Where on the Wall Should the Main Door Go? Padas vs. the Zone We Grade
Classical Vastu puts eight padas on a wall. Our check grades the entrance in eight 45-degree zones — one zone is four padas wide. Here is how they line up.
Author - Vaastu AI Editorial
Short answer: the classical systems divide each wall of the plan into eight padas, roughly 11.25 degrees apart, and name each one. Our check is coarser on purpose — it resolves the main entrance to one of eight 45-degree zones, which makes one of our zones exactly four padas wide. The practical consequence is the useful part: on any wall, the middle four padas land in that wall's own zone, and the two padas at each end belong to the neighbouring zone. So "north-facing door" is not one answer, it is three. On the north wall our table scores the entrance 75, 95 or 100 depending on which end of the wall the opening actually sits.
Every pada on all four walls, and what our table scores it
A wall of a plan spans 90 degrees seen from the centre of the building, and its middle sits on that wall's compass axis. Eight padas of 11.25 degrees fill it. Lay our zones over that and the mapping is fixed arithmetic — two padas, four padas, two padas:
| Wall | Padas 1–2 (first corner) | Padas 3–6 (middle) | Padas 7–8 (far corner) |
|---|---|---|---|
| North wall | North-West — 75, good | North — 95, ideal | North-East — 100, ideal |
| East wall | North-East — 100, ideal | East — 90, ideal | South-East — 45, avoid |
| South wall | South-East — 45, avoid | South — 40, avoid | South-West — 25, avoid |
| West wall | South-West — 25, avoid | West — 70, good | North-West — 75, good |
Those scores are the entrance row of the table this site grades floor plans against, and the verdict words are the bands our scale reports: 90 and above ideal, 70–89 good, 50–69 acceptable, below 50 avoid.
Three things fall out of that table that no direction-level guide can tell you.
The south wall has no good pada. Every one of its eight positions is in the avoid band — 45 at the south-east end, 40 across the middle, 25 at the south-west end. On the other three walls, where the door sits on the wall decides its band. On the south wall it decides only how much you lose. If you are reading this about a south entrance, the honest numbers are in our south main door post, including how much of it comes back without moving a wall.
The single most expensive step on any wall is two padas from the middle of the east wall. Going from the east wall's middle band to its far corner is 90 to 45 — a 45-point, two-band fall from ideal to avoid, in the width of one pada. The same cliff exists in reverse on the west wall: its first two padas score 25 and its middle four score 70, a 45-point rise. Every other step around the ring is 5 to 20 points. Two of the eight boundaries carry almost all of the risk.
A door gets better as it moves east. On the north wall the score rises 75 → 95 → 100 from the north-west corner to the north-east corner. On the east wall it falls 100 → 90 → 45 going south. The north-east corner of the plan is where the two best walls meet, and it is the only pada band on any wall that our entrance row scores 100.
Where the pada systems and our model actually agree
The field's pada pages are not in conflict with the table above. AnantVastu's 32-pada guide names N3 (Mukhya), N4 (Bhallat) and N5 (Soma) as the auspicious north positions, and E3 (Jayanta) and E4 (Indra) in the east. Those are middle-of-the-wall padas under either numbering convention, and the middle of the north wall is our North cell (95, ideal) while the middle of the east wall is our East cell (90, ideal). IIAG puts the same system in degrees: 360 divided by 32 gives 11.25 degrees per entrance, eight to a side. The classical answer and ours point at the same part of the same walls.
What the systems do not agree on is the denominator. Most pages use 32 padas, eight per side. Some divide each side into nine. That disagreement is real and it is in the sources, not in your plan — which is one good reason not to stake a buying decision on a single named pada.
What our check does and does not model here
Plainly, so you are not surprised by it:
- We do not model padas or their names. There is no
MukhyaorYamaanywhere in our scoring. The entrance gets one score, from the zone the opening falls in. - We do not model what the door opens onto — a corridor, a lift, a staircase, open sky. Same zone, same score.
- We do model the boundary crossing, which is the part a pada system and a zone system both turn on. Our check reads the entrance's position on the plan you upload and grades the zone it lands in, and the free result shows you which zone that was.
The entrance is the heaviest row in the table — 18% of a fully labelled flat's score — so getting its zone right matters more than getting any other single room right.
The measurement that decides all of it
A pada is 11.25 degrees wide. A zone boundary is a single line. If your north bearing is off by 10 degrees and the door sits near the middle of a wall, nothing changes; if it sits two padas from a corner, a 10-degree error can move it across a boundary — and on the east and west walls that boundary is worth 45 points. Get the bearing before you get the pada: our vastu compass explains magnetic versus true north and how to take a reading that does not drift.
Then upload the plan. The free vastu check detects the rooms, asks you to confirm north and the room labels, and returns the direction-wise zones and a score — including which zone your main door actually landed in, which is the question this whole page is about.