Pitru Paksha 2026 dates: how to work out which day is your ancestor's shraddh

The fortnight opens on 26 September this year, and by the second morning a good number of families have already made the one mistake that matters. Somebody looks up the dates on a phone, sees a block of days, and picks whichever one is convenient. Shraddh does not work that way. The day belongs to the person you are remembering, and it is fixed by the tithi on which that person died, not by the date on the death certificate.

That single rule is where most of the confusion in this fortnight comes from. It is also the part no printed calendar can answer for you, because the answer sits in your own family's history rather than in the almanac.

Pitru Paksha 2026 dates

Pitru Paksha 2026 runs from Saturday 26 September to Saturday 10 October.

The observance opens a day before the dark fortnight does. Bhadrapada Purnima falls on Saturday 26 September, and the purnima shraddh kept that day is counted as the first of the sequence. That is why some calendars print sixteen days for Pitru Paksha and others print fifteen. The dark fortnight proper begins on Sunday 27 September with krishna pratipada and closes on Saturday 10 October, Sarva Pitru Amavasya, the day most people know simply as Mahalaya.

The next morning, Sunday 11 October, Sharad Navaratri opens with Ghatasthapana. The two observances sit back to back with no gap at all, which is why the last days of the fortnight always feel crowded in a household that keeps both.

These are the days our festival calendar fixes inside the fortnight:

| Date | Tithi | What it carries | | --- | --- | --- | | Sat 26 Sep | Bhadrapada Purnima | Purnima shraddh, the opening day | | Sun 27 Sep | Krishna pratipada | First day of the dark fortnight | | Wed 30 Sep | Krishna chaturthi | Also Sankashti Chaturthi | | Tue 6 Oct | Krishna ekadashi | Indira Ekadashi | | Thu 8 Oct | Krishna trayodashi | Pradosh | | Fri 9 Oct | Krishna chaturdashi | Masik Shivaratri, and Ghata Chaturdashi shraddh | | Sat 10 Oct | Amavasya | Sarva Pitru Amavasya, Mahalaya |

The tithis not named above run in sequence between those anchors, with one exception this year that deserves its own section. A tithi is a fraction of the moon's separation from the sun rather than a slice of the clock, so the calendar day a given tithi lands on shifts with your longitude. Before you fix anything with a priest, check the tithi for your own city on the panchang.

One more thing worth knowing about the shape of the whole fortnight. The Sun crosses into Kanya on 17 September, a little before eight in the morning, and Pitru Paksha then sits entirely inside that solar passage. The older name for the period, Mahalaya paksha, refers to that Kanya-gata Surya window rather than to the single amavasya day at the end of it.

Why 2026 gives you fifteen days and sixteen tithis

Sixteen tithis have to fit into fifteen sunrises this year, and one of them does not get a morning.

Krishna ashtami is kshaya in 2026. At the reference meridian our panchang engine works from, the ashtami begins after one sunrise and finishes before the next, so no morning in the fortnight carries it. A tithi that never touches a sunrise drops out of the ordinary day count. That is why the fortnight reads as fifteen calendar days from 26 September to 10 October rather than the usual sixteen.

For most families this is a curiosity. If your father or your grandmother died on an ashtami, it is not.

Here is why it matters. The day for a shraddh is not settled by the tithi at sunrise. It is settled by the tithi running at aparahna, the afternoon stretch when the rite is actually performed. A tithi that misses every sunrise can still be present at somebody's aparahna, and which afternoon it touches depends on where you are standing. Chennai and Delhi can land on different days for the same ashtami. Questions of exactly this shape are what the day-selection literature that panchang makers still work from, the Nirnayasindhu and the Dharmasindhu, was compiled to settle.

If ashtami is your tithi, do not guess and do not copy a date off a national calendar. Ask Acharya with the date and place, and get the day worked out for where you live.

Working out which day is yours

The rule is old and it is simple to state.

The shraddh is kept on the tithi on which the person died, not on the Gregorian anniversary. If your grandfather died on 14 March, that date has no standing in this fortnight. What matters is the tithi that was running on 14 March in the year he died. That tithi, when it comes round in this dark fortnight, is his day.

Three details people get wrong:

The paksha does not travel, only the number does. If the death fell on a shukla saptami, the shraddh is kept on the krishna saptami of Pitru Paksha. The fortnight is a dark one throughout. You are matching the number of the tithi, not the half of the month.

Two ancestors can share a day. If a grandfather and a great-aunt both died on a dashami, they are remembered together on the same afternoon, and there is nothing irregular about it.

The first year runs on its own schedule. A family in the twelve months after a death should follow whatever the priest set out for that year rather than the general fortnight rule, because the first-year rites have their own sequence and their own dates.

