The full moon that ends the holiest month

Kartik Purnima is the full-moon day of Kartik, the lunar month that follows Diwali. In the reckoning used across most of North India, Kartik begins the day after the Sharad Purnima of Ashwin and ends on this full moon — so Kartik Purnima is not a day inside the month so much as the day that closes it.

The month has a reputation. Kartik is widely held to be the most meritorious month of the year for simple, repeatable acts: bathing at dawn, lighting lamps, eating lightly, giving something away. Almost nothing about it is elaborate. That is rather the point — Kartik is the tradition’s argument that consistency outperforms grandeur, and its practices are deliberately within reach of a household with no priest, no budget and no free daytime.

Kartik Purnima is where that month is cashed in. It carries three distinct observances stacked on one tithi: the last and most valued day of the Kartik snan (the dawn bath); the deep-daan (दीपदान, "lamp-offering"), in which lamps are floated on a river or set out at dusk; and Tripurari Purnima, which commemorates Shiva’s destruction of the three cities of the asuras. In Varanasi the evening has a fourth name and a life of its own — Dev Deepawali, the Diwali of the gods.

This guide gives you the computed date, the reasoning behind it, the vidhi, and the stories with their actual sources. If you are assembling the whole season, our Festival Calendar 2026 lays out the year around it.

Kartik Purnima 2026: Tuesday, November 24 — and this year there is no city split

Hindu festival days are fixed by tithis (lunar days), which are defined by the angular distance between the moon and the sun and can begin at any hour of the clock. To attach a tithi to a calendar date, the tradition asks a simple question: which tithi is running at sunrise? For a snan-and-vrat day like this one, the sunrise reading is the one that governs.

Using the same swisseph-based panchang engine that powers our live Panchang, Kartik Shukla Purnima in 2026 begins at 11:42 pm IST on Monday, November 23 and ends at 8:23 pm IST on Tuesday, November 24.

Now apply the rule. Sunrise across India on Tuesday, November 24 runs from about 5:54 am in Kolkata to about 7:05 am in Amritsar — a spread of roughly seventy minutes. Every one of those sunrises falls inside a window that opened at 11:42 the previous night and does not close until well after dark. So the Purnima is running at sunrise everywhere in the country, and Kartik Purnima 2026 is Tuesday, November 24, from Guwahati to Ahmedabad, with nothing to argue about.

That is worth saying plainly, because it is not always so. Four days earlier, Dev Uthani Ekadashi genuinely splits: its tithi ended at 6:32 am IST, right inside the spread of Indian sunrises, so Kolkata and Varanasi keep it on one morning and Delhi and Mumbai on another. We worked that case through in detail in our Dev Uthani Ekadashi and Tulsi Vivah guide. The contrast is the useful lesson: a festival date is contested when the tithi boundary lands near dawn, and uncontested when it does not. Kartik Purnima 2026 is the easy kind.

The evening is the part that travels badly

Here is where a guide that only gives you a date will let you down. Kartik Purnima has a morning rite and an evening rite, and they are governed by different moments.

The snan and the vrat follow sunrise, which we have just settled. But deep-daan is an evening observance, kept at pradosh — the twilight window that opens at sunset. For the lamp-offering to sit inside the festival, the Purnima has to still be running when your sun goes down.

Within India that is comfortable. Sunset on November 24 runs from about 4:51 pm in Kolkata to about 5:59 pm in Mumbai, and the tithi does not end until 8:23 pm IST. Every Indian city therefore gets its deep-daan on the evening of Tuesday, November 24 — the same evening as Dev Deepawali at the ghats, which is exactly why the two coincide.

Outside India the tithi is the same global instant, but your sunset is your own, and the two can come apart. Converted to local clocks, the Purnima window runs from 6:12 pm on November 23 to 2:53 pm on November 24 in London; from 1:12 pm on the 23rd to 9:53 am on the 24th in New York and Toronto; and from 10:12 am on the 23rd to 6:53 am on the 24th in San Francisco. Set those against local sunsets and the picture changes:

• New York, Toronto and Chicago — the Purnima has already ended by mid-morning on November 24, so the qualifying dusk is the evening of Monday, November 23 (sunset 4:32 pm in New York, 4:46 pm in Toronto, 4:24 pm in Chicago), which falls inside the window. The snan is still Tuesday morning; the lamps are Monday evening.
• London — the only city in this list with no qualifying evening at all. The tithi begins at 6:12 pm on November 23, twelve minutes after that day’s 4:00 pm sunset; and it ends at 2:53 pm on November 24, an hour before that day’s sunset. The Purnima covers London’s Tuesday sunrise but neither of its dusks.
• San Francisco — the sharpest case in the whole table. The tithi ends at 6:53:36 am local on November 24 and sunrise is at 6:59:16 am. It misses by five minutes and forty seconds, which is inside the margin where the sunrise convention itself (disc centre versus upper limb, refraction, your actual horizon) decides the answer. Treat San Francisco as genuinely borderline and check your own coordinates on the live Panchang.
• Dubai (sunset 5:29 pm), Singapore (6:53 pm) and Sydney (7:44 pm) all keep both the snan and the deep-daan on Tuesday, November 24 local, exactly as India does.

