Karva Chauth 2026 Moonrise Time: Why the Fast Ends at a Different Minute in Every City

By four in the afternoon on Karva Chauth the questions start arriving, and they are all the same question. What time is the moon. Every year somebody sends a screenshot of a time they found online, and every year it is a Delhi time being read in Pune, or a Patna time being read in Ahmedabad, and the woman who has not drunk water since before dawn is standing on a balcony forty minutes early, looking at an empty sky.

There is only one hard rule in this fast, and it is a timing rule. The vrat is broken when the woman keeping it sees the moon. Not at a fixed hour, not at sunset, not when the neighbours start their arghya. At moonrise, where she is standing. And moonrise moves further across India in a single night than most people expect.

Karva Chauth 2026 is on Thursday, 29 October

The vrat falls on the chaturthi of the krishna paksha, the fourth day of the waning fortnight. In the purnimanta reckoning used across most of north India that is Kartik krishna chaturthi. In the amanta reckoning the same day is Ashwin krishna chaturthi. Two names, one tithi, no disagreement.

Computed at Delhi, the chaturthi tithi in 2026 begins at 01:07 IST on 29 October and ends at 22:10 IST on 29 October. The whole tithi sits inside one calendar day. That is worth saying plainly, because Karva Chauth is one of the festivals where a tithi straddling two sunrises regularly produces two competing dates and a lot of anxious phone calls. Not this year. Every day-selection rule in the nirnaya literature lands on 29 October, and the moon rises well inside the tithi, about two hours before it closes.

One more thing about that date. Krishna paksha chaturthi is also Sankashti Chaturthi, the monthly Ganesha vrat, which is likewise broken at the sight of the moon. In Maharashtra and much of the south the fourth of the waning fortnight is kept as Sankashti and not as Karva Chauth at all. The tithi is shared, the moonrise rule is shared, the deity and the reason are not. If you keep the Ganesha fast, Sankashti Chaturthi has its own treatment here.

Moonrise on 29 October 2026, by city

These are computed for each city's own coordinates with Swiss Ephemeris, centre-of-disk rise, which is the convention panchang authorities use rather than the upper-limb convention a weather app prints. Tithi boundaries elsewhere on this page are on the sidereal Lahiri ayanamsa. All times are IST.

| City | Moonrise | Sunrise | Length of the fast | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Guwahati | 19:19 | 05:30 | 13h 49m | | Kolkata | 19:43 | 05:40 | 14h 03m | | Patna | 19:48 | 05:56 | 13h 52m | | Varanasi | 19:58 | 06:04 | 13h 54m | | Lucknow | 20:02 | 06:14 | 13h 48m | | Chandigarh | 20:08 | 06:36 | 13h 32m | | Ludhiana | 20:12 | 06:40 | 13h 32m | | Delhi | 20:13 | 06:31 | 13h 42m | | Amritsar | 20:13 | 06:45 | 13h 28m | | Jaipur | 20:24 | 06:35 | 13h 49m | | Bhopal | 20:27 | 06:24 | 14h 03m | | Ujjain | 20:34 | 06:31 | 14h 03m | | Indore | 20:35 | 06:30 | 14h 05m | | Hyderabad | 20:37 | 06:14 | 14h 23m | | Chennai | 20:40 | 06:02 | 14h 38m | | Ahmedabad | 20:48 | 06:43 | 14h 05m | | Surat | 20:52 | 06:40 | 14h 12m | | Bengaluru | 20:52 | 06:13 | 14h 39m | | Pune | 20:54 | 06:33 | 14h 21m | | Mumbai | 20:57 | 06:38 | 14h 19m |

Ninety-eight minutes separate the first moonrise on that list from the last. Inside the Karva Chauth heartland itself, from Varanasi at 19:58 to Jaipur at 20:24, the spread is twenty-six minutes. Delhi and Mumbai are forty-four minutes apart, which matters because a very large number of Punjabi and Haryanvi families now keep this fast in Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, reading times published for Delhi.