If nobody in the family remembers the tithi, you have two clean options and you do not need to invent anything. Sarva Pitru Amavasya on 10 October exists precisely for this. It carries every ancestor whose day is unknown, forgotten, or missed. The other option is arithmetic: if you know the Gregorian date of death and roughly where it happened, the tithi is a computation rather than a memory, and it can be recovered.

The window inside the day

Almost nobody publishes this part, and it is the part that changes most between cities.

Shraddh is an afternoon rite. The classical division cuts the daylight, sunrise to sunset, into fifteen equal muhurtas. The eighth of those, the one straddling local midday, is called kutup, and the shraddh window opens there and runs on through the aparahna into the later afternoon. The rite is not a morning one and it is not done after dark.

Because the window is cut from local sunrise and sunset, it moves. Sunrise on 10 October is not the same instant in Patna and in Ahmedabad, and a window built from it will not be either. A national calendar can only print one city's number. If you want the one that applies to your kitchen, take it from the panchang for your own city on the day.

The rest of the practice is the same everywhere and it is not complicated: face south, offer water with black sesame and darbha, name the people you are offering to out loud rather than in your head, and feed somebody. If you have not kept the rite before and want the full household sequence, we have written it out step by step in how to perform shraddh properly at home.

The named days inside the fortnight

Not every day in the fortnight is generic. Several carry a specific class of ancestor, and knowing them saves a family a lot of second-guessing.

Bharani shraddh. Kept on whichever day Bharani nakshatra falls within the fortnight. Bharani's presiding deity is Yama, which is the whole reason for the association, and the day is held to be of particular value for someone who died in the year just gone. The nakshatra moves year to year, so take the day from the panchang rather than from memory.

Avidhava Navami. The krishna navami is kept for married women who died while their husband was still living. In many families it is the only day of the fortnight the women of the house lead.

Ghata Chaturdashi, on Friday 9 October this year. The krishna chaturdashi carries those who died by accident, by weapon, or by violence, rather than in the ordinary course of age and illness. Families who lost someone suddenly often find this the day that actually helps.

Sarva Pitru Amavasya, Saturday 10 October. The closing day and the catch-all. Anyone missed, anyone whose tithi is unknown, anyone the family has lost track of across generations, all of them are covered here. If you keep only one day of the fortnight, keep this one.

Matamaha shraddh, Sunday 11 October. The day after the fortnight ends, on Ashwin shukla pratipada, is kept for the maternal grandfather by his daughter's son. It falls on Ghatasthapana this year, so a household doing both will be setting up the Navaratri kalash and keeping a shraddh on the same morning.

Why nothing new starts in these fifteen days

Ask any family astrologer for a griha pravesh date in the last week of September 2026 and you will be told to wait. The fortnight is closed to auspicious beginnings: no house-warming, no vehicle purchase, no shop opening, no naming ceremony, no wedding. The reasoning is not superstition about bad luck. The fortnight is oriented backwards, toward completing what is owed to the people who came before, and starting something forward-facing inside it is treated as working against the grain of the days.

Two of the year's long closed windows overlap here. Chaturmas is still running, so weddings are out regardless until Prabodhini Ekadashi on 21 November. And Pitru Paksha itself shuts the door on the rest. The door opens again on 11 October with Navaratri, which is a large part of why Navaratri and Dussehra carry so much of the year's starting-work traffic. If you are holding a date decision through this fortnight, the muhurat finder will show you what the days on the far side of it look like.

If you are picking this up after a gap

Plenty of households drop the fortnight for a generation and then somebody decides to pick it back up. That is a normal thing and it does not require getting everything right the first year.

Start with the two facts you can actually establish. Find out, from whoever in the family still knows, the tithi your parents' and grandparents' deaths fell on. Write them down somewhere that will outlive your phone. If nobody knows, use 10 October and start the record from there.

Then keep the afternoon. Fifteen minutes facing south with water and sesame, done on the right day with the right names said aloud, is worth considerably more than an elaborate ritual performed on a wrong day because it suited the weekend.

If the family has an open question here, whether it is a tithi nobody can pin down, an ashtami that has gone missing from the calendar this year, or a chart that keeps pointing at the ancestors, put it to Ask Acharya. It is free, it answers in your own language, and it is a better use of the fortnight than another hour of searching. If you want to see how the ancestral houses sit in your own chart before you ask, start with a free kundali.

Sources

• Nirnayasindhu and Dharmasindhu, the day-selection (nirnaya) literature that governs which day carries a shraddh tithi
• Garuda Purana, Preta Khanda, the standard puranic authority on funerary and shraddh rites
• Manusmriti, the shraddh section of the householder's duties
• Vidhata panchang: tithi, nakshatra and per-city sunrise, sunset and muhurta windows
• Vidhata festivals calendar, computed at the Ujjain reference meridian with the 2026 adhika Jyeshtha accounted