Diwali 2026 Lakshmi Puja Muhurat: City-by-City Timings for India and Abroad

Diwali 2026 falls on Sunday, 8 November. If you searched for that date expecting a single clock time back, the honest answer is that there isn't one. There is a rule, and the rule produces a different window in every city, because it depends on two things that both change with where you are standing: when the sun sets, and which sign is rising on your eastern horizon at that moment.

We cover the rule itself, why the puja is timed to pradosh kaal, why a fixed ascendant is wanted, and why Bengal keeps a different clock entirely, in Lakshmi Puja Muhurat 2026: how pradosh kaal and sthir lagna decide the right time. This piece does not repeat that explanation at length. It exists to answer the question that piece deliberately leaves open: what is the actual window, city by city, for 2026.

Every time below comes from Swiss Ephemeris on the sidereal Lahiri ayanamsa, computed at each city's own coordinates, and cross-checked against an independently computed table already live on the site. Nothing here is rounded, interpolated or carried over from a previous year.

The rule in one paragraph

Lakshmi puja wants two conditions at once: the amavasya tithi has to be running during pradosh kaal, the period from sunset into the early evening, and the ascendant rising at that moment should be a sthir (fixed) sign, ideally Vrishabha, which is ruled by Venus, the planet of wealth and comfort that the puja itself is about. Most published timings stop at "after sunset" and never check the second condition. The two conditions do not always agree with each other for their full length, so the muhurat that actually matters is the overlap between them, not pradosh on its own.

In 2026, krishna chaturdashi begins at 10:48 IST on 7 November and runs until 11:28 IST on 8 November, when amavasya takes over. Amavasya then continues past sunset and well into the night, all the way to 12:32 IST on 9 November, which is exactly the condition needed for the puja to fall correctly on the 8th rather than being pushed a day either way. Swati nakshatra is running throughout the evening window in every city below.

Lakshmi Puja muhurat, Indian cities (IST)

All times below are for the evening of 8 November 2026, IST.

Two things worth noticing across this table. First, the overlap runs shorter than pradosh kaal itself everywhere, by roughly 35 to 45 minutes, because Vrishabha does not rise at the exact instant of sunset in any of these cities. Second, the overlap length holds close to two hours almost everywhere, from 115 minutes in Chandigarh to 121 in three southern and central cities, which is why "about two hours" is a reasonable rule of thumb even though the precise start and end shift city to city.

Lakshmi Puja muhurat abroad, local time

For readers outside India, converting an Indian clock time by hand is the wrong approach: sunset, pradosh and the lagna cycle are all computed against your own longitude and latitude, not India's. Each row below is computed directly in that city's own local time and zone.

Every one of these six cities is in krishna amavasya at its own local window, the same tithi India is keeping the festival in, so there is no date confusion here of the kind that affects some of the other 2026 festival dates. London and Sydney carry the shortest overlaps on this list, 97 and 87 minutes, simply because the Vrishabha window there does not sit as centrally inside pradosh as it does elsewhere. That is still enough time for a full puja; it just means starting close to the opening minute rather than treating the window as loose.

When Vrishabha is short, or awkward, for your household

A short overlap, or a Vrishabha window that clashes with something else in the evening, is common enough that classical guidance already addresses it directly: pradosh kaal is the requirement, and a fixed ascendant overlapping it is the refinement layered on top, not a substitute for it. If your puja runs past the end of the Vrishabha window above but is still inside the pradosh column next to it, you have not missed the muhurat. What you should not do is skip pradosh entirely to wait for a later fixed sign, because pradosh is the part of the rule that is not optional.

There is a second fixed sign worth naming for households that keep a different tradition on this night. Bengal, and tantric practice more broadly, times Diwali worship not to pradosh but to nishita kaal, the depth of the night around midnight, using Simha rather than Vrishabha as the ascendant, and approaching the goddess as Kali rather than in her householder form. This is a separate lineage, not a later or looser version of the pradosh puja, and the two traditions are not meant to be mixed on the same night. For households that do keep this timing, here is when Simha rises on 8 to 9 November, in each city's own clock:

Notice that most of these windows cross into the 9th of November on the local clock, which is expected: nishita kaal is built around the midpoint of the night, and that midpoint usually falls after midnight regardless of the civil date printed on a calendar.

There are two more sthir signs, Vrischika and Kumbha, that also rise on 8 November. We have not tabled them city by city here because both fall in full daylight this year in every city we computed, hours before pradosh even opens, which puts them outside both the pradosh tradition and the nishita tradition. Their only use in a computation like this is to confirm that the sthir-sign cycle behaves the way the classical rule says it should across the whole day, which it does. Neither is a workable third option for the evening rite itself.

Why Naraka Chaturdashi lands on the same day this year

Ordinarily Choti Diwali, Naraka Chaturdashi, falls the evening before the main Lakshmi puja. In 2026 the chaturdashi tithi runs its entire course inside a single civil day without ever being the tithi present at sunrise on either side of it, so it never gets a sunrise-anchored day of its own and shares its date with the amavasya that follows. If your family's pre-dawn oil bath and the evening Lakshmi puja are both landing on 8 November this year, that is this year's correct calendar, not an error in whichever source you are reading. The mechanics of this kind of tithi overlap, and how it differs from a normal two-day spread, are covered in the companion piece on pradosh and sthir lagna linked above.

Checking your own chart against the night

A computed window tells you when the sky supports the puja. It does not tell you how this particular Diwali sits against your own birth chart, which planet is transiting your own wealth houses this season, or whether a personal muhurta consideration should move your family's plans inside the window rather than at the very start of it. If you want that laid over your own chart rather than a generic reading, a free kundali gives you the birth chart to start from, and Ask Acharya will answer a specific question about your own Diwali night, in your own language, at no cost.

For the rest of the festival, from Dhanteras through Bhai Dooj, the full sequence and what each day is actually for is in Diwali: the 5-day arc of light, decoded day by day, and the complete list of 2026 dates is on the Hindu festival calendar.