Look also at the last column. The fast in Amritsar runs thirteen hours and twenty-eight minutes from sunrise. In Bengaluru it runs fourteen hours and thirty-nine minutes. That is an hour and eleven minutes of difference in the same observance on the same night, and it is entirely a function of where you are standing.

Why moonrise moves so much when the tithi does not

The tithi is an angle. It is the elongation between the Sun and the Moon, and it reaches its boundary at one instant for the whole planet. When the chaturthi ends at 22:10 IST, it ends at 22:10 IST in Amritsar and in Chennai and in Guwahati. Nobody's tithi is different.

Moonrise is not an angle. It is an event on your horizon, and your horizon depends on two things. The first is longitude, which simply shifts the clock. Guwahati sits almost nineteen degrees of longitude east of Mumbai, which is about seventy-five minutes of solar time, and India runs the whole span on a single zone. That alone accounts for most of the ninety-eight minutes.

The second is latitude combined with the Moon's declination on the night in question. On 29 October 2026 the Moon is well north of the celestial equator, which makes it rise earlier relative to local time in the north and later in the south. That is why Chennai and Bengaluru sit at the bottom of the table despite being nowhere near the eastern edge of the country. A moonrise time is not a constant you can memorise, and last year's figure for your own city is no use to you.

For completeness, the Moon stands in Rohini at sunrise on 29 October and passes into Mrigashira at 11:11 IST, so the moon that rises for the arghya that evening is a Mrigashira moon. Mrigashira's presiding deity is Soma, the moon itself, which is a small and pleasant coincidence on a night built entirely around the moon.

What actually has to be timed on the day

Four things, and only one of them is fixed nationally.

Sargi, before sunrise. The pre-dawn meal, traditionally sent by the mother-in-law, is eaten before local sunrise. That is a moving target too. Sunrise on 29 October is 05:30 in Guwahati and 06:45 in Amritsar. Households usually finish sargi comfortably ahead of it rather than racing the minute.

The sankalpa and the katha, through the day. The vow is taken in the morning. The katha is read or heard in a women's gathering, usually in the afternoon, and in most families it is read before the evening puja rather than at a prescribed hour.

The puja, in the evening. The karva is filled, the thali is made up, and the group puja is done in the hours before moonrise. Some families anchor it to pradosh, the stretch after sunset. Sunset on 29 October runs from 16:42 in Guwahati to 18:05 in Mumbai, so this too is local. Rahu Kaal that Thursday falls in the early afternoon, 13:27 to 14:51 in Delhi, and is well clear of the evening.

The arghya and the parana, at moonrise. Water is offered to the moon, the moon is seen, the husband is seen, and the fast is broken with water from his hand. This is the moment the whole day has been pointing at, and it is the one you cannot take from somebody else's city.

The regional shape of the fast

Karva Chauth is not a pan-Indian observance and it is worth being accurate about that, because a great deal of published content flattens it into one national ritual.

Punjab and Haryana. The sargi is the strongest element here, sent from the mother-in-law and eaten in the dark. The evening puja is a group affair, and the distinctive act is the phera, in which the women sit in a circle passing their thalis to the right while the katha is sung, seven times around.

Delhi and western Uttar Pradesh. Closest to the Punjabi form, with the exchange of karvas, the small clay or metal pots, between women who have adopted each other as ritual sisters for the day. In many UP households the katha is the Karva Chauth story proper and the vrat is described as a fast for the husband's long life without further elaboration.

Rajasthan. The chhalni, the sieve, is most strongly associated with the Rajasthani and Marwari form, and there is a local reluctance to look at the chaturthi moon directly, which the sieve is understood to resolve. Rajasthani households also keep an ornamented clay karva and a clay image of Gaur Mata, Parvati, shaped for the day.

Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. Real but thinner, more common in Marwari and Punjabi families settled there than as an old local custom.

Where it is not kept. Bengal, Odisha, Assam and the southern states have no indigenous Karva Chauth. Where you see it in Chennai or Bengaluru now, it has travelled with families, and it is being kept on a Bengaluru moonrise by people reading a Delhi time.

