Karwa Chauth 2026: Moonrise Time by City, Puja Muhurat

Karwa Chauth 2026 falls on Thursday, 29 October. The Kartik Krishna Chaturthi tithi (the fourth day of the waning moon, by the purnimanta calendar most of north India follows) runs from 29 October 1:07 am to 29 October 10:10 pm IST, so it is in force for the whole day and evening, well past moonrise everywhere in the country.

The fast does not break at a fixed clock time. It breaks when the Moon is sighted. That single fact is why a Delhi time circulating online is close to useless for a woman observing the vrat in Mumbai or Bengaluru: moonrise on 29 October is roughly forty-five minutes later in the west and south than it is in the east. Find your city below before you plan your evening.

Moonrise and puja muhurat, city by city

All times are IST. The pradosh puja window is the evening period, from sunset to roughly two and a half hours later, when the katha and the main puja are traditionally done. Moonrise is separate and comes after the puja window closes in most cities.

Look at the spread. Patna sees the Moon at 7:48 pm. Mumbai waits until 8:57 pm, more than an hour later, because the Moon rises later the further west and south you travel on the same calendar day. A woman in Ahmedabad who breaks her fast at a Delhi-sourced time of 8:13 pm would be eating before the Moon has actually risen in her sky, which defeats the point of the rite.

Outside India. The tithi itself is a global instant, but the clock reading of it depends on the local calendar. Dubai, Singapore and Sydney fall in the same lunar day as India and can simply read their own moonrise: roughly 8:24 pm in Dubai, 9:58 pm in Singapore, 11:10 pm in Sydney. London, New York and Toronto cross the tithi boundary differently because of the time difference, so households there who track the tithi precisely rather than the calendar date may find themselves a day off from India. If that applies to you, check with your own family's practice or a local pandit rather than relying on a single printed time.

What the fast is actually for

Karwa Chauth is kept by married women for the long life of their husband, and increasingly by unmarried women for a good one to come. It is a nirjala vrat, meaning no food and no water, not even a sip, from before sunrise until the Moon is sighted in the evening. That stretch runs close to fourteen hours in most of north India, which is why the sargi meal matters as much as the breaking of the fast does.

Sargi: the meal before the fast begins

Sargi is eaten before sunrise, usually given by the mother-in-law to her daughter-in-law as a mark of blessing. It has to be finished before the sun is up, because the nirjala period begins at sunrise, not at some arbitrary morning hour. Sunrise itself varies by city on 29 October, from around 5:40 am in Kolkata to nearly 6:45 am in Ahmedabad, so the sargi window closes earlier in the east than in the west. A heavy, hydrating sargi, usually something with fruit, dry fruit, coconut water or a sweet dish, is traditional precisely because there is no second chance to eat until the Moon appears that night.

How the day runs

The sankalp, the formal resolve to keep the vrat, is taken in the morning, often right after sargi. Through the day, the fast is kept strictly, and many women avoid even swallowing their own saliva as a mark of how literal the "nirjala" is meant to be. In the evening, the Karwa Chauth katha, the story of Veervati or the version followed in a particular family's tradition, is read or heard, usually in a group of women sitting together with their karwas (the small earthen pots used in the puja).

The pradosh puja, the main worship with the thali, the karwa, and the sieve through which the Moon and then the husband are traditionally viewed, happens in the evening window given above. This is not when the fast ends. It is the preparation for the moment that does end it.

The fast itself breaks only at moonrise, when the woman sights the Moon, often through a sieve, offers it water (arghya), and then looks at her husband through the same sieve before he gives her the first sip of water or bite of food. This sequence, chandra darshan followed by arghya followed by the husband's hand, is the actual close of the vrat. Everything before it, the sankalp, the katha, the pradosh puja, is preparation for this one moment, which is exactly why the moonrise time and not the puja time is the number that matters most on the day.

If cloud cover hides the Moon in a particular city, many families use the clock time of moonrise, calculated for that latitude and longitude rather than observed, as the point to break the fast. That is the same number given in the table above.

If you are wondering whether your own married-life yoga supports the kind of partnership Karwa Chauth is meant to honour, or whether a particular dosha in your chart is worth addressing before an auspicious season like this one, you can ask Acharya directly and get a reading grounded in your own birth chart rather than a generic forecast. If you have not generated that chart yet, free kundali takes a few minutes and needs only your birth date, time and place.

Why the gap between cities is so large

Moonrise, unlike sunrise, does not track neatly with longitude alone. On the fourth day after new moon, the Moon is a thin, fast-moving crescent low in the sky, and small differences in longitude and latitude translate into real differences in when it clears the horizon. India spans close to thirty degrees of longitude, from Gujarat to the northeast, and nearly as much of a visual effect from latitude. That is the honest reason a single number can never serve the whole country for this particular festival, and why almanacs that print only a Delhi or a generic "India" time are quietly wrong for most of their readers.