Sarva Pitru Amavasya 2026: the date where you actually live

The short answer, and the only one most families need: Sarva Pitru Amavasya 2026 — the closing day of Pitru Paksha, which carries every ancestor whose own day has been missed or is not known — falls on Saturday, 10 October in India, the Gulf, Britain, South Africa, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand, and on Friday, 9 October in the United States and Canada.

That North American difference is not a rounding artefact of converting Indian clock times. The entire fortnight sits a calendar day earlier there: 25 September to 9 October, against 26 September to 10 October in India. A family in New Jersey working from a list printed for Delhi has the closing rite on the wrong day.

Every date on this page was computed city by city from that city’s own sunrise and sunset, using the same engine that produces our panchang and our shraddha day finder. None of it was converted from an Indian table, which is the step where these dates usually go wrong.

Why one new moon lands on two different calendar dates

A tithi is not a day. It is a single interval of time, the same interval everywhere on earth, defined by how far the Moon has pulled ahead of the Sun. The Amavasya that closes Pitru Paksha 2026 is one such interval: it opens at about 9:36 pm Indian time on Friday, 9 October and closes at about 9:20 pm Indian time on Saturday, 10 October — twenty-three hours and forty-four minutes, once.

Write those same two instants on other clocks and nothing about the Moon changes, but the calendar pages do. In London the interval runs from about 5:06 pm on Friday the 9th to about 4:50 pm on Saturday the 10th. In New York it runs from about 12:06 pm on Friday the 9th to about 11:50 am on Saturday the 10th. In San Francisco, from about 9:06 am Friday to about 8:50 am Saturday.

Now bring in the rule. Shraddha is an aparahna rite: it belongs to the day whose aparahna — the fourth of the five equal parts of daylight — is held by the relevant tithi. Aparahna is always somewhere in the early-to-middle afternoon, and it is built from the local sunrise and sunset, so it sits at a different point of the world clock in every city.

New York’s aparahna on Friday, 9 October runs 1:51 pm to 4:08 pm. The Amavasya opened there at about 12:06 pm — nearly two hours before that window — so the Amavasya covers it, and Friday is the shraddha day. By Saturday afternoon in New York the Amavasya has already been over since about 11:50 am, so Saturday cannot take the rite. In Delhi the arithmetic runs the other way: Friday afternoon is too early, and the Amavasya holds Saturday’s aparahna, 1:17 pm to 3:37 pm, from end to end.

The rule that does the work: aparahna, not sunrise

Most published Pitru Paksha lists are built from the tithi running at sunrise, because that is how the great majority of Hindu observances are dated. Shraddha is one of the exceptions, and the exception is exactly what makes the abroad question hard.

A tithi runs roughly nineteen to twenty-six hours, so it drifts backwards through the clock a little each day and regularly straddles two sunrises or none. The aparahna window, by contrast, is anchored: about two and a half hours in the local afternoon, every day, wherever you are. Dating by sunrise and dating by aparahna therefore disagree in a fortnight like this one — and they disagree differently in each city, because each city has its own afternoon.

Our companion guide, the Pitru Paksha 2026 day-by-day tithi calendar, works this out in full for India, including the place where the two rules genuinely part company in the first week of October and the Ashtami that touches no Indian sunrise at all. This page takes the same rule and moves it around the world.

New York, day by day: eight of fifteen move, and not in one block

This is the part that a general warning like “the dates can differ abroad” cannot give you, and it is the reason a family cannot simply subtract a day.

Between India and New York, the first four tithis of the fortnight — Pratipada, Dwitiya, Tritiya and Chaturthi — each fall a calendar day earlier in New York. Then the shift stops. Seven consecutive tithis, Panchami through Ekadashi, fall on exactly the same date in both places: a family whose ancestor died on Ashtami keeps the rite on Saturday, 3 October in Chennai and on Saturday, 3 October in Queens. Then, from Dwadashi onward, the shift returns and the last four tithis move a day earlier again.

So eight of the fifteen move and seven do not, and which group you are in depends entirely on your ancestor’s tithi. A blanket adjustment gets nearly half the fortnight wrong in one direction or the other.

There is a second consequence worth knowing about. Because tithis are longer than the gap between two aparahnas some days and shorter on others, each location ends up with one day of the fortnight that carries two shraddhas. In India that day is Wednesday, 30 September, which takes both Chaturthi and Panchami. In New York it is Tuesday, 6 October, which takes both Ekadashi and Dwadashi. Same fortnight, same rule, different double day.

Further west, more of the fortnight moves: Chicago and Houston see nine of the fifteen tithis shift, and San Francisco and Vancouver see ten. Toronto matches New York at eight.

London, Johannesburg, and a forty-five-minute margin

Britain is the case that lulls families into assuming the Indian list applies. It nearly does. London’s fortnight has the same bounds as India’s, 26 September to 10 October, and its Sarva Pitru Amavasya is the same Saturday, 10 October. Only two tithis differ: Tritiya and Chaturthi each fall a day earlier in London, on 28 and 29 September rather than 29 and 30.

How nearly it does is worth sitting with. London’s aparahna on Saturday, 10 October runs 1:53 pm to 4:05 pm, and the Amavasya ends there at about 4:50 pm — the window clears by roughly forty-five minutes. Had the new moon come an hour earlier, London would have kept the closing rite on Friday the 9th along with New York, and every list computed for India would have been wrong for Britain on the fortnight’s most-observed day.