Maharashtra sits in between. The Marathi household keeps the same tithi as Sankashti Chaturthi, breaks it at the same moonrise, and does not call it Karva Chauth.

What the texts actually say, and what they do not

This deserves care, because a lot of the authority cited for this fast on the internet is invented.

The day-selection is well grounded. The question of which calendar day a tithi-based vrat is kept on when the tithi spans two sunrises is exactly what the nirnaya literature exists to settle, and the standard authorities are the Nirnaya Sindhu of Kamalakara Bhatta and the Dharmasindhu of Kashinatha Upadhyaya. The chaturthi vratas themselves, and the rule that they are broken on sight of the moon rather than at a clock hour, sit in the tithi-wise vrata compendia, of which Hemadri's Chaturvarga Chintamani, Vrata Khanda, is the great one.

The story is a different matter. The tale of Veeravati, the brahmin girl whose seven brothers faked a moonrise with a mirror and a fire behind a pipal tree, and the frame in which Krishna narrates the vrat to Draupadi, both belong to the printed vrata-katha tradition. They are widely reproduced. They do not have a verifiable locus in any Purana, and this site will not manufacture one for them. The honest description is that Karva Chauth is a living regional vrat with a folk narrative, kept for centuries, whose day-selection is governed by classical nirnaya rules and whose story is not scripture. That is not a weakness in the observance. It is simply what it is.

What a practitioner actually says when asked

Do not keep a nirjala fast if you are pregnant, nursing, diabetic, on medication that needs food, or recovering from anything. The tradition has always allowed a phalahar version, fruit and water, and has always allowed the sankalpa to be modified at the time it is taken. A vow made in a form you can actually complete is a stronger vow than one abandoned at four in the afternoon.

If the sky is overcast and the moon does not appear, the settled practice is to wait, and if it truly does not clear, to offer the arghya in the direction of the moon at the computed moonrise time and complete the vrat. Nobody's fast is invalidated by cloud cover. This is one of the practical reasons to know your own city's minute rather than to rely on seeing it.

And a word on the reciprocity question, which comes up every year. The classical rite is asymmetric. Husbands fasting alongside is a contemporary addition with no textual basis and no textual prohibition either. Families are free to do as they like with it.

Where the moon meets the chart

The moon is the significator of the mind in Jyotish and it governs the emotional weather of the person who has it. On a night organised entirely around moonrise, the reasonable question to ask is not what the moon is doing in the sky but what it is doing in your own chart, and whether the current dasha is one in which the moon is running the show.

That takes about a minute to find out. Compute a free kundali and look at the Moon's sign, its nakshatra and its house, then Ask Acharya what a strong or afflicted Moon means for your period right now. It answers in your own language and you can keep asking follow-ups, which is usually where the useful part starts. If you want the raw timing rather than the reading, the panchang carries moonrise, sunrise, sunset and the day's windows for your city, recomputed every day.

One last thing about that screenshot

The next time somebody forwards you a Karva Chauth moonrise time, ask which city it was computed for. If the answer is that it did not say, it is not a time, it is a rumour. Twenty-six minutes inside the heartland and ninety-eight minutes across the country is more than enough to matter to a woman who has had nothing to drink since before her own city's sunrise.

Sources

• Nirnaya Sindhu of Kamalakara Bhatta and Dharmasindhu of Kashinatha Upadhyaya, the day-determination digests that govern which calendar day a tithi-based vrat is kept on when the tithi spans two sunrises
• Chaturvarga Chintamani, Vrata Khanda, of Hemadri, the tithi-wise compendium in which the chaturthi vratas and their completion on sight of the moon are collected
• The Veeravati katha and the Krishna-and-Draupadi frame belong to the printed vrata-katha tradition. No Puranic locus is attested for either and none is claimed here.
• Moonrise, sunrise, sunset and tithi boundaries computed by Vidhata's panchang engine: Swiss Ephemeris, sidereal Lahiri (Chitrapaksha) ayanamsa, centre-of-disk rise and set, per-city coordinates