Sade Sati calculator
Sade Sati is the roughly seven and a half year stretch when Saturn crosses the sign before your moon sign, your moon sign, and the sign after it. This works out every leg from your birth details, tells you which phase each one is, and marks the one running now. Small Panoti, the shorter fourth and eighth house transits, is listed alongside it.
How Sade Sati is worked out
Everything here is measured from your natal Moon rather than from your ascendant. Saturn takes about two and a half years to cross a sign, so the three consecutive signs around your Moon add up to the seven and a half years the name refers to. The three legs are usually distinguished as rising, peak and setting, depending on whether Saturn is in the twelfth, the first or the second from your Moon.
Small Panoti, also called Dhaiya, is the separate two and a half year transit through the fourth or the eighth from your Moon. It is included above because it is read the same way, against the same natal point, and people looking for one usually want to see the other.
Does your birth time change this?
Less than it changes most things on this site, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Sade Sati depends on your moon sign, and the Moon spends about two and a quarter days in a sign, so for most births the date alone settles it and the exact time is not doing much work.
The exception is real, though. If you were born within a few hours of the Moon changing sign, the date does not settle it, and the two possible moon signs give you two schedules about two and a half years apart. If the dates above look badly out of step with your own experience of these years, a boundary birth is one of the likelier explanations, and narrowing the birth time is what settles which side you fall on. The glossary explains the moon sign if that term is new.
What the dates do and do not tell you
They tell you when. They do not tell you what, and any page that promises a single outcome for a period this long is selling something. Saturn transits are traditionally read against the whole chart: where Saturn sits natally, which houses it rules for your ascendant, and which dasha period is running underneath the transit.
That last one is worth pairing with this page. Your Vimshottari dasha timeline is the other half of Vedic timing, and the full kundli shows where Saturn actually sits in your chart.
Takes about 10 minutes.
Sade Sati, answered
What is Sade Sati?
Sade Sati is the roughly seven and a half year stretch when Saturn transits three signs in a row: the sign before your moon sign, your moon sign itself, and the sign after it. Each leg lasts about two and a half years. The name means seven and a half in Hindi, and it is the transit people in India ask about more than any other.
Does Sade Sati depend on my birth time?
It depends on your moon sign, which is usually settled by the date. The catch is that the Moon changes sign every two and a bit days, so if you were born near a boundary the date alone does not decide it, and the whole schedule shifts by two and a half years to the wrong set of dates. That is when the birth time matters here.
What is Small Panoti?
Small Panoti, also called Dhaiya or Kantaka Shani, is Saturn transiting the fourth or eighth sign from your moon sign, lasting about two and a half years. It is a separate event from Sade Sati and is listed alongside it in the table above because both are read the same way, against the natal Moon.
How often does Sade Sati come round?
Saturn takes about 29 and a half years to go once round the zodiac, so Sade Sati returns roughly every 30 years. Most people live through two of them in full and part of a third, which is why the dates in your own timeline are more useful than any general description of what the transit means.
Are the three phases the same?
They are usually distinguished as rising, peak and setting, according to whether Saturn is in the twelfth, the first or the second from your Moon, and traditional readings treat them as having different emphases rather than being one uniform stretch. The table above labels which phase each leg is.