Lakshmi Puja 2026 is Sunday, 8 November — and the date is the easy half

There is no controversy about the date this year. The corridor opens with Dhanteras on Friday the 6th; Naraka Chaturdashi runs on Saturday evening and Sunday morning; Govardhan Puja and Bhai Dooj both fall on Tuesday the 10th, leaving Monday the 9th carrying nothing at all, which our Govardhan Puja and Bhai Dooj guide works through. The Lakshmi Puja itself belongs to the Amavasya, the new moon at the centre of the corridor, and in 2026 that lands on Sunday, 8 November.

What a household actually needs on the evening itself is not the date. It is the minute the Pradosh window opens where it lives. And because Pradosh Kaal begins at sunset, that minute is genuinely local: on 8 November it arrives at 4:37 pm in Guwahati and not until 6:02 pm in Mumbai. Both are correct. Neither is a national time.

This is where a forwarded WhatsApp timing does its damage. A muhurat computed for Delhi, sent to a family in Pune, is 27 minutes early. The same timing sent to Kolkata is 36 minutes late. Nobody in that chain has done anything wrong except assume a window that starts at sunset can be published as one number for a country 29 degrees wide.

What Pradosh Kaal is, and where the two hours and twenty-four minutes comes from

An observance in this tradition is not simply attached to a tithi. It is attached to that tithi being present during a particular part of the day, called the kala. Lakshmi Puja belongs to pradosha (प्रदोष), the twilight window that opens at sunset. Govardhan Puja belongs to pratah-kala, the first fifth of the daylight after sunrise. Bhai Dooj belongs to aparahna, the fourth of five equal daylight parts. These assignments come from the dharmanibandha literature — the medieval digests of ritual law — whose standard authorities here are the Nirnaya Sindhu and the Dharmasindhu.

How long is Pradosh? We use two hours and twenty-four minutes from sunset, and that is the figure our own festival-date auditor uses when it decides which civil day a pradosh-anchored rite falls on. It is worth being precise about which half of that window is hard and which is soft. The opening is astronomical: sunset is a computed instant and there is nothing conventional about it. The closing is a convention — some almanacs treat pradosh as a proportional share of twilight rather than a fixed clock interval, so their close will differ from ours by a few minutes. No decision a household makes on Diwali night turns on those minutes; every decision turns on the opening.

Inside the window, tradition prefers a narrower slice still: the portion during which a sthir lagna — a fixed Ascendant — is rising. That preference is real, it is why almanacs publish a shorter "Lakshmi Puja muhurat" inside Pradosh, and we come back to it below, including why this guide gives you the Pradosh window and not that narrower one.

Your city’s Pradosh window on Sunday, 8 November 2026, computed

Times below are Indian Standard Time for Sunday, 8 November 2026, ordered by the minute the sun actually sets. The first time in each row is when Pradosh opens; the second is when it closes on the two-hour-twenty-four-minute reckoning above.

Read your own row and ignore the rest. The point of the table is not that the spread is interesting — it is that seventeen households following the same rule on the same evening will light the lamp at seventeen different times, and every one of them is right.

• Guwahati — sunset 4:37 pm — Pradosh 4:37 pm to 7:01 pm
• Kolkata — sunset 4:56 pm — Pradosh 4:56 pm to 7:20 pm
• Patna — sunset 5:04 pm — Pradosh 5:04 pm to 7:28 pm
• Varanasi — sunset 5:13 pm — Pradosh 5:13 pm to 7:37 pm
• Lucknow — sunset 5:19 pm — Pradosh 5:19 pm to 7:43 pm
• Chandigarh — sunset 5:30 pm — Pradosh 5:30 pm to 7:54 pm
• Delhi — sunset 5:32 pm — Pradosh 5:32 pm to 7:56 pm
• Nagpur — sunset 5:35 pm — Pradosh 5:35 pm to 7:59 pm
• Amritsar — sunset 5:36 pm — Pradosh 5:36 pm to 8:00 pm
• Bhopal — sunset 5:39 pm — Pradosh 5:39 pm to 8:03 pm
• Jaipur — sunset 5:40 pm — Pradosh 5:40 pm to 8:04 pm
• Chennai — sunset 5:40 pm — Pradosh 5:40 pm to 8:04 pm
• Hyderabad — sunset 5:42 pm — Pradosh 5:42 pm to 8:06 pm
• Bengaluru — sunset 5:51 pm — Pradosh 5:51 pm to 8:15 pm
• Ahmedabad — sunset 5:58 pm — Pradosh 5:58 pm to 8:22 pm
• Pune — sunset 5:59 pm — Pradosh 5:59 pm to 8:23 pm
• Mumbai — sunset 6:02 pm — Pradosh 6:02 pm to 8:26 pm

Why one country gets 85 different minutes — and why it is not a simple east-to-west queue

India keeps one clock across roughly 29 degrees of longitude, so the sun genuinely sets at different times on the same clock. That is the larger part of the spread and the part everyone expects: Guwahati in the far east loses the sun first, Mumbai in the west keeps it longest, and the gap between them on this date is 85 minutes.

