Karva Chauth 2026 is Thursday, 29 October — and the number you need is not the date

Karva Chauth 2026 falls on Thursday, 29 October. That part is not in dispute, and you can see it on our Karva Chauth 2026 guide page alongside the rest of the autumn calendar.

The date is the easy half. Karva Chauth is one of the very few observances in the Hindu year whose ending is fixed by an event you have to watch for — the fast runs from sunrise to the sighting of the moon, and the moon does not rise at one national time. It rises at your longitude and your latitude, and across India that difference is 74 minutes: the moon clears the horizon at 7:42 pm in Kolkata and not until 8:56 pm in Mumbai. A time forwarded from a sister-in-law in another state is not approximately right. It is the wrong time, by more than an hour at the extremes.

So this guide does the thing that a publisher which computes can do and a publisher which copies cannot: it gives your city’s minute, states exactly how that minute was obtained, and then teaches the rule well enough that you could check it yourself.

Your city’s moonrise on 29 October 2026, computed

Times below are Indian Standard Time for Thursday, 29 October 2026, ordered east to west by the minute the moon actually appears. Sunrise is included because it is the other bound of the fast — and because it is the real deadline for sargi, which we come to below.

Every one of these moonrises falls inside the Chaturthi, so for a household anywhere in India the 29th is the day, without a rule to adjudicate.

• Kolkata — sunrise 5:39 am · moonrise 7:42 pm
• Patna — sunrise 5:55 am · moonrise 7:47 pm
• Lucknow — sunrise 6:14 am · moonrise 8:01 pm
• Chandigarh — sunrise 6:35 am · moonrise 8:07 pm
• Delhi — sunrise 6:31 am · moonrise 8:12 pm
• Amritsar — sunrise 6:44 am · moonrise 8:12 pm
• Jaipur — sunrise 6:34 am · moonrise 8:23 pm
• Bhopal — sunrise 6:24 am · moonrise 8:26 pm
• Indore — sunrise 6:29 am · moonrise 8:34 pm
• Hyderabad — sunrise 6:13 am · moonrise 8:37 pm
• Chennai — sunrise 6:02 am · moonrise 8:39 pm
• Ahmedabad — sunrise 6:43 am · moonrise 8:47 pm
• Bengaluru — sunrise 6:12 am · moonrise 8:51 pm
• Pune — sunrise 6:33 am · moonrise 8:53 pm
• Mumbai — sunrise 6:37 am · moonrise 8:56 pm

Why Mumbai waits 74 minutes longer than Kolkata — and why it is not only about the east

Two things set a moonrise time, and only the first is the one everybody names.

Longitude does most of the work. The Earth turns 15 degrees of longitude every hour, so a place further west meets the same point of sky later. Kolkata sits at about 88.4°E and Mumbai at about 72.9°E — 15.5 degrees apart, which is very close to a full hour of rotation. That alone accounts for roughly 62 of the 74 minutes.

Latitude does the rest, and it is the part that makes the list stop being a simple east-to-west queue. The moon on 29 October is south of the celestial equator, and a body with southern declination rises earlier the further south you stand and later the further north. That is why Chennai (13.1°N) sees the moon at 8:39 pm while Delhi (28.6°N), further east, sees it at 8:12 pm — the longitude gain and the latitude penalty partly cancel. It is also why Amritsar and Delhi, nearly 2.4 degrees of longitude apart, share the same 8:12 pm minute: Amritsar’s westward position is offset almost exactly by its more northerly latitude.

If that reasoning is familiar it is because it is the same geometry that makes sunrise, and every panchang limb built on sunrise, a local quantity rather than a national one — worked out at more length in Finding the Right Muhurat.

Why our minute may differ from the one you saw elsewhere — and what the difference rests on

You will find Karva Chauth moonrise times for the same city published several minutes apart, sometimes far more. That is not usually because someone is careless. It is because "moonrise" is not one quantity, and almost nobody says which one they computed.

Here is the convention behind every number on this page, stated so you can compare like with like:

• Upper limb, with atmospheric refraction. We take moonrise as the instant the leading edge of the disc appears above the horizon, with the standard 34 arcminutes of refraction applied. A table that uses the centre of the disc instead will read 1 to 3 minutes later for the same place — a real difference, not an error, and the single most common reason two honest tables disagree.
• City centre, at sea level. No elevation correction. If you stand higher you see the moon earlier; if your eastern horizon is a ridge or a tower block you see it later, sometimes by much more than any of these differences.
• Swiss Ephemeris, on the same code path our live Panchang uses for every other timing on the site — so the moonrise on this page and the moonrise the product shows you are the same computation, not two guesses.
• Rounded to the nearest minute. The underlying values carry seconds; publishing them would imply a precision the atmosphere does not.

