Pitru Paksha 2026 at a glance: the fifteen days, with their tithi boundaries

Pitru Paksha — also called Mahalaya Paksha, or simply the shraddha fortnight — is the waning half of the lunar month that ends at the Amavasya (new moon) before Navratri. In 2026 it opens on Saturday, 26 September and closes on Saturday, 10 October. Every time below is computed from the same engine that produces our panchang, for New Delhi and Indian Standard Time, and every one of them is the tithi’s own beginning and end, not a rounded headline.

Read the table this way: the day in the left column is the day to perform shraddha for an ancestor who died on the tithi named beside it. The clock window is when that tithi actually runs — it usually spans two calendar dates, which is precisely the source of most of the confusion in this fortnight.

• Saturday 26 September — Purnima. The Bhadrapada Purnima shraddha, which many families keep as the fortnight’s opening day.
• Sunday 27 September — Krishna Pratipada. Monday 28 September — Dwitiya. Tuesday 29 September — Tritiya, and also Bharani Shraddha.
• Wednesday 30 September — Chaturthi and Panchami together. The one day of 2026’s fortnight that carries two.
• Thursday 1 October — Shashthi. Friday 2 October — Saptami. Saturday 3 October — Ashtami. Sunday 4 October — Navami, kept in many communities for mothers and married women of the family.
• Monday 5 October — Dashami. Tuesday 6 October — Ekadashi. Wednesday 7 October — Dwadashi, and also Magha Shraddha.
• Thursday 8 October — Trayodashi. Friday 9 October — Chaturdashi, traditionally reserved for those who died untimely or violent deaths.
• Saturday 10 October — Amavasya. Sarva Pitru Amavasya, the day for all the ancestors together, and for every case where the specific tithi is unknown or was missed.

The rule almost nobody publishes: aparahna, not sunrise

Most Hindu observances are dated by the udaya-vyapini rule: the tithi running at sunrise owns the day. That rule is so common that date lists are often built from it mechanically, and for most festivals it gives the right answer.

Shraddha does not follow it. Shraddha is an aparahna rite — it is performed in the aparahna kala, and the classical rule is aparahna-vyapini: the day for a given tithi is the day whose aparahna that tithi holds. The distinction is not pedantry. Because a tithi is longer than a day and slides backwards through the clock, the tithi at sunrise and the tithi at mid-afternoon are frequently not the same tithi.

Aparahna itself is a simple construction. Take the interval from sunrise to sunset on a given day, divide it into five equal parts, and the fourth part is aparahna. In Delhi in early October, sunrise is around 6:18 am and sunset around 5:55 pm, so aparahna falls roughly between 1:20 pm and 3:40 pm. It is defined by local sunrise and sunset, which is why it is a genuinely local quantity — and why a date list computed for India is not automatically correct in London or New Jersey.

• Udaya-vyapini — the tithi at sunrise owns the day. Used for most festivals and vratas.
• Aparahna-vyapini — the tithi holding the fourth fifth of daylight owns the day. Used for shraddha.
• When one tithi covers the whole aparahna, there is no ambiguity at all — that is fourteen of the fifteen days in 2026.
• When a tithi boundary falls inside the aparahna, the tithi covering more of it is the one the day belongs to, and the other is normally combined onto the same day rather than moved.

Which day is your ancestor’s shraddha

The organising rule of the fortnight is personal: shraddha for an ancestor is performed on the tithi of Pitru Paksha that matches the tithi on which they died. A grandmother who passed on a Panchami receives her shraddha on the Panchami of the fortnight; a grandfather who died on a Dashami, on its Dashami. One fortnight thus quietly holds a separate date for every family in it.

So the practical question has two halves. First, which tithi did the death fall on — a question about the past, and one the Gregorian date alone cannot answer, because the tithi changes at a different moment each day. Second, which 2026 date carries that tithi — which is the table above.

If you know the tithi, you are done: find it in the list and that is your day. If you know only the Gregorian date of the death, our calendar will name the tithi that date fell on, and Purohit Ji can do the same conversationally and then hand you back the 2026 date. Families who have kept the day for years usually already know the tithi by its name, because it is what the household has said aloud each year.

Where the two rules disagree in 2026: 1, 2 and 3 October

In most years the difference between a sunrise-built list and the aparahna rule is invisible, because the two happen to select the same tithi on most days. In 2026 they do not. For three consecutive days in early October the tithi at sunrise and the tithi at aparahna are different tithis, and a date list built the quick way will be wrong for anyone whose ancestor died on a Panchami, a Shashthi or a Saptami.

