Sharad Purnima 2026 is Sunday 25 October by the moon and Monday 26 by the sunrise — and both are right

Look up Sharad Purnima 2026 and you will find two dates. Most festival lists print Sunday 25 October; some print Monday 26 October; almost none say why. The reason is worth having, because it decides what your own household does and when.

A tithi — a lunar day — is not a calendar day. The Purnima, the fifteenth tithi of the bright fortnight, is the stretch during which the Moon runs from 168 to 180 degrees ahead of the Sun, and in 2026 it runs from 11:57 am on Sunday 25 October to 9:42 am on Monday 26 October, Indian Standard Time: twenty-one hours and forty-five minutes. It begins in the middle of Sunday, holds the whole of Sunday night, and is still running when the sun rises on Monday. So Sunday night is the Purnima night, and Monday is the Purnima day. Two civil dates, one tithi.

Which one you act on depends on the rite. Observances that belong to the night — kheer set out under the moon, the Kojagara vigil for Lakshmi, the Raas of Braj, the Gujarati garba under the full moon — follow the night the tithi covers, and that is Sunday. Observances fixed by the tithi at sunrise — a Purnima vrat, a Satyanarayan katha kept on the full-moon day, the first day of the month-long Kartik snan, Valmiki Jayanti — follow the day, and that is Monday. A calendar that prints only one date is answering one of those questions and not the other.

Every time on this page is computed from the same engine that produces our live Panchang, and we will state the convention used for each so that you can compare it with whatever your family has always followed.

The rule that produces each date — and the check at India’s edges

Two rules are doing the work, and they are the same two that separate nearly every dated festival on our site.

The sunrise rule, udaya tithi, gives a tithi to the civil day at whose sunrise it is running. The Purnima begins at 11:57 am on Sunday, more than five hours after the latest sunrise on our list (Amritsar, 6:41 am) and still five hours after the later sunrises of Kutch, so every Sunday sunrise in India falls in the Chaturdashi, the fourteenth tithi. On Monday the Purnima is running at every Indian sunrise and still has more than two and a half hours left when the westernmost towns of Kutch see the sun, a little before 7 am. By the sunrise rule the Purnima day is Monday 26 October everywhere in India, without a margin to argue about.

The night rule is the one Kojagara actually uses. A vrata kept through the night is judged by whether the tithi holds nishita — the middle muhurta of the night. Our Janmashtami guide sets the definition out: the night from sunset to the next sunrise is divided into fifteen equal muhurtas, and nishita is the eighth, straddling local midnight. On Sunday night the Purnima has been running since midday and does not close until 9:42 the next morning, so it holds every Indian city’s nishita with hours to spare. On Monday night it has been over since the morning. By the night rule the Kojagara night is Sunday, and there is no city in India where that changes.

That is the whole explanation of the split. The two rules name two days because the tithi genuinely straddles them, and the household answer is to keep each rite on the day its own rule gives — the moon-night on Sunday, the sunrise observances on Monday — rather than to pick one date and force every rite onto it. The same logic separated the afternoon rite from the sunrise date in our Dussehra guide and the two rites of Naraka Chaturdashi in our Choti Diwali guide.

Which night is the moon actually fullest? Monday’s — and why that does not move the rite

Here is a fact almost no festival page mentions, and it is the one a careful reader will notice for themselves standing on the balcony.

The instant of full moon — the moment the Moon stands exactly opposite the Sun — is the moment the Purnima tithi ends, and in 2026 that is 9:42 am on Monday 26 October IST, in daylight, with the moon below the horizon across India. When the moon rises over Delhi on Sunday evening at 4:56 pm it is still sixteen hours and forty-six minutes short of full; when it rises on Monday at 5:34 pm it is seven hours and fifty-two minutes past full. Monday evening’s moon is the rounder of the two. To the eye both are full — the difference is a sliver on one edge that no one without a telescope will see — but if you were to ask which evening the Moon is nearer to perfectly full, the honest answer is Monday.

And the rite is still Sunday, because the tradition never timed Sharad Purnima by the roundness of the disc. It timed it by the tithi, which is a stretch of angular distance, not an appearance. The Purnima tithi is the whole final fifteenth of the Moon’s journey to opposition, and the night it covers is the night, whether the disc is ninety-nine percent lit or a hundred. Monday night, however round the moon looks, is the first night of the Pratipada, the next fortnight’s first tithi.