What to do when the tithi and your sunset will not line up

The London case is not a trick question — it happens somewhere in the world every festival, and it has a settled answer in practice, if not a single ruling text.

The general principle the tradition uses when a rite’s proper window is unavailable is to keep the rite at the nearest point where its intention holds, and not to abandon it. For an evening lamp-offering that means one of three things, in descending order of how commonly they are followed abroad. Keep the deep-daan on the evening the Purnima is running locally, if there is one — this is what New York and Toronto should do on November 23. Where there is no such evening, keep it on the evening of the festival day itself as India keeps it, which for London means Tuesday, November 24 after 4:00 pm, accepting that the tithi has closed. Or keep it on the evening closest to the tithi, which in London is the same Tuesday dusk.

The convergent answer for London, by two of those three routes, is Tuesday evening — which is also what almost every diaspora temple will do, because they follow the Indian festival date. There is no reason for a household to fight that. What is worth knowing is the reasoning behind it, so the choice is informed rather than accidental.

One thing to avoid: do not let the tithi arithmetic talk you out of the observance. The Kartik practices are valued precisely because they are small and repeatable. A lamp lit at the wrong minute with attention is nearer the point of the month than a lamp not lit at all.

Kartik snan and deep-daan: what they are, and where they are praised

Kartik snan is the practice of bathing before sunrise through the month of Kartik — traditionally in a river, in practice at home for most people. It is paired with a lighter diet, often one meal a day, and frequently with abstention from certain foods. The month’s discipline is a package, and the bath is its anchor.

Deep-daan is the giving of light: lamps floated on flowing water, set on the steps of a ghat, placed under a tulsi plant, or arranged at the threshold and on the terrace. Daan means "giving", and the word is doing real work here — the lamp is not decoration but an offering, made and then released. The lamps floated on a river are meant to leave; that is the whole gesture.

The Kartika Mahatmya, a section that appears in both the Skanda Purana and the Padma Purana, is the body of text that praises these practices most directly, and it is where the extravagant claims about Kartik’s merit generally come from. Read those passages the way the tradition reads its own mahatmyas — as praise-literature written to make a practice attractive, not as an actuarial table. The practice is genuinely valuable; the arithmetic of merit is not the reason to keep it.

A practical note on floating lamps that has become unavoidable. The traditional diya is unbaked clay with a cotton wick and ghee or oil, all of which return to the river. The modern thermocol or plastic float does not. If you are offering on flowing water, use clay, or use a leaf boat, or set the lamps on the bank instead. A rite whose meaning is giving something back to the river should not leave the river worse.

Tripurari Purnima: the burning of the three cities

The second name of this day is Tripurari Purnima, and behind it is one of the more striking narratives in the Shaiva corpus.

Three asura brothers — the sons of Tarakasura — win, through long austerity, three fortress-cities: one of gold, one of silver, one of iron. The cities are mobile and separately positioned, and the boon protecting them is precisely constructed: they can be destroyed only when all three align, and only by a single arrow. The alignment is rare, the shot is nearly impossible, and the brothers are for a long time invincible.

The story is told at length in the Shiva Purana, in the Rudra Samhita, and the same episode is referred to in the Mahabharata’s Karna Parva. The version that has entered popular retelling has Shiva prepare for the shot with the whole cosmos as his equipment — the earth as his chariot, the sun and moon as its wheels, Mount Meru as the bow, Vishnu as the arrow — and then, at the moment the cities align, release it. Shiva is Tripurari from that act: the enemy of Tripura.

What the story is doing is worth a sentence, because it is easy to read it as a simple monster-slaying. The three cities are read in the commentarial tradition as the three states in which the self ordinarily lives — and the single arrow at the single moment of alignment as the undivided attention that ends them together. That reading is why the day is a lamp festival rather than a martial one. If the symbolic layer interests you, our Concepts and Contrasts encyclopedia works through this family of ideas, and the Om Jai Shiv Omkara aarati is the one most households sing on a Shaiva evening.

Honest caveat: Purana narratives exist in multiple recensions and the details vary — the number of brothers’ boons, who supplies which part of the chariot, how long the austerity lasted. Where a retelling gives you a very precise detail with great confidence, it is usually picking one recension without saying so.