The Chaturthi window, and why the Indian date carries no ambiguity this year

Karva Chauth is kept on the Chaturthi — the fourth tithi, or lunar day — of the Krishna Paksha, the waning fortnight. This year that fortnight begins after the Purnima of 26 October and runs to the Amavasya of 9 November. North India’s purnimanta calendars place it in the month of Kartik; the amanta calendars of western and southern India place the same days in Ashvin. One day, two month-names — which is why you will see both, and why neither is wrong.

A tithi is not a day. It is the interval during which the moon gains a fixed 12 degrees on the sun, and it can be shorter or longer than a civil day. In 2026 the Chaturthi runs from 1:07 am to 10:11 pm IST on 29 October — twenty-one hours and four minutes.

That window is what makes the Indian date clean. The Chaturthi is already running at sunrise everywhere in India, and it is still running at every Indian city’s moonrise — the latest of them, Mumbai at 8:56 pm, arrives with an hour and a quarter to spare. Both of the rules an almanac might apply, the sunrise rule and the moonrise rule, name the same day. There is nothing to adjudicate.

Hold on to that sentence, because it stops being true the moment you leave the country.

Sargi: the deadline is your sunrise, not "around 6:30"

Sargi — the pre-dawn meal, traditionally sent or prepared by the mother-in-law — has to be finished before the fast begins, and the fast begins at sunrise. Nearly every page that gives a sargi "time" gives a rule of thumb, usually somewhere around 6:30 am, applied to the whole country at once.

It is not a national number. Sunrise on 29 October is at 5:39 am in Kolkata and 6:44 am in Amritsar — sixty-five minutes apart. A Kolkata household working to 6:30 am would be eating an hour into the fast; an Amritsar household would be finishing needlessly early in the dark.

Use your own city’s sunrise from the list above, and give yourself a margin — most families finish sargi comfortably before first light rather than racing the minute, and the tradition has never treated the boundary as a stopwatch. What matters is the intent: the meal belongs to the night before the fast, not to the fast.

For any city not listed here, or for a different year, our live Panchang computes sunrise, moonrise and the day’s five limbs for whatever location you set.

Karva Chauth abroad: which evening is actually yours

This is the question that no published list answers honestly, and it has a real answer.

Karva Chauth is defined by a moonrise that falls inside the Chaturthi. In India this year that definition and the calendar date agree. Abroad they do not always, because the Chaturthi is fixed in absolute time — it opened at 7:37 pm UTC on 28 October and closed at 4:41 pm UTC on the 29th — while your moonrise is fixed by where you stand. Whether the two overlap is a question about your longitude, and it has three different answers.

In North America the qualifying moonrise is on Wednesday, 28 October — the day before the Indian date. By the evening of the 29th, local time, the Chaturthi has already ended. The moonrises that fall inside it are: New York 7:29 pm on the 28th, Toronto 7:38 pm, Chicago 7:20 pm, San Francisco 8:02 pm. Note also what this does to the fast itself: sargi would have to be finished by sunrise on the 28th (7:21 am in New York), making the fast about twelve hours rather than the fourteen a Delhi household keeps.

In the Gulf, Southeast Asia and Australia the qualifying moonrise is on Thursday, 29 October, the same date as India. Dubai 8:23 pm, Singapore 9:57 pm, Sydney 11:08 pm, Melbourne 11:49 pm. Dubai is the tightest of them: its moon clears the horizon at 4:23 pm UTC and the Chaturthi closes at 4:41 pm UTC, so the fast ends with seventeen minutes of the tithi left. The Australian times are worth planning around — a fast that ends at ten to midnight is a different evening from one that ends at half past eight.

And London has no qualifying moonrise at all this year. The moon rises over London at 5:25 pm on the 28th, more than two hours before the Chaturthi opens at 7:37 pm; it then stays up, sets at 11:34 am on the 29th, and does not rise again until 6:21 pm — by which time the Chaturthi has been over for an hour and forty minutes. The tithi opens and closes entirely in the gap between two consecutive moonrises.

That sounds like a mistake and it is not. The Chaturthi lasts 21 hours 4 minutes; successive moonrises at a fixed place are roughly 24 hours 56 minutes apart. The difference — very nearly four hours — is a genuine window in which a place’s moonrise can miss the tithi altogether. Something like one longitude in six will fall in it on any given occasion. It is the exact lunar counterpart of a tithi that touches no sunrise, which is a case Indian almanac tradition has long recognised and which our own Pitru Paksha 2026 tithi calendar had to resolve this year for an Ashtami that reached no sunrise in Delhi.

