Kundli matching
Ashtakoota Guna Milan across all eight kootas — plus the number that changes how you should read it: 82.6% of random pairs already clear the traditional 18-point threshold.
Ashtakoota depends only on the Moon, so the date is usually enough — the time matters only if a birth falls near a nakshatra boundary.
Computed across 500 sampled pairs · published nowhere else
What “18 out of 36” is actually worth
Every kundli matching service in existence repeats the same rule: 18 gunas or more and the match is acceptable, below 18 and it is not. The rule is quoted as an ancient standard. Nobody publishes the distribution behind it — which is strange, because it takes minutes to compute and it changes the meaning of the rule completely.
Why the average is so high. Look at the per-koota averages below. Tara gives the typical pair 2 of 3 and Yoni gives 2.89 of 4 — these kootas award most of their points to almost everyone. The heavy discriminators are Bhakoot (3.54 of 7) and Nadi (5.33 of 8), both of which score zero or full with nothing in between. So a Guna Milan total is mostly a near-constant floor plus two coin-flips worth 15 points, and that structure — not compatibility — is what produces the distribution.
How Ashtakoota works
The system compares two charts using only the Moon — its nakshatra and the sidereal sign it occupies. Eight tests are applied, weighted from 1 to 8 points, summing to 36. That is the whole mechanism, which is why kundli matching can be done from birth dates alone while a full synastry reading needs times and places.
The weights are not arbitrary in the way Western compatibility scores are — they are fixed by classical texts and every service uses the same eight kootas with the same maximums. What differs between services is the handling of edge cases in Tara and Vashya, which is why you may see totals differ by a point or two between sites.
Nadi dosha, in proportion
Nadi is the heaviest koota at 8 points, and it scores zero whenever both partners share the same nadi. Each nadi contains exactly nine of the 27 nakshatras, so by construction this affects roughly a third of all pairs. That is what the average of 5.33 out of 8 in our sample reflects.
It is worth stating plainly: Nadi dosha is not a rare affliction. It is a common outcome of an evenly divided classification, and it costs 8 of 36 points — nearly a quarter of the scale — on a coin-flip that has nothing to do with either person.
What this cannot tell you
No component of Ashtakoota has been shown to predict marital outcomes. We compute it because millions of people are asked to act on the number, and the honest service is to give them the number and its distribution rather than the number alone.
If a match you care about scores below 18, the most useful thing on this page is the 82.6% figure. If it scores above 18, the most useful thing is the same figure.