Diwali 2026 Lakshmi Puja Muhurat: 8 November, Pradosh Kaal, Sthir Lagna and Choghadiya

2026-08-26

Diwali 2026 falls on Sunday, 8 November. Amavasya runs through Pradosh Kaal that evening and Vrishabha sthir lagna rises at 17:55, giving a Lakshmi Puja muhurat of 17:55 to 19:51 for Delhi. What Pradosh, sthir lagna, Nishita and choghadiya each mean.

Diwali 2026 falls on Sunday, 8 November. What people want closer to the date is narrower: the exact evening window, and why one almanac prints 17:55 and another prints 18:12. This page is about that window — where it comes from, what a sthir lagna actually is, and what each slice of the evening is suited to.

Why the puja is on 8 November and not the 9th

Lakshmi Puja is tied to Kartika Amavasya, but not to whichever calendar day the Amavasya begins on. The rule is pradosh-vyapini: the Amavasya tithi must be running during Pradosh Kaal, the stretch just after sunset. Amavasya begins at 11:28 on 8 November and ends at 12:32 on 9 November. On the 8th, sunset is 17:30, so Amavasya is comfortably in place; on the 9th it has ended nearly five hours before that day's sunset of 17:29. The 8th takes the puja, and there is no genuine two-date split this year.

One consequence does catch people out. Kartika Krishna Chaturdashi runs until 11:28 on the morning of the 8th, so Naraka Chaturdashi and Lakshmi Puja share a single date in 2026 — the abhyang snan before dawn and the Lakshmi Puja after sunset both belong to Sunday the 8th.

The evening in measured numbers

Read directly from our panchang engine for Delhi, in IST.

Two details are worth a pause. The Moon sets at 16:39, before the Sun does — which is what an Amavasya evening should look like. And the nakshatra is Swati, itself classed as a chara, or movable, nakshatra: whatever fixedness this muhurat has comes from the lagna, not the nakshatra.

What Pradosh Kaal actually is

Pradosh is the joint between day and night — the hours when the sky has lost the Sun but has not gone properly dark. For Diwali, the working definition in most Indian almanacs is three muhurtas, about 2 hours 24 minutes, counted from sunset. For Delhi on 8 November that gives 17:30 to 19:54.

This is a convention, not a constant. Some panchangs run Pradosh from about 48 minutes before sunset to 48 minutes after; the monthly Shiva Pradosh vrat uses that narrower version, Diwali the wider one. When two sites publish different Pradosh windows, that is usually the whole disagreement.

Sthir lagna: what "fixed" means here

The lagna, or ascendant, is the rashi standing on the eastern horizon at a given moment. It changes roughly every two hours, so across a day and night all twelve take their turn. They sort into three groups:

• Chara, movable — Mesha, Karka, Tula, Makara
• Sthir, fixed — Vrishabha, Simha, Vrishchika, Kumbha
• Dvisvabhava, dual — Mithuna, Kanya, Dhanu, Meena

Muhurta shastra treats the lagna as carrying the character of whatever begins under it. A chara lagna suits things meant to move — travel, dispatch, goods bought to be sold on. A sthir lagna suits things meant to stay: pratishtha of a murti, griha pravesh, laying a foundation, filling a treasury.

Why a sthir lagna for Lakshmi, and why Vrishabha

The traditional reasoning is short and best stated without decoration. Lakshmi is described in the puranic literature as chanchala — restless, not inclined to remain anywhere long. The puja is anchored in a fixed sign so that what is invoked settles rather than passes through. The rising sign is being asked to hold.

That is reasoning by correspondence, and the texts offer nothing underneath it. The Muhurta Chintamani tradition classifies the lagnas and prescribes sthir lagna for sthayi karya, work meant to endure, but it gives no mechanism, and we are not going to invent one. A second argument is usually stacked on top: Vrishabha is ruled by Shukra, karaka of wealth and comfort, the aptest of the four for this deity. Take it as a compounding preference, not a proof.