So what should a household abroad actually do?

Two readings are defensible, and families genuinely follow both. We are not going to pretend there is one answer, because there is not.

Follow the Indian date. Keep the fast on Thursday 29 October wherever you are, and break it at your own city’s moonrise that evening. This is what most diaspora households do, and it has real reasons behind it: it keeps you in step with parents and in-laws back home, it is what a family video call at moonrise assumes, and a vrat has always been as much about the household keeping it together as about the sky. On this reading the London problem disappears — you simply use the moonrise of the 29th, at 6:21 pm.

Apply the rule where you stand. Keep the fast on the day whose moonrise falls inside the Chaturthi — the 28th in North America, the 29th in the Gulf, Singapore and Australia. This is the more literal reading of what the observance is, and it is the same logic by which a shraddha performed in Toronto is timed by Toronto’s aparahna rather than Delhi’s, a case we worked through in our Pitru Paksha abroad guide.

For London specifically, where the rule gives no answer at all, the honest advice is the first reading: keep the 29th and use that evening’s moonrise at 6:21 pm. A rule that returns nothing is not instructing you to skip the vrat; it is telling you the rule has reached its edge, and where a rule reaches its edge, the tradition falls back on the community’s practice — which in London is the Indian date.

Whichever you choose, the useful thing is to choose it deliberately and tell the family, rather than discovering on the evening that half the household is fasting a day apart. If you would like to talk it through for your own city, ask our Purohit — it computes the panchang for any location and any date, so it can put your own moonrise and the tithi window side by side.

The evening itself, in short

The ritual sequence does not change with the date, and we have written it out in full — sargi, the day, the kathas, the thali and the chhalni — in the Karva Chauth vrat, sargi and moonrise ritual guide. In brief, once the moon clears the rooftops: sight it through the sieve with the lamp beside it, offer the arghya of water from the karva with rice, turn and view your spouse through the same sieve, take the first sip and the first morsel from their hand, and touch the feet of the elders.

One practical note that follows from the numbers above: keep the half-hour after your listed moonrise free, not the half-hour before it. The minute in the table is when the moon’s edge crosses a flat sea-level horizon. From a balcony in a built-up city it will be some minutes more before it is genuinely visible, and on a hazy October evening more still.

Honest questions, honest answers

Three come up every year, and one is new this year because of the London finding.

• What if the moon never shows — cloud, haze, a blocked horizon? Break the fast at your city’s listed moonrise time, offering the arghya in the moon’s direction. Many families keep the custom of looking for the moon’s reflection in a bowl of water rather than requiring a clear sky. The computed minute is precisely what makes this workable: you are not guessing, you know the moon is there.
• Is the puja muhurat a separate thing from moonrise? Yes. The evening puja and the katha are usually kept in the hour or so before moonrise, and the widely-published "puja muhurat" for Karva Chauth is generally the pradosh period — the stretch beginning at sunset. Sunset on the 29th is 5:39 pm in Delhi and 6:07 pm in Mumbai, and our live Panchang gives it for your own city, so you can place the katha between sunset and your moonrise without needing anyone else’s window.
• Should a household abroad keep two evenings to be safe? No — and no tradition asks for that. Pick one of the two readings above, apply it consistently, and let the other go. Keeping a nirjala fast twice in two days is a genuine physical cost and it buys nothing the tradition recognises.
• Who should keep a gentler form of the fast? Anyone pregnant, nursing, diabetic, on regular medication, or recovering from illness. The classical nirjala form — without even water — is not a test, and every regional tradition carries lighter versions: fruit and milk through the day, or water permitted. Our ritual guide sets these out.

Going deeper

If you want the stories rather than the clock — the katha of Veervati and the false moon, the Draupadi variant, why the sieve — the Karva Chauth vrat, sargi and moonrise ritual guide is the companion piece to this one.

If what interests you is the machinery — how a tithi is computed, why an observance can move by a day between two cities, and how the classical rules resolve the awkward cases — three pieces build that picture: Finding the Right Muhurat on why every panchang limb is local, the Dussehra 2026 guide on how a rule and a date can genuinely part company, and the Pitru Paksha 2026 tithi calendar on a fortnight where they part company four times over.

And for the rest of the season — Diwali, Dhanteras, Govardhan Puja and Bhai Dooj all fall within eight days of each other in November this year — the 2026 festival calendar carries the dates with the same computation behind them.