The part that surprises people is that the order is not purely east to west. Chennai sits three degrees east of Delhi and still gets its sunset eight minutes later. In early November the sun is well south of the celestial equator, which shortens the day at northern latitudes and lengthens it in the south — so latitude pushes back against longitude, and a southern city holds the light after a northern city further west has lost it. Guwahati is both the most easterly city in the table and one of the most northerly, which is why it is first by such a margin.

One consequence is worth pulling out, because it is the practical shape of the whole table: there are only 59 minutes on the evening of the 8th — 6:02 pm to 7:01 pm IST — during which all seventeen cities are inside Pradosh at the same time. That is the window in which a family spread across the country could genuinely light the lamp together. Before 6:02 pm Mumbai has not reached sunset; after 7:01 pm Guwahati has already closed.

The convention behind our minute, and the check that it holds

Sunset sounds like a single unambiguous instant and is not. A published time depends on which part of the sun you mean and whether you account for the atmosphere bending its light. We take the upper limb of the disc with atmospheric refraction — the moment the sun’s edge touches the horizon — computed at the city centre at sea level, and we round to the nearest minute. This is the same convention our panchang uses everywhere else on the site, and it is the one the widely-used Indian almanacs publish.

That convention is worth stating because tables that do not state theirs disagree with each other by more than they should. Using the disc centre without refraction moves every time by four to five minutes, which is enough to make two "correct" tables differ visibly and give a reader no way to tell which one to trust.

There is a check available here that most guides cannot offer, because it uses our own earlier work as a control. Our Dhanteras 2026 guide published sunsets for Friday, 6 November: Delhi 5:33 pm, Mumbai 6:03 pm, Kolkata 4:57 pm, Bengaluru 5:52 pm. Recomputing that day with the method used for this page reproduces all four to the minute, and the two-day drift into the 8th is the one to two minutes the season should give. If the method were wrong, the older table would not fall out of it.

The Amavasya window, and why no Indian city has an ambiguous evening

The tithi itself runs from 11:28:22 am on Sunday, 8 November to 12:32:07 pm on Monday, 9 November, Indian Standard Time. That is 25 hours and 4 minutes — longer than a day, which is common enough and is exactly what makes a tithi capable of touching two civil dates.

Set the three candidate evenings against it and the answer is not close. Saturday the 7th: Delhi’s window would run 5:32 pm to 7:56 pm, and the new moon does not begin until the following morning, so Saturday evening belongs to the Chaturdashi and to the Naraka Chaturdashi rites our Choti Diwali guide covers. Monday the 9th: the window would run 5:31 pm to 7:55 pm, and the new moon ended at 12:32 that afternoon — five hours before sunset. Only Sunday evening has Amavasya running through it, and it runs through the whole of it in every city in the table above.

That is why this year needs no adjudication rule in India. In some years a household has to decide between two evenings that both hold part of the tithi, and then the kala doctrine does real work. In 2026 it simply confirms what a glance at the clock already says.

Lakshmi Puja abroad: this year, there is no split at all

Readers who followed our Karva Chauth guide or the Naraka Chaturdashi one will be braced for a split, because both of those genuinely divide the diaspora this year — New York and London keep those observances on a different calendar day from Delhi. It is reasonable to assume Diwali night does the same. It does not.

We computed sunset and the resulting Pradosh window for ten cities abroad on each of the three candidate evenings, and asked in every case whether the whole window falls inside the Amavasya. The answer is the same everywhere: Saturday no, Sunday yes, Monday no. A tithi running 25 hours and 4 minutes is long enough that every longitude we checked gets exactly one qualifying sunset, and this year that sunset is Sunday’s in all ten.

So a household in Chicago and a household in Kolkata are keeping the same evening, at wildly different clock times, for the same reason. Times below are local.