There is also a plainer reason, specific to this date. Over Delhi on 8 November, Vrishchika lagna rises at 07:22 and Kumbha at 13:27 — both in daylight. Of the four fixed signs only Vrishabha and Simha fall in the puja hours at all. Vrishabha rises at 17:55 and hands over to Mithuna at 19:51; laid over Pradosh Kaal, the overlap is nearly the whole lagna — 17:55 to 19:51. That is the Lakshmi Puja muhurat for 2026, and it is a generous one. In years when the fixed lagna clips only the last twenty minutes of Pradosh, households rush. Not this year.

Nishita Kaal, and the Simha lagna problem in 2026

Nishita is the eighth of the fifteen muhurtas the night divides into — the one straddling the true middle of the night. Measured from the engine's sunset of 17:30 to the next morning's sunrise of 06:39, it runs 23:38 to 00:31, the midpoint of the night falling at 00:04. This is the window for tantric Kali Puja and the late household puja kept in many Bengali and Shakta homes, and the standard advice is to pair it with the night's other fixed sign, Simha.

In 2026 that pairing barely works. Simha does not rise over Delhi until 00:25, while Nishita closes at 00:31 — an overlap of six minutes. For almost all of Nishita the rising sign is Karka, which is chara. Two honest options: keep Nishita and accept a movable lagna, which is effectively what the Kali Puja tradition already does since it treats Nishita as primary; or move the puja into 00:25 to 02:43, the full run of Simha, and let Nishita go.

The evening window by window

Sunrise, sunset, tithi and Rahu Kaal are engine readings for Delhi. Choghadiya boundaries are derived by dividing the engine's own sunrise-to-sunset and sunset-to-sunrise spans into eight; as a check, the eighth day-part lands at 16:09–17:30 against the engine's Rahu Kaal of 16:08–17:30. Pradosh and Nishita are counted from the engine's sunset, and the lagna times are computed for Delhi at 28.61 N, 77.21 E with Lahiri ayanamsa — the engine stores no lagna. All derived times are rounded to the nearest minute, so a boundary can sit a few seconds either side of the figure printed here.

Choghadiya, and Rahu Kaal ending at sunset

Choghadiya splits the day into eight parts between sunrise and sunset, and the night into eight between sunset and the next sunrise, each with a planetary lord and a name. It is coarser than lagna-based muhurta. Sunday night opens with Shubh, so the whole muhurat sits inside Shubh until 19:09 and Amrit after it — the two most favoured of the eight, and Amrit is the slot shopkeepers pick for the new bahi-khata. Pleasant, but it follows from the weekday and the sunset time; it is not an omen. Choghadiya is recalculated daily from that day's sunrise and sunset.

Rog runs 22:26–00:04 and Kaal 00:04–01:43, which matters for the Nishita puja: the two systems disagree there, and where they disagree the tradition gives precedence to the kaal and the lagna. One oddity this year — Sunday's Rahu Kaal is the eighth and last part of the day, 16:08 to 17:30, ending on the same minute Pradosh begins. Nothing needs doing about it; preparation is not a muhurta act, and anyone avoiding Rahu Kaal for the first diya need only wait until 17:30. Rahu Kaal moves with the weekday, so do not carry Sunday's figure to Govardhan Puja on the 10th.

These are Delhi times

Everything above is computed for Delhi and stated in IST. Sunrise, sunset and moonrise differ by city, and every window here moves with them: Pradosh and Nishita are measured from sunset, choghadiya from sunrise and sunset, the lagna from your own latitude and longitude. For a rough sense of the spread, Mumbai's sunset is about half an hour later than Delhi's and Kolkata's about forty minutes earlier — longitude estimates, not engine readings. Pull your own city's panchang before fixing the time. For the sequence of the puja rather than its timing, the full Lakshmi Puja vidhi and samagri list is separate.