 365.26-day solar cycle in the site’s pace table. That table’s figure for a single sign, about 30½ days, is an average; the real stays in 2027 run from 29 days 10 hours to 31 days 10 hours.

Why the Mid-Year Stays Run Longest

The Sun’s apparent speed is not constant. The ingress table records it at each crossing, and across 2027 it ranges from 0.9536° a day as it enters Cancer to 1.0187° a day as it enters Capricorn. Take the speed at the start and end of each stay, average the two, and rank the twelve signs from slowest to fastest by that figure: the ranking is identical, sign for sign, to ranking them from longest stay to shortest. The three longest stays are Gemini, Cancer and Taurus, all entered and left at under a degree a day; the three shortest are Sagittarius, Capricorn and Scorpio, all crossed at more than a degree a day.

In standard astronomy this follows from the Earth’s orbit being an ellipse rather than a circle, which is why the table’s fastest crossing comes in January and its slowest in July. The practical consequence is that the longest stay of the year outlasts the shortest by 2 days, so a list that treats every solar month as the same length is wrong at both ends.

What a Minute Is Worth Here

The site prints a clock minute only for a crossing faster than 0.1° a day, and the Sun clears that floor by a wide margin all year. Even so, the minute depends on the zodiac it is measured in. At the Sun’s speed, one arcminute of longitude is between 24 and 25 minutes of clock, so an almanac using an ayanamsa a single arcminute different from the Lahiri value here would put every crossing about two dozen minutes earlier or later, and one a few arcminutes different would move them by an hour or more. Neither reckoning is in error when that happens. The table’s minutes are exact for its own frame; across frames, treat them as good to within that margin.

Dates are more robust, and the question is how close each crossing sits to midnight. None of the twelve in 2027 falls within an hour of it. The two nearest are both in the small hours: Scorpio at 01:53 on 17 November 2027, 1 hour 53 minutes after midnight, and Libra at 02:03 on 18 October 2027, 2 hours 3 minutes after. At the Scorpio crossing that margin is a little over 4 arcminutes of the Sun’s motion, so a calendar working in a zodiac that much different could list the date as 16 November. Every other crossing is close to three hours or more from a date change.

About Six Hours Later Than in 2026

Set beside the same crossing a year earlier in the ingress table, each 2027 crossing comes between 5 hours 54 minutes and 6 hours 16 minutes later on the clock, once 365 calendar days are taken off. That is the Sun’s own cycle at work: the twelve stays above add up to 6 hours 12 minutes more than 365 days, and the clock times creep forward by about that much each year. For most signs the date stays the same and only the hour moves. For Cancer, Libra and Scorpio the shift carries the crossing past midnight: Cancer from 16 July to 17 July, Libra from 17 October to 18 October and Scorpio from 16 November to 17 November. That is why a solar date copied from last year’s list is usually right and occasionally a day out, and why a copied clock time is wrong every time.

Exaltation, Own Sign and Debilitation in 2027

The site’s planet table gives the Sun three dignity signs, and the sign table agrees with it row for row. This page names the signs and their dates only; the degree figures attached to some of them are left out.

• Aries, the sign of exaltation: 14 April 2027 to 15 May 2027. See Sun in Aries.
• Leo, the Sun’s own sign, which the planet table also gives as its moolatrikona for part of the sign: 17 August 2027 to 17 September 2027. See Sun in Leo.
• Libra, the sign of debilitation: 18 October 2027 to 17 November 2027. See Sun in Libra.

Aries and Libra face each other across the zodiac, so the exaltation and debilitation stays fall half a year apart. The dignity table records where the Sun stands; it does not say what any stay amounts to in a given chart, and nothing on this page is a reading for a sign. The Sun’s significations in the classical scheme are gathered on the Sun reference page, and the practices the tradition attaches to Surya are collected in remedies for a weak Sun.

Sagittarius and Pisces: the Kharmas Stretches

The tradition calls the Sun’s passage through Sagittarius and through Pisces Kharmas, or Malmas, and the site’s closures table sets both edges of each stretch on the Sun’s own crossings. In 2027 there are three such stretches touching the year: Sagittarius from 16 December 2026 to 14 January 2027; Pisces from 15 March 2027 to 14 April 2027; and Sagittarius again from 16 December 2027 to 15 January 2028. Those are Sun-in-sign dates and nothing more. What the custom attaches to them is set out on the Kharmas dates page.

The Crossing Instant Is Not the Observance Day

Each row in the table is the instant the tradition names a Sankranti after the sign entered: Makara Sankranti for Capricorn, Kumbha Sankranti for Aquarius, Meena Sankranti for Pisces, Mesha Sankranti for Aries, and so on round the year. The table gives the crossing and only the crossing. The day on which a Sankranti is kept, and its punya kaal, are settled by separate rules that take the instant as only one input, and this page does not apply them. It gives no observance day and no punya-kaal window for any of the twelve. For the Capricorn crossing that reasoning is worked through on the Makar Sankranti 2027 page, and the 2027 festival calendar sets the solar dates beside the lunar ones.

Nakshatras Along the Way (नक्षत्र)

Three of the Sun’s sign changes are also nakshatra changes, at the same instant: entering Aries it enters Ashwini, entering Leo it enters Magha, and entering Sagittarius it enters Moola. The nakshatra spans show these to be the only three places in the zodiac where a sign and a nakshatra begin together; at the other 9 sign lines a nakshatra runs across the boundary.

The planet table lists Krittika, Uttara Phalguni and Uttara Ashadha as the Sun’s nakshatras, the three the nakshatra table gives to the Sun as lord. The Sun is already in Uttara Ashadha when it reaches Capricorn, having entered it on 11 January 2027; it reaches Krittika on 12 May 2027 and Uttara Phalguni on 14 September 2027. Nakshatra crossings are given by date only, and no pada is named.

A Month in a Sign, Against the Moon’s Two Days

Everyone born during one of these month-long stays shares a sidereal Sun sign, whereas the Moon, by the site’s pace table, spends about 2¼ days in a sign. The gochara method counts transits from the Moon sign, and the difference is set out in Sun sign vs Moon sign, and the Moon sign calculator finds yours from birth details. For the season just before this year, the Sun in Scorpio 2026 page covers one stay in detail, and the same year is listed for three other grahas in Mercury transit 2027, Venus transit 2027 and Mars transit 2027. In Hindi: सूर्य गोचर 2027: हर राशि-प्रवेश की तारीख और समय.