One more thing the tithi explains. On Sunday the moon rises before the sun sets — by 45 to 48 minutes in every Indian city on our list — so at dusk you will find it already up, low and pale in the east, and it will be high and bright by the time the kheer goes out. On Monday moonrise and sunset fall within a few minutes of each other, which is the classic full-moon picture, and that too is the tithi arithmetic showing through: each evening the moon rises later than the last, by roughly forty minutes at this time of year (thirty-eight in Delhi, forty-four in Mumbai).

Your city on Sunday 25 October: sunrise, moonrise, sunset and the Kojagara midnight, computed

Times are Indian Standard Time for Sunday 25 October 2026, ordered from the earliest sunset. The last column is nishita, the midnight muhurta, which is the window the Kojagara puja is traditionally placed in; everything from sunset onward is inside the Purnima, so the kheer can go out as soon as the sky is dark.

• Guwahati — sunrise 5:27 am · moonrise 3:59 pm · sunset 4:47 pm · nishita 10:42 pm to 11:33 pm
• Kolkata — sunrise 5:37 am · moonrise 4:17 pm · sunset 5:04 pm · nishita 10:56 pm to 11:46 pm
• Patna — sunrise 5:53 am · moonrise 4:27 pm · sunset 5:14 pm · nishita 11:08 pm to 11:59 pm
• Varanasi — sunrise 6:01 am · moonrise 4:36 pm · sunset 5:23 pm · nishita 11:17 pm to 12:08 am
• Lucknow — sunrise 6:11 am · moonrise 4:43 pm · sunset 5:29 pm · nishita 11:25 pm to 12:16 am
• Chandigarh — sunrise 6:32 am · moonrise 4:55 pm · sunset 5:42 pm · nishita 11:41 pm to 12:33 am
• Delhi — sunrise 6:28 am · moonrise 4:56 pm · sunset 5:42 pm · nishita 11:40 pm to 12:31 am
• Nagpur — sunrise 6:13 am · moonrise 4:57 pm · sunset 5:42 pm · nishita 11:33 pm to 12:23 am
• Chennai — sunrise 6:01 am · moonrise 5:00 pm · sunset 5:45 pm · nishita 11:29 pm to 12:18 am
• Bhopal — sunrise 6:22 am · moonrise 5:01 pm · sunset 5:47 pm · nishita 11:39 pm to 12:30 am
• Amritsar — sunrise 6:41 am · moonrise 5:02 pm · sunset 5:48 pm · nishita 11:49 pm to 12:41 am
• Hyderabad — sunrise 6:12 am · moonrise 5:03 pm · sunset 5:48 pm · nishita 11:35 pm to 12:25 am
• Jaipur — sunrise 6:32 am · moonrise 5:04 pm · sunset 5:50 pm · nishita 11:46 pm to 12:36 am
• Indore — sunrise 6:27 am · moonrise 5:08 pm · sunset 5:54 pm · nishita 11:46 pm to 12:36 am
• Bengaluru — sunrise 6:11 am · moonrise 5:11 pm · sunset 5:56 pm · nishita 11:39 pm to 12:28 am
• Pune — sunrise 6:31 am · moonrise 5:21 pm · sunset 6:06 pm · nishita 11:54 pm to 12:44 am
• Ahmedabad — sunrise 6:41 am · moonrise 5:21 pm · sunset 6:07 pm · nishita 11:59 pm to 12:49 am
• Mumbai — sunrise 6:36 am · moonrise 5:24 pm · sunset 6:09 pm · nishita 11:58 pm to 12:48 am

The convention behind every number here

Sunrise, sunset and moonrise are computed for the upper limb of the disc with standard atmospheric refraction, at the city centre at sea level, from the Swiss Ephemeris — the same code path our live Panchang runs. Nishita is the eighth of fifteen equal parts of the night from that sunset to the next sunrise. Every value is rounded to the nearest minute. Our Karva Chauth 2026 guide explains at more length why a table that names no convention can differ from an honest one by several minutes without either being wrong, and the same is true here: a moonrise computed for the centre of the disc reads a minute or three later than ours, and a nishita computed as a fixed forty-eight minutes around clock midnight can sit anywhere from a few minutes (Delhi) to nearly an hour (Guwahati) from the one above, depending on how far your city lies from the centre of its time zone.

Where our figures differ from a printed almanac by a minute, the almanac is usually truncating where we round, or has been computed for a slightly different point in the city. Where they differ by an hour, check which table has the right time zone before deciding who is wrong.