Johannesburg differs from India on one tithi only, Chaturthi, which falls on 29 September there rather than 30 September. The Gulf does not differ at all: Dubai keeps India’s dates for all fifteen, because at four hours behind Indian time its afternoons still line up with the same tithis.

East of India the days move later, not earlier

Families in Southeast Asia and the southern Pacific are used to being told their festival dates run a day ahead. For shraddha the movement goes the other way, and it is small.

Singapore and Kuala Lumpur differ from India on a single tithi: Panchami falls on 1 October rather than 30 September. Sydney and Melbourne differ on two — Panchami on 1 October and Shashthi on 2 October, each a day later than India. Auckland adds a third, Saptami on 3 October. In every one of those cities the fortnight still runs 26 September to 10 October and Sarva Pitru Amavasya is still Saturday, 10 October.

One date is the same in every city we computed, from Vancouver to Auckland: Krishna Navami falls on Sunday, 4 October everywhere. Families that keep Matru Navami or Avidhava Navami — the Navami observance for mothers, and for women who died before their husbands — need no adjustment at all this year, wherever they live.

For Australian and New Zealand readers one caveat applies to the clock times rather than the dates. Daylight saving begins in early October there, so the local time of an aparahna window shifts by an hour partway through the fortnight. We computed each of those cities under both offsets: the clock times change, and the day assignments above do not.

When the tithi is not the only thing that decides the day

For most families the question is answered by the tithi alone. Several common situations are answered by a different rung of the tradition’s own ladder, and it is worth knowing which rung you are standing on — and whether a named text asserts it or whether it is followed practice.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. Some of these rules are stated outright in the nirnaya literature; others are widespread convention that no text asserts. A page that runs them together invites a family to treat a custom as an obligation, or an obligation as optional.

• The death tithi is known. The rite belongs to the day whose aparahna that tithi holds — the ordinary case, and the one the tables above cover. Scripturally grounded; the nirnaya literature, Nirnaya Sindhu and Dharmasindhu, states it directly.
• The death tithi is not known. Sarva Pitru Amavasya carries every ancestor whose day cannot be named: Saturday, 10 October in India, Friday, 9 October in the United States and Canada. Widely followed convention.
• The death fell on Krishna Chaturdashi, from natural causes. This one surprises people: the rite is not kept on Chaturdashi at all. It moves to the Amavasya — 10 October in India, 9 October in North America. The instruction is scriptural, carried in the Mahabharata’s Anushasana Parva and repeated by Nirnaya Sindhu quoting Pracheta.
• The death fell on Chaturdashi and was violent or untimely. Here the Chaturdashi itself is the day, and it runs one earlier than the Amavasya in every location: Friday, 9 October in India, Thursday, 8 October in New York. Also scripturally grounded, and the two Chaturdashi cases point in opposite directions, which is why they are so often confused.
• The deceased died on a Purnima. Kept on the Amavasya by convention rather than by a text’s assertion — Dharmasindhu carries the practice.
• Matru Navami or Avidhava Navami. Krishna Navami, Sunday, 4 October, in every city on this page. This is an opt-in observance whose scope differs by family and region: Matru Navami is kept for mothers, Avidhava Navami for women who died before their husbands, and families who keep the death tithi instead are equally within the tradition. It is never something to infer for a family that has not been keeping it.

Where these dates come from, and what we are not claiming

Every date here is computed, not copied. Tithi boundaries come from the Moon–Sun elongation crossing successive multiples of twelve degrees on the Lahiri ayanamsa, using the same ephemeris behind our panchang and kundali pages. Each city’s sunrise and sunset were computed for that city, its daylight cut into five parts, and the fortnight resolved independently — no city’s answer is another city’s answer with a day added or taken away.

Two independent checks agree with it. Our own day-by-day Indian calendar, computed separately, puts the Amavasya interval within a minute of the figures used here. And at least one temple panchangam published in the United States lists the Mahalaya Amavasya tarpanam for the Eastern United States on Friday, 9 October 2026 — arrived at by a different route, and landing on the same day.

Four honest limits. The clock times on this page belong to the named cities; your own sunrise and sunset differ, and the further you are from one of them the more your aparahna window shifts, so use the shraddha day finder for your actual place rather than the nearest big city. Where a tithi boundary falls inside an aparahna window, which shraddha the day carries is a rule of interpretation and not arithmetic — the companion calendar prints the raw minute-by-minute coverage for India’s 30 September case so you can see precisely what such a decision rests on. Bharani Shraddha and Magha Shraddha are separate observances fixed by nakshatra rather than by this ladder, and they are covered in that companion guide, not here. And a family that has kept a particular almanac or a family tradition for generations is within the tradition: this page gives you the computed answer and the rule that produced it, not a ruling.

If a date here disagrees with an almanac you trust, we would rather know than be right — tell us through contact and we will recheck it against the engine and publish the correction.

Where to go from here

This page tells you which day. Two others tell you the rest. The Pitru Paksha 2026 day-by-day tithi calendar gives the Indian fortnight with each tithi’s own start and end times and the rule taught as a procedure you can apply yourself. The shraddha and tarpan at-home guide gives the vidhi: who performs the rite, the tarpan sequence step by step, what the family cooks, what is traditionally paused during the fortnight, and the common doubts answered plainly.

For the wider frame — why an annual shraddha exists at all, and what the thirteen days after a death set in motion — our guide to Antyeshti, the final samskara places it inside the sixteen samskaras that structure a Hindu life from before birth to after death.

And if the practical question is simply keeping a Hindu calendar in a country that does not run on one, how families abroad can use the panchang is written for exactly that.