On Thursday 1 October the tithi at sunrise is Panchami, which ends at 12:35 pm — before aparahna opens. The tithi that actually holds that day’s aparahna is Shashthi. On Friday 2 October the sunrise tithi is Shashthi, ending at 10:15 am, while the aparahna belongs to Saptami. On Saturday 3 October the sunrise tithi is Saptami, ending at 8:00 am, while the aparahna belongs to Ashtami. The two rules converge again on Sunday 4 October, where Navami answers to both.

This is worth stating plainly because it is checkable: the clock boundaries in the first table are the whole argument. If a published list you are reading puts Panchami Shraddha on 1 October, it was built from sunrise tithis. That is not dishonest — it is a defensible convention for most rites — but it is not the convention shraddha uses.

Why 30 September carries two shraddhas

Fifteen calendar days cannot carry sixteen tithis one apiece, so one of them has to double up, and in 2026 it is Wednesday 30 September. The Chaturthi runs from 5:10 pm on the 29th to 2:55 pm on the 30th, and the Panchami begins there and runs to 12:35 pm on 1 October. Delhi’s aparahna on the 30th is roughly 1:21 pm to 3:43 pm — so the Chaturthi holds about 94 minutes of it and the Panchami the last 48.

The Panchami therefore never gets an aparahna of its own: by the time the 1st of October’s aparahna opens, the Panchami has already ended. Under the aparahna rule its shraddha is kept on the 30th alongside the Chaturthi, which is what almanacs following that rule will print. A household that has always kept Panchami separately can simply keep both rites on the 30th, in order — the Chaturthi rite first, then the Panchami.

This is the single most common source of family disagreement in a fortnight like this one, and it is worth naming the reason out loud rather than arguing about which list is right. Both lists are computing correctly; they are applying different rules to a tithi that is genuinely squeezed.

The Ashtami that never touches a sunrise

There is a mirror-image case in the same week, and it is the clearest demonstration that the aparahna rule is doing real work. The Krishna Ashtami of 2026 opens at 8:00 am on Saturday 3 October and closes at 5:52 am on Sunday the 4th. Delhi’s sunrise on the 3rd is about 6:18 am and on the 4th about 6:19 am — so the Ashtami is running at neither. In the ordinary panchang vocabulary it is a kshaya tithi, a tithi that is skipped, because it touches no sunrise.

But it holds the whole of the 3rd of October’s aparahna, from about 1:20 pm to 3:40 pm, with no boundary anywhere near it. Under the rule shraddha actually follows, the Ashtami loses nothing at all: Saturday 3 October is unambiguously its day.

So in this one fortnight, the sunrise reckoning drops a tithi that the shraddha reckoning keeps, and squeezes out a tithi that the shraddha reckoning keeps as a combined day. If you have ever wondered why two panchangs printed side by side can differ by a day on your family’s date, this is the machinery underneath.

The days chosen by circumstance rather than by tithi

Alongside the personal tithi, tradition marks several days of the fortnight for particular circumstances. These are observed with real regional variation, so treat the list as the common ground rather than as a universal rule, and follow your family’s practice where it differs.

• Bharani Shraddha — 2026: Tuesday, 29 September. Named for the nakshatra rather than the tithi; Bharani holds the whole of that day’s aparahna. Traditionally kept for someone who died within the past year.
• Magha Shraddha — 2026: Wednesday, 7 October. Again a nakshatra day, and again computed at aparahna: Magha begins at 10:17 pm on the 6th, so a sunrise-based check on the 7th would still be reading Ashlesha.
• Navami — 2026: Sunday, 4 October. Widely kept for mothers and for married women of the family; many communities call it Avidhava Navami.
• Chaturdashi — 2026: Friday, 9 October. Traditionally reserved for those who died untimely or violent deaths; those who died on other tithis are not given shraddha on this day.
• Sarva Pitru Amavasya — 2026: Saturday, 10 October. The day for all the ancestors together, and the tradition’s standing accommodation for anyone who does not know the tithi or has missed the day.

Why some calendars open the fortnight on the 27th

You will find published lists giving 26 September as the start and others giving the 27th, and the disagreement is not an error in either. It is a question about whether the Purnima belongs to the fortnight.