Kheer under the moon: what the tradition says, and what the texts actually say

The custom nearly every household keeps is the simplest one. A vessel of kheer — rice cooked slowly in milk with sugar, cardamom and a few nuts — is set out on the roof or in the courtyard after dark, where the full moon’s light can fall on it, and eaten the next morning as prasad. The belief that travels with it is that on this one night the moon is full with all sixteen of its kalas, its phases or aspects, and that its rays carry amrit, the nectar of immortality, which the kheer absorbs. That is a belief of the tradition, not a claim of any text we can cite, and we present it as what it is: a very old and very widely held way of receiving the autumn moon.

What the classical texts do say is more specific, and it comes from medicine rather than ritual. The Ayurvedic seasonal regimen — the ritucharya chapters of the Charaka Samhita (Sutrasthana, chapter 6) and the Ashtanga Hridaya (Sutrasthana, chapter 3) — treats sharad, the season after the rains, as the time when pitta, accumulated through the damp months, is aggravated by the sudden return of the sun. Its prescription is cooling: sweet, light, easily digested food, ghee, milk, rice, and time spent in the moonlight of the early night. A dish of sweet milk and rice cooled under the autumn moon is that regimen in one bowl. Whether or not the moon adds anything, the kheer is exactly what the season’s medicine recommends, and that is a good enough reason to make it.

Three practical notes, since the custom predates refrigeration. Cover the vessel with a fine muslin rather than a lid — the tradition asks for moonlight on the kheer, and muslin lets light through while keeping dew and insects out. Keep the quantity modest and the vessel steel or clay, not plastic. And in a warm city, where a night is still above twenty degrees, take it in and refrigerate it after the puja rather than at dawn; a bowl that has sat in moonlight for a few hours has kept the custom, and milk left eight hours in the heat has kept nothing.

Kojagara: “Who is awake?” — the Lakshmi vigil in the digests, and the six ways the regions keep it

Kojagara is the name the vrata itself carries in the ritual-law digests of medieval India, and its etymology is its story. On the Ashvina Purnima the goddess Lakshmi is said to move through the world at night asking ko jagarti — who is awake? — and to bless with prosperity the house she finds keeping vigil. The vrata described in those digests (the Nirnaya-sindhu is one of them, and P. V. Kane’s History of Dharmashastra summarises the tradition) is the household answer: worship Lakshmi at night, and stay awake for her. Some of the digests pair her with Indra, the giver of rain and plenty, which fits the season — this is the full moon that closes the monsoon and opens the harvest.

A name that travels this widely gets pronounced many ways, and the observance takes a different shape in each region that keeps it. None of these is the universal form, and a household should keep the one its own family does.

• Bengal — Kojagari Lakshmi Puja. This is the year’s principal household Lakshmi puja in Bengal, kept on the Purnima evening rather than on Diwali night, which Bengal gives to Kali; our Diwali guide notes the same regional ordering. The floor carries an alpana with the goddess’s footprints leading in; the image is often a painted lakshmi-sara, a clay plate; sheaves of new paddy stand beside it; the Lakshmi panchali is read; and the prasad runs to narkel naru, khichuri and kheer.
• Odisha — Kumar Purnima. The day belongs to unmarried girls, who keep a vrat, offer to the sun at dawn and the moon at dusk, and honour Kumara, Kartikeya, for whom the day is named. The food of the night is chanda chakata, a round preparation of the season’s new grain shaped like the moon.
• Mithila — Kojagara. In the Maithil tradition the first Kojagara after a wedding is the new groom’s night: the bride’s family sends makhana, betel and sweets, which are shared out through the village, and the couple is blessed under the moon.
• Maharashtra — Kojagiri Purnima. Masala doodh — milk boiled down with saffron, cardamom and nuts — is set to cool under the moon and drunk near midnight; in many families the eldest child of the house is honoured with an aarti that night.
• Gujarat — Sharad Poonam. The night is for garba and raas under the full moon, and doodh-pauwa — sweetened milk with flattened rice — is the offering taken at midnight.
• Braj — Raas Purnima. The Bhagavata Purana (10.29–33) sets Krishna’s Maha-Raas with the gopis on autumn nights, opening with the Lord looking on nights “blossoming with autumn jasmine” and a moon rising in the east; the text says autumn, and the tradition of Braj fixes it on this full moon. Vrindavan’s temples hold raas-lila through the night, and the Banke Bihari temple famously shows its deity holding a flute on this one night of the year.

