Hindu Calendar & Panchang 2026

A panchang is the Hindu almanac. The name means "five limbs", and those five are the tithi (the lunar day), the vara (the weekday and its ruling planet), the nakshatra (the lunar mansion the Moon is passing through), the yoga (a combination of the Sun and Moon positions) and the karana (half a tithi). Everything else a panchang carries — Rahu Kaal, the muhurats, choghadiya — is worked out from those five together with the day's sunrise and sunset.

New Delhi (28.61°N, 77.21°E), in Indian Standard Time, using the Lahiri or Chitrapaksha ayanamsha. Sunrise moves by more than an hour between the east and west of India, and every muhurat is derived from sunrise, so timings for your own city will differ. The tithi, nakshatra, yoga and karana themselves are the same everywhere in India; only the clock times change.

A tithi is not a calendar day. It is the time the Moon takes to gain twelve degrees on the Sun, which runs anywhere from about nineteen to about twenty-six hours — so a tithi almost never starts at midnight and almost never ends at one. A tithi that begins at 7:16 in the morning will usually end some time the following morning, and that is why the panchang day runs from sunrise to sunrise rather than from midnight to midnight.

A kshaya tithi begins after one sunrise and ends before the next, so it prevails at no sunrise at all and looks as though it is missing from the calendar. The opposite case, a vriddhi tithi, prevails at two sunrises and so occupies two days. Six kshaya and three vriddhi tithis fall between September and December 2026, and those are exactly the dates on which published almanacs differ. Where that happens we say so on the day's page rather than quietly picking a side.

Because most major festivals are not selected by the tithi at sunrise. Ganesh Chaturthi is chosen by which day has Chaturthi at midday, so in 2026 it falls on 14 September, a day that begins under Tritiya. Diwali is chosen by which day has Amavasya at dusk, so it falls on 8 November, a day that begins under Chaturdashi. Vijayadashami uses the afternoon, Dhanteras and Tulsi Vivah use dusk, Govardhan Puja uses the early morning, and Sankashti Chaturthi is decided by moonrise. Each festival page states which rule placed it.

Rahu Kaal is a period of roughly ninety minutes each day, traditionally avoided for starting anything new. The time between sunrise and sunset is divided into eight equal parts, and one of those parts belongs to Rahu — which part depends on the weekday. Because it is a fraction of the actual day, it is longer in summer and shorter in winter, and it moves with sunrise. Yamaganda and Gulika Kaal are worked out the same way, from different parts.

Because we cannot compute them to a standard we would stand behind. The rules are known in shape, but the tables they depend on — the per-nakshatra ghati values for Varjyam, the weekday muhurta ordinals for Dur Muhurat — differ between sources by enough to move a window by the better part of an hour. These are windows whose entire purpose is telling you not to begin something, so a wrong one is worse than none. The same goes for Godhuli Muhurat.

They are two ways of deciding where a lunar month ends. In the purnimanta reckoning, used across North India, the month ends at the full moon; in the amanta reckoning, used in the south and west, it ends at the new moon. The two agree through every waxing fortnight and differ by one month through every waning one — so the same dark fortnight is Ashwin Krishna in the north and Bhadrapada Krishna in the south. That is why Pitru Paksha is called an Ashwin observance in Delhi and a Bhadrapada one in Chennai. We show both.