Dev Deepawali at the ghats — and how recent it actually is

On the evening of Kartik Purnima, the stone steps of Varanasi’s riverfront are lined with lamps from Ravidas Ghat to Rajghat, and the city calls it Dev Deepawali — the Diwali of the gods, kept fifteen days after the human one. It is now among the most photographed nights in India.

The honest history is more interesting than the mythic framing. Lamps on Kartik Purnima at Varanasi are old, and deep-daan on the ghats is an established Kartik practice of long standing. But Dev Deepawali as the mass, city-wide, organised festival that appears in photographs is recent — it grew from lamp-lighting at Panchganga Ghat into a civic event over the last few decades, and much of its present scale, including the coordinated lighting of the full ghat sweep, dates from the 1980s onward. Guides that describe the modern spectacle as ancient are conflating a genuinely old rite with a genuinely modern festival.

Saying so takes nothing away from it. A living tradition is allowed to grow new limbs, and a practice that has drawn hundreds of thousands of people back to a river to light lamps is doing what the Kartik texts asked for. It is simply better to know which part is which.

If you are going: the lamps are lit at dusk, so the window is Tuesday, November 24 from about 5:08 pm in Varanasi, and the full moon rises at about 4:40 pm — before sunset, which is what makes the photographs work. If you are not going, the observance transfers completely. A row of lamps on your own threshold at your own dusk is the same rite.

Your city, computed

Times below are computed for the city centre for Tuesday, November 24, 2026, in local time. Sunrise governs the snan and the vrat; sunset opens the pradosh window for the deep-daan; and the moonrise is included because on a Purnima the full moon comes up around sunset, and in most of these cities it is already above the horizon when the lamps are lit.

For the Indian cities, all three columns fall inside the tithi and the day is simply Tuesday, November 24. For the cities marked otherwise, read the previous sections before acting on the row.

• Kolkata — sunrise 5:54 am · sunset 4:51 pm · moonrise 4:24 pm. Patna — 6:13 am · 4:58 pm · 4:31 pm. Varanasi — 6:21 am · 5:08 pm · 4:40 pm.
• Lucknow — sunrise 6:32 am · sunset 5:13 pm · moonrise 4:45 pm. Haridwar — 6:49 am · 5:18 pm · 4:48 pm. Delhi — 6:50 am · 5:24 pm · 4:56 pm.
• Jaipur — sunrise 6:52 am · sunset 5:33 pm · moonrise 5:06 pm. Pushkar — 6:57 am · 5:39 pm · 5:12 pm. Amritsar — 7:05 am · 5:28 pm · 4:57 pm.
• Chennai — sunrise 6:11 am · sunset 5:39 pm · moonrise 5:19 pm. Bengaluru — 6:22 am · 5:50 pm · 5:30 pm. Hyderabad — 6:25 am · 5:39 pm · 5:17 pm.
• Pune — sunrise 6:45 am · sunset 5:56 pm · moonrise 5:34 pm. Mumbai — 6:50 am · 5:59 pm · 5:37 pm. Ahmedabad — 6:58 am · 5:53 pm · 5:29 pm.
• Dubai — 6:41 am · 5:29 pm. Singapore — 6:49 am · 6:53 pm. Sydney — 5:38 am · 7:44 pm. All three keep both rites on Tuesday, November 24 local.
• New York — snan Tuesday 6:52 am, but deep-daan Monday, November 23 at 4:32 pm. Toronto — snan Tuesday 7:22 am, deep-daan Monday 4:46 pm. Chicago — snan Tuesday 6:50 am, deep-daan Monday 4:24 pm.
• London — snan Tuesday 7:32 am; no sunset inside the tithi. Keep the deep-daan at Tuesday’s 4:00 pm dusk with the Indian date, as above. San Francisco — borderline at both ends; check your own coordinates.

The vidhi, step by step

Nothing here needs a priest, and none of it needs to be expensive. The sequence below is the common North Indian household form; regional practice varies and the variations are noted where they matter.