The Kojagara night at home, step by step

A household puja needs no priest and no great outlay; it needs the evening kept free and the house kept awake. In outline, and adapt it to your family’s form:

• Dusk. Sweep and wash the puja space, draw an alpana or rangoli — in Bengal, with the goddess’s footprints leading in from the door — and set Lakshmi’s image, or a kalash with a coconut, on a clean cloth with a ghee lamp.
• After dark. Set the kheer out where the moonlight falls, covered with muslin, before you begin — it is the offering the night is known for, and it should be under the moon while the puja happens.
• Evening puja. Offer flowers, makhana, coconut, betel, sweets and the kheer; recite whatever your family recites — the Sri Sukta, the Lakshmi Ashtottara, or the Bengali panchali — and end with the Om Jai Lakshmi Mata aarati, the words of which are in our library with their meaning.
• Nishita. The Kojagara puja proper belongs to the midnight muhurta; use your city’s window from the table above, and offer the moon-kheer to the goddess in it.
• Jagran. Keep the house awake through the night — katha, kirtan, the Lakshmi stories, games; the vigil is the vrata, and this is the part the goddess’s question is about.
• Dawn. The kheer is shared as prasad. Monday’s sunrise is inside the Purnima, so the tithi day begins: the Purnima vrat, the Satyanarayan katha if your family keeps it on full moons, and the first dawn bath of Kartik.

Monday 26 October: the tithi day, and what begins on it

The Purnima is running at sunrise on Monday in every Indian city, so Monday is the full-moon day for everything the sunrise rule governs.

The Purnima vrat and the Satyanarayan katha. Families who keep a fast on full moons keep it Monday, and the Satyanarayan puja that many households hold on the Purnima is Monday’s — our Satyanarayan puja guide and the puja-vidhi page carry the vidhi and the katha in full.

Kartik snan begins. In the purnimanta reckoning of North India the month of Kartik opens after this Purnima, and the month-long practice of the dawn bath begins on the Purnima day itself and closes on Kartik Purnima, Tuesday 24 November. Our Kartik Purnima guide is where that month is cashed in.

Valmiki Jayanti. The birth anniversary of the Ramayana’s author is kept on the Ashvina Purnima across North India, and by the sunrise rule that is Monday. His own place in the epic — the sage who shelters Sita and raises Luv and Kush — is in our Ramayana encyclopedia.

And the season turns. Karva Chauth is Thursday 29 October, four days later; Dhanteras is Friday 6 November; Lakshmi Puja is Sunday 8 November. The 2026 festival calendar carries the whole run with the same computation behind each date, and the Diwali guide page has the five days in order.

Keeping it abroad: your midnight, not Delhi’s

This is the question our Karva Chauth and Pitru Paksha guides trained readers to ask, and the answer this time has three parts.

The Purnima is fixed in absolute time: it opens at 6:27 am UTC on Sunday 25 October and closes at 4:12 am UTC on Monday 26. Your nishita is fixed by your own sunset and sunrise. Whether they overlap is a question about your longitude, and for the eleven cities below it has three different answers.

From London east to Melbourne, the Kojagara night is Sunday, the same as India. London’s nishita on Sunday night runs 11:17 pm to 12:13 am GMT — note that British clocks go back an hour at 2 am that Sunday morning, so the evening is already on GMT — and the Purnima does not close until 4:12 am Monday. Dubai’s window is 11:38 pm to 12:28 am; Singapore’s 12:25 am to 1:13 am; Sydney’s 12:18 am to 1:00 am; Melbourne’s 12:43 am to 1:25 am, all on Sunday night into Monday, all comfortably inside.

On the Pacific coast the Kojagara night is Saturday. In San Francisco and Vancouver the Purnima runs from 11:27 pm on Saturday 24 October to 9:12 pm on Sunday 25, so Saturday night’s midnight — 12:28 am to 1:20 am in San Francisco, 12:30 am to 1:25 am in Vancouver — is inside it and Sunday night’s is not. Notice what that does to the evening rites: on Sunday the moon rises at 5:49 pm in San Francisco and the Purnima is still running until 9:12 pm, so the kheer can go out and the evening puja can be kept on Sunday, and only the midnight vigil moves to Saturday. Saturday evening itself is still the Chaturdashi.

