How a wedding date is chosen

A wedding muhurtham is arrived at by elimination, in a fixed order, and the order matters more than any single rule.

First whole months and whole weekdays are removed, because no amount of good elsewhere rescues them. Then the remaining days are graded on the panchang running at sunrise — the tithi, the star, the karana. Then, only for the days that survive, the hour itself is found by watching which sign is rising.

Everything before the last step is about the day. The last step is about the hour, and it is the only part that needs a place and a sunrise.

Three Tamil solar months carry no weddings at all: Aadi, Purattasi and Margazhi. The month is read from the sidereal sign the Sun stands in at sunrise, so it is Aadi from the Sun’s entry into Kadagam, Purattasi from Kanni and Margazhi from Dhanusu. The other nine — Thai, Maasi, Panguni, Chithirai, Vaikasi, Aani, Aavani, Aippasi and Karthigai — are the wedding months.

Two weekdays go the same way. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are the good days, Sunday is acceptable and used freely in Tamil families, and Tuesday and Saturday are not used. The published Tamil muhurtham lists bear this out: of the 78 Tuesdays and Saturdays that fall in the wedding months of 2026 in the Daily Thanthi list, none carries a wedding.

If the couple’s stars are given, one more thing is removed outright: a day on which the Moon stands in the eighth sign from either person’s rasi. That is Chandrashtama, and it rules the day out whatever else the day has going for it.

This app marks each of these as fatal rather than merely bad. A day that fails one of them is graded "avoid" even if every other rule on it is favourable, which is how an almanac reads them.

What is left is graded on the panchang running at sunrise, which is the instant every Tamil almanac reads a day by.

The tithi: seven are the wedding tithis — Dwitiyai, Thritiyai, Panchami, Saptami, Dasami, Ekadasi and Trayodasi — counted in the bright fortnight and in the dark one as far as Dasami. Prathamai, the paksha-chidra tithis and Amavasai are avoided. Pournami and the late waning Ekadasi and Trayodasi are neither: they are neutral here, because they are not among the seven and the waning Moon past Dasami is held to be weak.

The star: twelve are the marriage stars — Rohini, Mirugasirisham, Magam, Uthiram, Hastham, Swathi, Anusham, Moolam, Uthiradam, Thiruvonam, Uthirattathi and Revathi. Ten are avoided. The remaining five are neutral.

The karana: a Vishti, or Bhadra, karana running at sunrise counts against the day.

Each of these adds or subtracts points. A wedding month is worth two, a good weekday two, a wedding tithi two, a marriage star three; an avoided tithi costs six and an avoided star six; Vishti costs four; a day on either person’s janma nakshatra costs four. Seven points or more is excellent, four is good, one is fair, and below that the day is one to avoid.

Only now does the lagna come in, and only it needs a place. The rising sign is taken every five minutes from sunrise to sunset, and wherever it changes between two samples the boundary is bisected down to about a second.

The stretches wanted are those with Mithunam, Kanni or Thulam rising — the three every source names — or Rishabam, Kadagam, Dhanusu, Kumbam or Meenam, which the Tamil lists also carry and which are treated here as acceptable. Mesham, Simmam, Viruchigam and Magaram are not used.

Rahu kaal, Yamaganda kaal and Gulika kaal are then subtracted from those stretches, and what survives has to be at least 45 minutes long to count as a usable window. A day with such a window scores a little more; a day with none says so rather than quietly offering an hour there is no room for.

That is the whole procedure. Note what it does not do: it never looks at the couple beyond their two stars and rasis, and it never casts the wedding chart itself. A family astrologer will go further.

Because they are weighting the same rules differently, not because one of them is working from a different sky.

The eleven marriage stars of the Muhurta Chintamani do not include Thiruvonam. The Tamil lists do, and the published Tamil muhurtham days of 2026 use it more often than any other star — six of the nine Shravana days carry one. This app therefore counts twelve marriage stars and says so. An astrologer working strictly from the Chintamani will count eleven and will not offer you those days.

The wedding lagnas are the same story. Three signs are agreed by everybody; the other five are in the Tamil lists and are treated here as acceptable rather than best. An older and more general reading prefers the fixed signs and accepts the dual ones, which is a muhurta rule rather than a vivaha one, and it produces a different set of hours on the same day.

Pournami is neutral here and avoided by some. The late waning Ekadasi and Trayodasi are neutral here and good by the plain reading of "the seven tithis". Each such choice moves a handful of days across a grade boundary, and a season’s list is made of a few hundred such decisions.

It prints the rule beside every grade. Each day in a range comes back with the full list of reasons it was graded as it was — the month and why, the weekday and why, the tithi, the star, the karana, each Chandrashtama check, each lagna window with its sign and its minutes — each marked as counting for or against, with its points.

So when your astrologer’s list and this one differ, the line they differ on is on the screen. You can see that the day was dropped for its star and not for its tithi, and you can ask about that one thing.

The tables the app uses are named on the page and set out in full on the method page, including the places where the sources part company and which reading was taken. None of them is presented as the correct one.

Two last honest points. The grading is a classical rule faithfully applied: it is right as a grading and it says nothing whatever about how a marriage goes. And the hour of a wedding is a family decision made with a family astrologer who has the two horoscopes in front of them. This page computes the days and the windows, prints the reasoning, and stops there.

Wedding dates in a range, graded like an almanac.

Muhurtham →