• Before dawn on Tuesday, November 24 — the snan. Bathe before sunrise. If you are at a river, that is the traditional form; at home, add a little Ganga jal to the water if you keep it, and take the bath as the observance rather than as preparation for one.
• At the bath — the sankalpa. State plainly what you are keeping and for whom. A sankalpa is a spoken intention, not a formula you must get right; your own language is acceptable and always has been.
• Through the day — the vrat. Most households keep a light single meal (havishya-style: simple, unspiced, no grain for the stricter form) and avoid onion, garlic and meat. Those who cannot fast keep the diet light and give the fast’s value in daan instead. Nobody unwell, pregnant, elderly or on medication should keep a strict fast; the tradition consistently exempts them.
• During the day — the daan. Give something away, and prefer the useful over the ceremonial: food, blankets, a contribution that will actually be spent. Lamp-oil, ghee and warm clothing are the season’s conventional gifts and remain genuinely apt in late November.
• Many households keep a Satyanarayan Puja on this Purnima, which is the classical day for it. If yours does, our step-by-step Satyanarayan Puja vidhi has the full sequence, the samagri and the katha.
• At sunset — the deep-daan. Light the lamps at your own pradosh, using the times above. Clay diyas with cotton wicks and ghee or mustard oil; an odd number is customary but not obligatory. Set them at the threshold, on the terrace, at the tulsi, and by a window facing the water if there is water.
• If you are at a river — the offering. Float the lamps on a leaf or clay base only. Say what you are giving and let it go without following it with your eyes; the releasing is the rite.
• In the evening — the aarati and the moon. Sing the aarati your family keeps; Shiva’s is the seasonal one for Tripurari Purnima. Then look at the moon. It is a full-moon festival and the moon is the visible half of it, which is easy to forget indoors.

What else this full moon carries

Kartik Purnima is unusually crowded, and a guide that presents only the Vaishnava-Shaiva household observance leaves out most of what is happening on the day. The significant parallel observances, kept honestly separate:

• Guru Nanak Jayanti (Prakash Parv) — Sikhs mark the birth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev Ji on Kartik Purnima, which in 2026 places it on Tuesday, November 24. It is an independent observance with its own form — the Akhand Path in the days before, the Nagar Kirtan procession, and langar — and it is not a version of the Hindu festival, though the two share the tithi.
• Pushkar Mela — the Pushkar fair in Rajasthan culminates on Kartik Purnima with a bath in the Pushkar lake, and the town’s Brahma temple, one of very few anywhere, draws its largest crowds of the year on this day.
• Ganga snan — Garh Mukteshwar, Haridwar, Prayagraj, Varanasi and Sonepur all hold major Kartik Purnima bathing gatherings; Sonepur in Bihar runs the cattle fair alongside it.
• Jain observance — for Jains, Kartik Purnima marks the end of Chaturmas and the reopening of the Shatrunjaya (Palitana) yatra, undertaken on this day by large numbers of pilgrims. Again, a distinct tradition keeping its own festival on a shared date.
• Kartikeya — some traditions, particularly in the Himalayan north and in the south, associate the month and this full moon with Kartikeya, and hold darshan on this day to be especially valuable.
• Regionally, the emphasis varies sharply: in Varanasi the day is the evening lamps, in Rajasthan it is the fair and the lake, in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh it is the river bath, and in much of the south the observance is quieter and more temple-centred than domestic.

Keeping Kartik Purnima away from India

Three practical problems recur for families abroad, and each has a workable answer.

The timing, which is the one this guide has spent the most words on. Settle two moments, not one: your sunrise for the snan and your sunset for the lamps, and check whether the Purnima is running at each. In North America they can fall on different calendar days, which surprises people who have only ever needed a single date. The live Panchang will give you both for your own coordinates, and Purohit Ji will do the reasoning with you if the rows above do not cover your city.

The water. Most families abroad have no river they may lawfully float a lamp on, and many local authorities prohibit it outright. This is a smaller loss than it feels. Deep-daan is fundamentally the offering of light; the water is the traditional medium, not the requirement. Lamps at the threshold, on a balcony, or set around a bowl of water indoors all carry the rite. Where open flame is not permitted at all, an LED lamp with the intention stated is what the tradition’s own reasoning supports, and no one should feel the observance has failed.

The working Tuesday. November 24, 2026 is a mid-week day in the diaspora and the snan is a pre-dawn rite. Keep the bath early and quietly, keep the diet light through the day, and hold the lamps for the evening when the household is back together. Our guide for families abroad using the panchang covers the general method for relocating a festival without hollowing it out.

And if the Kartik season as a whole is what you are planning, this full moon is the last of the sequence: Dhanteras and the five days of Diwali open it, Chhath follows a week later, Dev Uthani Ekadashi reopens the wedding calendar on the 20th or 21st, and Kartik Purnima closes the month on the 24th. Once it does, the wedding and Griha Pravesh season is properly open — the muhurat finder will give you the actual windows rather than a month-name.

What to actually do this Kartik Purnima

If you take one thing from this guide, let it be the two-moment habit rather than the date.

On Tuesday, November 24, 2026, bathe before your own sunrise and say what you are keeping. Eat lightly. Give something away that someone will actually use. Then, at your own dusk — Tuesday in India and most of the world, Monday the 23rd if you are in New York, Toronto or Chicago — light the lamps and put them where they can be seen. Clay if you are near water. Look at the moon before you go in.

That is the entire observance, and it has not changed in any way that matters. The month spends four weeks arguing that small things done consistently outrank large things done once. Its last day is not the moment to abandon the argument.