2026 Calendar
Hindu festival dates 2026: Diwali, Holi, Navratri and more
Every date below was read from a published reference panchang’s own pages for 2026, not typed from memory, and the list is re-checked when a source revises a date. Dates are for India. Where a festival is kept on a different day in a region or a family, the reason is almost always one of the three explained after the table.
The dates
| Festival | 2026 date |
|---|---|
| Makar Sankranti | Wednesday 14 January |
| Vasant Panchami | Friday 23 January |
| Maha Shivaratri | Sunday 15 February |
| Holika Dahan | Monday 2 March |
| Holi (Rangwali) | Tuesday 3 March |
| Gudi Padwa | Thursday 19 March |
| Ugadi | Thursday 19 March |
| Chaitra Navratri begins (Ghatasthapana) | Thursday 19 March |
| Rama Navami | Thursday 26 March |
| Hanuman Jayanti | Thursday 2 April |
| Akshaya Tritiya | Sunday 19 April |
| Guru Purnima | Wednesday 29 July |
| Nag Panchami | Monday 17 August |
| Raksha Bandhan | Friday 28 August |
| Krishna Janmashtami | Friday 4 September |
| Ganesh Chaturthi | Monday 14 September |
| Anant Chaturdashi | Friday 25 September |
| Pitru Paksha begins (Purnima Shraddha) | Saturday 26 September |
| Sarva Pitru Amavasya | Saturday 10 October |
| Sharad Navratri begins (Ghatasthapana) | Sunday 11 October |
| Maha Ashtami | Monday 19 October |
| Vijayadashami (Dussehra) | Tuesday 20 October |
| Karwa Chauth | Thursday 29 October |
| Dhanteras | Friday 6 November |
| Diwali (Lakshmi Puja) | Sunday 8 November |
| Govardhan Puja | Tuesday 10 November |
| Bhai Dooj | Wednesday 11 November |
| Chhath Puja | Sunday 15 November |
Diwali in 2026 runs Thursday 5 November to Wednesday 11 November:
- Dhanteras: Friday 6 November
- Naraka Chaturdashi and Lakshmi Puja: both Sunday 8 November, because the Chaturdashi and Amavasya tithis share one civil day this year
- Govardhan Puja: Tuesday 10 November (morning muhurat by city)
- Bhai Dooj: Wednesday 11 November
Sharad Navratri begins on Sunday 11 October, with the kalash sthapana window detailed in our Navratri 2026 Ghatasthapana guide. For Bengal and eastern celebrations, the pandal schedule and Sandhi Puja timings are in our Durga Puja 2026 dates guide, and Jamshedpur’s pandals and visarjan ghats in our Jamshedpur Durga Puja pandals guide. If you read the Durga Saptashati on the nine days, the Devi Kavach comes first each day; its full text, with the Hindi meaning of every verse, is on this site.
Chhath Puja begins on Friday 13 November with Nahay Khay, Kharna is on Saturday 14 November, the evening arghya on Sunday 15 November and the morning arghya on Monday 16 November. (Corrected on 20 October: this paragraph had each day one day late.) The arghya times for 30 cities are in our Chhath Puja 2026 arghya times guide. To understand the ancient traditions behind the festival, see our guide on who started Chhath Puja.
Dates checked in September 2026. The Diwali sequence is for New Delhi and was re-checked on 7 October 2026.
Why a festival date can differ by a day
Three things move a Hindu festival by a day between two calendars, and none of them is an error.
Which tithi is “today’s”. A festival belongs to a lunar day, a tithi, and a tithi is a fraction of the moon’s cycle, not a sunrise-to-sunrise day. It can begin at 3 PM and end at noon the next afternoon. The general rule is that the day at whose sunrise the tithi is running takes its name (the udaya tithi), but many festivals have their own rule instead: Diwali’s Lakshmi Puja wants Amavasya in the evening, at Pradosh, so it goes to the day on which the tithi covers dusk; Janmashtami wants Ashtami at midnight; Karwa Chauth wants Chaturthi at moonrise. When a tithi straddles two civil days, these rules can place the festival on different days in different traditions, and a panchang has to choose.
Amanta or Purnimanta. North India ends a lunar month at the full moon; the south, Gujarat and Maharashtra end it at the new moon. The same day therefore sits in a different named month, which changes nothing for most festivals but matters for any fixed as “the Nth tithi of month X”: Krishna-paksha festivals in particular can fall in different named months, and a few are kept on different days as a result.
Where you are. A tithi’s start and end are moments in time, the same everywhere, but sunrise is not, so “the tithi at sunrise” can differ between, say, Kolkata and Dubai on the same date. Regional panchangs are computed for their own place. Most differences you will meet between a printed calendar and this table are one of these three, and the reference panchang’s page for the festival gives the tithi timings that explain it.
The muhurat on the day is a different question
A festival date tells you the day. The hour within it (when to do the Lakshmi Puja, when to buy the gold on Dhanteras, when to tie the rakhi) is a muhurat, fixed by the same panchang rules but for a moment rather than a date, and it depends on the city because it is set from that city’s sunset or sunrise. That is what the rest of this site computes:
- The choghadiya gives the good and bad periods of any day, in your city: the everyday tool for choosing an hour on a day already chosen.
- Rahu Kaal is the window to keep a beginning out of, on every day including a festival.
- Abhijit Muhurat, the midday window, is the safe default when a ceremony has no fixed hour of its own.
Some festivals carry their own muhurat rule that overrides the daily tables: Lakshmi Puja in Pradosh Kaal after sunset, Holika Dahan after sunset once Bhadra has passed, Raksha Bandhan outside Bhadra. For those a reference panchang gives the specific window for the year. Two days in the year are held auspicious throughout, without a muhurat: Akshaya Tritiya (19 April 2026) and, in the same spirit, Dhanteras (6 November) for purchases.
Sarvartha Siddhi Yoga and the other named yogas: not listed here yet
Alongside the festivals, panchangs list days of Sarvartha Siddhi Yoga, Amrit Siddhi Yoga and Ravi Yoga, combinations of a weekday and the moon’s nakshatra that tradition holds to be good for any undertaking. They are computed, not fixed: a given nakshatra falling on a given weekday. This site does not yet publish a computed list of them, and this page does not copy one from elsewhere: a rule the page cannot show is a rule you cannot check. When the nakshatra-and-weekday tables are verified against reference panchangs they will appear here, computed for the year, and checked the same way as the table above.
How this list is kept
The table is generated from the reference panchang’s pages, not typed from memory. If a source revises a date (it happens when a tithi is close to a boundary and a panchang changes its rule), this page will be updated and the “updated” line at the top will change. If you find a date that disagrees with your own panchang, the contact page is the place to say so: with the source, it is usually one of the three reasons above, and worth a note here.
Today’s timings for this
This post describes what the panchang tradition says about a window; it is not personal advice. Times on the linked pages are computed for the city you choose.