Mars Sign Calculator

The calculator reads Mars's position at your birth from the Swiss Ephemeris, the same planetary tables our kundli uses, twice: measured from the March equinox (the tropical zodiac of Western astrology) and measured from the stars with the Lahiri ayanamsa (the sidereal zodiac of Vedic astrology, used across India).

Each sign is 30° wide in both. Mars stays in a sign for about six to seven weeks, and up to seven months when it turns retrograde, so a date usually settles the sign. On the day it changes sign the answer depends on the hour, and the result then names both signs and the minute of the change: add your birth time.

Without a birth place the date is read in India time. The place matters only for the clock (it moves the hour of a sign change), never for which sign the planet was in.

The tropical zodiac starts at the March equinox, the moment the Sun crosses the celestial equator going north. The sidereal zodiac starts from a fixed point among the stars (opposite the star Chitra, by the Lahiri convention). Because the equinox slides slowly backwards against the stars (precession, about 1° every 72 years), the two zodiacs drift apart. Today they are 24°14′ apart.

So the same planet usually sits one sign earlier in a Vedic chart than in a Western one: a Western Leo Sun is most often a Vedic Kark (Cancer) Sun. Neither sign is wrong; they answer to different traditions. A Vedic rashi, the sign most Indian astrologers ask for, is the Moon's sidereal sign, not the Sun's: the rashi calculator finds it.

Worked out by the same engine for 2026, in India time (IST). Born in another country? The dates are the same; the hour of each change moves with your clock.