In the eastern and central time zones of North America no midnight falls inside the Purnima at all. In New York and Toronto the Purnima runs 2:27 am Sunday to 12:12 am Monday; in Chicago and Houston 1:27 am Sunday to 11:12 pm Sunday. Saturday night’s nishita ends before it opens, and Sunday night’s nishita begins after it has closed. New York is the case worth remembering: its Sunday nishita opens at 12:14 am on Monday, one minute and fifty-nine seconds after the Purnima ends. Toronto misses by twenty-three minutes, Chicago by fifty-six; Houston’s Saturday midnight window catches the tithi only in its last five minutes, which no almanac would count. It is the lunar counterpart of a tithi that touches no sunrise, and the same thing happened to London’s moonrise in our Karva Chauth 2026 guide.

So what should a household abroad actually do?

Two readings are defensible, and the Karva Chauth guide set them out at length; here they are for this night.

Follow the Indian date. Keep Sunday night wherever you are: set the kheer out at your own moonrise, keep the puja in the evening and the vigil at your own midnight. This is what most diaspora households do, it keeps you in step with the family in India, and for the moon rites it is almost always inside the tithi anyway — in New York the Purnima is running until 12:12 am, so a kheer set out at moonrise, 5:26 pm, and a puja at nine in the evening are inside it; only the strict midnight muhurta falls two minutes outside. Nothing in the tradition asks a family to skip a vrata over two minutes.

Apply the rule where you stand. Keep the Kojagara midnight on the night your own nishita falls inside the Purnima — Saturday on the Pacific coast, Sunday from London to Melbourne — and, where no night qualifies, keep the evening rites on Sunday, when the moon is up and the tithi is running, and let the midnight go. That is the more literal reading, and it is the same logic by which our Pitru Paksha abroad guide timed a shraddha in Toronto by Toronto’s afternoon rather than Delhi’s.

Whichever you choose, choose it deliberately and tell the family, so that a video call at moonrise finds everyone on the same evening. Our guide to using the panchang abroad covers the wider question, and our Purohit computes the panchang for any city and any date, so it can put your own midnight and the tithi window side by side.

Honest questions, honest answers

Four that come up every year, and one that this year’s arithmetic makes new.

• Can I do the whole thing on Monday, since my calendar says the 26th? The Monday date is the sunrise date, and it is right for the vrat, the katha and the start of Kartik snan. The night rites on Monday night fall in the Pratipada, after the Purnima has closed. If Monday evening is the only evening the family can gather, keep it and keep it wholeheartedly — a vrata kept together a day late is worth more than one kept alone on time — but know that the tithi has moved on.
• Is Monday’s moon the real full moon? Astronomically, Monday evening’s moon is the nearer to exactly full, by about eight hours to Sunday’s seventeen. The tradition never used that test; it uses the tithi, and the tithi is Sunday night’s.
• Do I have to stay up all night? The vrata as the digests give it is a vigil, and the name is a question about who is awake. Families keep it in many degrees — some to dawn, some to the midnight puja and the prasad. Keep what your household can keep well.
• Is Kojagari Lakshmi Puja the same as Diwali Lakshmi Puja? No. Bengal keeps its principal household Lakshmi puja on this Purnima and gives the Diwali Amavasya to Kali; North and West India keep theirs on Diwali. A family with both traditions keeps both, and the Diwali evening this year is worked out in our Lakshmi Puja 2026 guide.
• Is it safe to eat kheer that sat out all night? In a cool northern October, generally yes, covered and taken in at dawn. In a warm city, keep it under the moon for the puja and refrigerate it afterwards. The custom is about the moonlight falling on it, not about the number of hours it sits.

Going deeper

If what interests you is the machinery — why a tithi can straddle two days, how the sunrise and night rules part company, and how the classical rules resolve the awkward cases — three pieces build the picture: Finding the Right Muhurat on why every panchang limb is local, the Janmashtami 2026 guide on the nishita rule this night shares, and the Karva Chauth 2026 guide for the moonrise convention and the two readings for a household abroad.

For the goddess herself, the Om Jai Lakshmi Mata aarati is in our library with its meaning, and the Navratri guide covers the nine nights that end the week before this moon. For the month this Purnima opens, the Kartik Purnima guide is where it closes. And for the rest of the season, the 2026 festival calendar carries every date with the same computation behind it, and our calendar shows the tithi running on any day you open.