Navratri 2026: the dates, and the one place the listings go thin

Sharad Navratri 2026 — the autumn Navratri, the great one of the four — begins on Sunday, October 11 and runs through Monday, October 19. Ghatasthapana, the installation of the kalash that opens the nine nights, is kept on the morning of Sunday the 11th. Maha Ashtami falls on Sunday the 18th, Maha Navami on Monday the 19th, and Vijayadashami — the tenth day, which closes the sequence rather than belonging to it — on Tuesday, October 20.

Most readers need nothing beyond that paragraph, and it is worth saying so plainly before the working starts.

But two things in this particular year repay a closer look, and neither is well served by the one-line listings. The first is the Ghatasthapana muhurat. This is the one timed act of the whole festival — the rest of Navratri is a matter of days rather than minutes — and in 2026 the window it is normally kept in is compromised across the whole of India. The second is the shape of the second half: from the 18th onward, the tithi running at dawn and the day printed on your family calendar stop agreeing, and knowing why will save an argument.

Everything below is computed with the same panchang engine that powers our live Panchang, and every time is given in IST unless it says otherwise.

The computed windows: Pratipada, Chitra and Vaidhriti on October 11

Hindu festival dates are tithis — lunar days measured by the angle between the Moon and the Sun, each running roughly 19 to 26 hours, and therefore almost never lining up with a midnight-to-midnight date. Ghatasthapana belongs to Pratipada, the first tithi of the bright fortnight of Ashwin.

In 2026 that tithi begins at 9:20 pm IST on Saturday, October 10 — the moment Amavasya, the new-moon tithi that closes Pitru Paksha, expires — and ends at 9:31 pm IST on Sunday, October 11. It is running at sunrise on Sunday the 11th and at no other sunrise, which is what fixes Ghatasthapana to that morning and settles the date beyond argument.

Two other panchang elements matter here, and this is where 2026 becomes unusual. Alongside the tithi, a panchang tracks the nakshatra (the lunar mansion the Moon is passing through) and the yoga (a quantity derived by adding the Sun’s and Moon’s longitudes, one of twenty-seven named divisions). On October 11 the nakshatra is Chitra, which began at 9:43 pm on the 10th and runs until 10:32 pm on the 11th. The yoga is Vaidhriti, which began at 10:02 pm on the 10th and runs until 9:05 pm on the 11th.

Look at what that does to the day. Sunrise in Delhi on October 11 is at 6:19 am and sunset at 5:56 pm. Pratipada, Chitra and Vaidhriti are all running at that sunrise, and all three are still running at that sunset. There is no part of the daylight on Ghatasthapana day 2026 that is free of any of them.

Why that matters: the rule, and what to do when it cannot be met

Ghatasthapana is normally kept in the first one-third of the day — the stretch from sunrise to a third of the way to sunset, which in Delhi on October 11 closes at 10:11 am — while Pratipada is running. That much is close to universal, and it is the reason the rite is a morning one.

Layered on top of it is a restriction that comes not from the Devi Mahatmya but from the nibandhas, the medieval digests of ritual law that most modern panchangs actually follow — the Nirnaya Sindhu and the Dharmasindhu among them. They set aside Chitra nakshatra and Vaidhriti yoga for the installation of the kalash. It is worth being precise about the status of that rule: it is a convention carried in the digest tradition and honoured by the great majority of published panchangs, not a line of scripture, and we would rather say so than dress it up.

In most years the restriction costs nothing, because Chitra or Vaidhriti covers part of the morning and the rest is clear. In 2026 it covers all of it, everywhere, and the arithmetic above is why: both conditions outlast the sunset.

When Pratipada is entirely covered like this, the standard remedy in the same digest tradition is Abhijit muhurat — the eighth of the fifteen muhurtas into which the daylight is divided, the roughly forty-eight minutes sitting astride local noon, and the one window held to override most ordinary blemishes. That is what almost every panchang you can consult for 2026 will print, and it is what we would suggest.

There is an honest caveat and it should not be buried. Not every tradition applies the Chitra and Vaidhriti restriction to Ghatasthapana at all; some families and some regional almanacs keep the rite in the ordinary morning window and consider the matter closed, and a household following a kula-parampara — the practice handed down in its own line — is not doing anything wrong. If your family has always installed the kalash at first light, this guide is not an instruction to change that. It is an explanation of why the printed times this year look different from last year’s, and of what to do if you have no inherited practice to fall back on.