Strictly, Pitru Paksha is the krishna paksha — the waning fortnight — and a waning fortnight begins with Pratipada, which in 2026 holds the aparahna of Sunday 27 September. But the Bhadrapada Purnima immediately before it carries its own shraddha, kept for those who died on a Purnima, and in very wide practice the fortnight is counted as opening with it. That is Saturday 26 September in 2026, and it is why our table starts there.

The practical consequence is small and worth knowing: if your ancestor died on a Purnima, your day is 26 September; if on a Pratipada, it is the 27th. Nobody with a tithi in hand is affected by the argument about where the fortnight is said to begin.

Purnimanta and amanta: one fortnight, two month names

A second disagreement you will meet is about the month. Some sources place Pitru Paksha in Bhadrapada, others in Ashwin, and both are describing the same fifteen days.

North India generally uses the purnimanta reckoning, in which a lunar month ends at the full moon, so the waning fortnight after Bhadrapada Purnima already belongs to Ashwin. Most of western and southern India uses the amanta reckoning, in which a month ends at the new moon, so that same fortnight is still Bhadrapada and closes with Bhadrapada Amavasya. Our own engine reports this fortnight as Bhadrapada krishna paksha, which is the amanta naming.

This is a difference in what the month is called, not in which days the fortnight covers. The same distinction runs through the whole festival calendar — it is the reason the same lunar month can appear under two names in our Ganesh Chaturthi guide — and it changes nothing about your family’s date.

If you are keeping the rite outside India

Because aparahna is built from local sunrise and sunset, the correct day genuinely can differ abroad. A tithi that opens at 8:00 am IST opens at 3:30 am in London and 10:30 pm the previous evening in New York — so a tithi that holds Delhi’s aparahna may hold the aparahna of a different calendar date where you are standing.

The classical instruction is unambiguous on this point: the rite is dated by the time and place at which it is performed, not by the time and place where the family originally lived. A date list computed for India is therefore a good guide and not an answer for a household in Toronto or Melbourne.

Two practical routes. Our panchang computes the tithi and the day’s divisions for whichever city you set, so you can read your own aparahna window and see which tithi covers it. Or ask Purohit Ji directly with your city, and it will compute the same thing and tell you which day of the fortnight your tithi lands on where you live.

Where these dates come from

Every time on this page is computed, not copied. The tithi boundaries come from the Moon–Sun elongation crossing successive multiples of twelve degrees, using the Lahiri ayanamsa and the same ephemeris that produces our panchang and kundali pages; the aparahna windows come from local sunrise and sunset for New Delhi. Each boundary was then recomputed a second time by an independent method and agreed to within a second, and the day assignments are unchanged under either of the two sunrise conventions in common use.

Two honest caveats. The clock times are for New Delhi — your city’s tithi boundaries are the same instants but land on your own clock, and your aparahna window is your own; use the panchang for your location rather than assuming Delhi’s. And the treatment of 30 September, where a tithi boundary falls inside the aparahna, is a rule of interpretation rather than a computation: we have stated the rule we applied and given the raw coverage, 94 minutes against 48, so that a family following a different almanac can see exactly what the difference rests on.

If you find a date here that 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

The companion to this page is our Pitru Paksha shraddha and tarpan guide — who performs the rite, the home tarpan sequence step by step, what the family cooks, what is paused during the fortnight, and the common doubts answered honestly. This page tells you which day; that one tells you what to do on it.

For the rites that create the relationship this fortnight renews, our Antyeshti guide covers the funeral rites, pinda-dana and the first year of mourning, and the sixteen samskaras place antyeshti in the full arc of a life. The Ekadashi that falls inside the fortnight — Indira Ekadashi, on 6 October in 2026 — is described in our Ekadashi guide, and it is kept for ancestral peace.

The fortnight ends and Navratri begins the next morning: Sarva Pitru Amavasya closes at 9:20 pm on 10 October, and Ghatasthapana follows on Sunday 11 October. Our Navratri guide picks the calendar up there. And because the fortnight is a period in which most auspicious beginnings are set aside, our griha pravesh muhurat guide for 2026 shows exactly which dates it removes and what is left.

For the philosophy underneath the rite rather than its mechanics, the Katha Upanishad’s conversation between Nachiketa and Yama is the classical text on what survives a death, and the story the fortnight itself carries — Karna’s return to earth to give the food he had never given — is told in the companion guide.