• London — sunset 4:22 pm — Pradosh 4:22 pm to 6:46 pm
• Chicago — sunset 4:37 pm — Pradosh 4:37 pm to 7:01 pm
• New York — sunset 4:45 pm — Pradosh 4:45 pm to 7:09 pm
• Toronto — sunset 5:00 pm — Pradosh 5:00 pm to 7:24 pm
• San Francisco — sunset 5:04 pm — Pradosh 5:04 pm to 7:28 pm
• Dubai — sunset 5:34 pm — Pradosh 5:34 pm to 7:58 pm
• Singapore — sunset 6:51 pm — Pradosh 6:51 pm to 9:15 pm
• Sydney — sunset 7:30 pm — Pradosh 7:30 pm to 9:54 pm
• Auckland — sunset 8:01 pm — Pradosh 8:01 pm to 10:25 pm
• Melbourne — sunset 8:02 pm — Pradosh 8:02 pm to 10:26 pm

Sthir lagna: what it means, and why we will not print you a clock time for it

Almanacs usually publish a muhurat narrower than the full Pradosh window, and the reason is the Ascendant. Of the twelve rising signs, four are classed sthira (स्थिर), or fixed: Vrishabha (Taurus), Simha (Leo), Vrishchika (Scorpio) and Kumbha (Aquarius). The preference is for the puja to sit inside a fixed Ascendant, and the image behind it is plain enough — a fixed lagna helps Lakshmi settle rather than pass through. In late October and November it is usually Vrishabha that is rising during the early evening, which is one reason Pradosh became the default household choice in the first place.

We are not going to give you a clock time for it, and it is worth saying why rather than quietly omitting it. Which sign is rising at a given moment depends on your latitude and longitude far more sharply than sunset does, so a Vrishabha window computed for one city is not approximately right for another — it is a different window. Our panchang computes and publishes sunset for any location; it does not compute a rising-sign clock for a location, and we would rather tell you that than print a number that would be wrong for most of the people reading it. Two of our other Diwali-corridor guides already say the same thing, and this is the same answer, not a new one.

What to do instead is straightforward. Open the muhurat finder or the daily panchang for your own city, or ask Purohit Ji, which will compute the evening for the coordinates you actually live at. And if you do not want a narrower window at all, you have lost nothing: the full Pradosh window is a valid time for the puja on its own terms, and it is what most households have always used.

The evening itself, timed against the window

The full order of service — the samagri, the invocation, the sixteen upacharas, the aarati — is set out in our Lakshmi Puja vidhi guide, and it does not change from year to year. What changes is where the clock sits, so this is only the timing skeleton.

Everything that can be done before sunset should be: the cleaning, the rangoli, the chowki laid and covered, the images placed, the samagri assembled, the lamps filled and wicked. The window is not long, and the years it feels rushed are the years the preparation ran into it.

The lamps are lit at the opening of the window rather than at some point during it — sunset is the part of this that is exactly known, so it is the part worth being punctual about. The puja proper then runs inside the window, and the aarati closes it. If the household is large and the puja runs long, running past the close is not a failure; the window names the auspicious opening, and no tradition asks a family to abandon a puja mid-course because a clock turned over.

Honest questions, honest answers

The questions below are the ones that actually arrive, and a few of them have answers people do not expect.

• Is Diwali on the 8th everywhere in India? Yes. The Amavasya covers every Indian sunset on the 8th and none on the 7th or 9th, so there is no regional date split this year.
• Our family always does the puja after dinner, closer to nine. Is that wrong? It is outside Pradosh in most Indian cities, and it is also what a great many households do. Pradosh is the preferred window, not a deadline for validity; if the family rhythm cannot be moved, keep the rhythm.
• Why does your Delhi time differ by a minute from the almanac we use? Almost certainly the rounding or the limb convention rather than a disagreement about astronomy. We state ours on this page so the difference is checkable rather than mysterious.
• Can we use the Delhi timing if our city is not listed? Only if you are close to Delhi. Use the daily panchang for your own place instead — it takes a moment and it is the number this whole page is arguing for.
• Is Mahanishita Kaal better than Pradosh? It is a different practice rather than a better one, associated with tantric and specialist observance rather than household puja. The classical household window is Pradosh.
• What about Choti Diwali and Dhanteras timings? Both are also pradosh-anchored and both are covered day by day in the Dhanteras guide and the Naraka Chaturdashi guide.

Going deeper

For the corridor as a whole — the five days, the four stories behind them, and the vidhi in full — start with the Diwali at home guide or the Diwali 2026 festival guide. For the days on either side of the Amavasya, the Dhanteras and Govardhan Puja and Bhai Dooj guides carry their own computed windows.

And if the question you actually came with is about your own city rather than the country, the daily panchang answers it for any date and any place, including the sunset this page is built on.