One practical note on Abhijit: it is not observed on Wednesdays. October 11, 2026 is a Sunday, so the window is available.

Your city’s Abhijit window, computed

Abhijit is defined off sunrise and sunset, so it is local. It is not a national clock time, and a table computed for Delhi is wrong for Guwahati by more than an hour.

Here is the window for twelve cities on Sunday, October 11, 2026, computed from each city’s own sunrise and sunset. Any moment inside your city’s window is a correct time to install the kalash.

Guwahati 10:46 to 11:33 am · Kolkata 10:59 to 11:46 am · Varanasi 11:21 am to 12:08 pm · Chennai 11:31 am to 12:19 pm · Hyderabad 11:39 am to 12:26 pm · Bengaluru 11:42 am to 12:30 pm · Delhi 11:44 am to 12:30 pm · Kochi 11:47 am to 12:35 pm · Jaipur 11:50 am to 12:36 pm · Pune 11:57 am to 12:44 pm · Mumbai 12:01 to 12:48 pm · Ahmedabad 12:02 to 12:49 pm.

The spread between the first city to open its window and the last is seventy-six minutes, and it is entirely a matter of longitude: India keeps one clock across a span the Sun takes nearly two hours to cross. If your city is not in the table, our muhurat finder will compute the window for it, and the live panchang gives you the same day’s tithi, nakshatra and yoga boundaries for your own location.

Ghatasthapana, step by step

The rite itself is modest, and it is worth knowing what each part of it is for rather than treating the sequence as a checklist.

A shallow bed of clean soil is laid first, and barley — jau — is sown in it. This is not decoration. The barley is watered every morning of the nine nights and sprouts over them; the shoots are cut on the tenth day and given out, and in many families tucked behind an ear or into a cash box. The bed is a nine-day clock you can see, and a household that keeps it will notice that Navratri is measured in growth rather than in evenings.

The kalash — a pot of water, its mouth ringed with mango leaves and topped with a whole coconut — is then set on or beside the bed. Water, leaf and fruit stand for the presence being invited rather than for a deity in any pictorial sense, which is why the same grammar recurs at Ganesh Chaturthi, at a griha pravesh and at a wedding.

Then the sthapana proper: the kalash is installed, a sankalpa is spoken — your name, your place, the date, and what you are undertaking, said aloud — and the Goddess is invited to be present for nine nights. After the avahan the kalash is a guest in the house and is treated as one; it is not moved, and it is not left unattended in the dark.

The akhand jyoti, the unbroken lamp, is lit last if the household is keeping one. It is a real commitment — the lamp is meant to burn for the full nine nights — and it is entirely acceptable not to undertake it. A lamp lit at each evening’s puja is the ordinary practice in most homes.

Our Navratri nine-nights guide works through the vidhi at greater length, along with how the vrat is kept and who should adapt it.

The nine nights, and the tithi at each dawn

Each of the nine nights belongs to one of the Navadurga, the nine forms of the Goddess named in the Devi Kavacha of the Durga Saptashati: Shailaputri, Brahmacharini, Chandraghanta, Kushmanda, Skandamata, Katyayani, Kalaratri, Mahagauri and Siddhidatri. That sequence is fixed and is the same every year; it is the part of Navratri with a text behind it.

The tithi running at each dawn in 2026, computed for Delhi, goes: Pratipada on Sunday the 11th, Dwitiya on Monday the 12th, Tritiya on Tuesday the 13th, Chaturthi on Wednesday the 14th, Panchami on Thursday the 15th, Shashthi on Friday the 16th, Saptami on Saturday the 17th — and Saptami again on Sunday the 18th, which is the year’s complication and has the next section to itself. Ashtami runs at dawn on Monday the 19th and Navami at dawn on Tuesday the 20th.

Inside the nine nights sit two sequences with their own timing rules. The Saraswati sequence is fixed by the nakshatra rather than the tithi — Avahan on Mula, Saturday the 17th, through Visarjan on Shravana, Tuesday the 20th — and we compute the whole of it, including the four and a half minutes that put Chennai and Kolkata in different tithis on the morning of the invocation, in our Saraswati Puja and Golu guide. At the far end, Ayudha Puja and Vidyarambham fall on different days from each other in the South, and our Ayudha Puja and Vidyarambham guide sorts out which rite belongs to which. The year’s festival calendar entry for Navratri carries the dates at a glance.

Why Maha Ashtami is the 18th when the tithi at that dawn is Saptami

This is the part of Navratri 2026 most likely to produce a disagreement in a family group chat, so it is worth doing carefully.

Saptami in 2026 begins at 5:54 am IST on Saturday, October 17 and ends at 8:28 am IST on Sunday, October 18. Delhi’s sunrise on the 17th is 6:22 am and on the 18th 6:23 am. Saptami is therefore running at both of those dawns — it owns two sunrises. A tithi that does this is said to be in vriddhi, increase; the opposite case, where a tithi begins and ends between two sunrises and touches none, is kshaya, loss. Both are ordinary and both happen several times a year.

The consequence is a mismatch. The nine nights are printed as nine civil days, October 11 to 19, but the tithis they are named for have taken ten dawns to get through. From the 18th onward the printed day number runs one ahead of the tithi at sunrise, and a reader checking a panchang app at breakfast on the 18th will see Saptami where the calendar on the wall says the eighth night.

The resolution is the same one that settles Dussehra, and our Dussehra 2026 guide works through it in detail with a year in which the two rules visibly disagreed. Maha Ashtami, Maha Navami and Vijayadashami are not fixed by sunrise. They are fixed by aparahna — the fourth of the five equal parts into which the daylight is divided, the late afternoon — and read that way, 2026 is unambiguous.

In Delhi on Sunday the 18th, aparahna runs 1:14 to 3:31 pm. Ashtami began at 8:28 that morning and does not end until 10:52 the next, so it holds that window from end to end: Maha Ashtami is the 18th. On Monday the 19th, aparahna runs 1:14 to 3:31 pm and Navami — which began at 10:52 that morning — holds it end to end: Maha Navami is the 19th. On Tuesday the 20th, Dashami begins at 12:50 pm, before the window opens at 1:14, and holds it: Vijayadashami is the 20th. Each of the three days is clean, and a sunrise reading would have put every one of them a day late.

One short window inside this deserves its own line, because it is the ritual heart of Durga Puja in Bengal, Odisha and Assam and it is easy to miss. Sandhi Puja occupies the last twenty-four minutes of Ashtami and the first twenty-four of Navami. Ashtami ends at 10:52 am on Monday, October 19, so the Sandhi window is 10:28 to 11:16 am — and because a tithi boundary is a single astronomical instant, that is the same moment everywhere on Earth. Only the local clock reading it changes.

The nine colours: an honest answer

“Navratri colours” is among the most searched things about the festival, and the honest answer is one most listings will not give you: the nine-colour sequence is a modern convention. It has no basis in the Devi Mahatmya, none in the digests, and no fixed form — which is why the list you saw last year does not match this year’s, and why two newspapers can print different sequences for the same nine days without either being wrong.

The reason it moves is structural. The colour lists in circulation are keyed to the weekday, not to the tithi or to the Navadurga form. Navratri starts on a different weekday every year, so the whole sequence rotates. In 2026 the nine nights run Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday — and any weekday-keyed list you follow will lay itself over those days.

We deliberately do not publish a colour list as though it were authoritative, because it would be the one thing on this page with nothing behind it. If your community, your garba circle or your family keeps a sequence, keep it — it is a lovely custom and the absence of a scriptural warrant takes nothing away from it. What is fixed, and worth knowing instead, is the Navadurga form belonging to each night, which is in the section above and does not change from year to year.

Keeping the nine nights abroad

A tithi boundary is one instant everywhere; what differs abroad is the local clock reading it and, more importantly, where that instant falls relative to your own sunrise.

Pratipada ends at 9:31 pm IST on October 11, which is 5:01 pm in London, 12:01 pm in New York and 9:01 am in San Francisco — all on the 11th, and every one of them after that city’s sunrise. Pratipada is therefore running at the local dawn on Sunday the 11th, and Ghatasthapana belongs to that morning across the UK and the Americas exactly as it does in India.

East of India the same check is worth making, and it comes out the same way. The tithi opens at 11:50 pm on October 10 in Singapore and closes at 12:01 am on the 12th; in Sydney it opens at 2:50 am on the 11th and closes at 3:01 am on the 12th. In both cities it covers the sunrise of the 11th and no other, so the date holds there too. The rule worth carrying is the general one rather than the particular numbers: a tithi is a single window on the world clock, and what decides your date is whether that window happens to contain your own sunrise.

The more useful move is not to work from a table at all. Ask for your own city and you get the tithi boundaries, the first-third window and the Abhijit muhurat computed where you actually are, which is the only version of these numbers that is true for you.