Sharad Purnima 2026: 26 October, and Which Night the Kheer Actually Goes Out

2026-08-25

Purnima tithi begins 25 October 2026 at 11:56 AM and ends 26 October at 9:41 AM, which means the kheer night is 25/26 October, not 26/27. Exact moonrise and moonset for both nights, the Kojagara vigil, and an honest look at the amrit varsha belief.

Two dates circulate for Sharad Purnima 2026 — 25 October and 26 October — and neither is a printing error. The Purnima tithi begins late on one morning and ends early the next, and the different things people do on this festival follow different rules about which day a tithi belongs to. Here is the arithmetic, and what it means for the kheer.

The short answer

The moonlit night — the one the kheer sits out under, the one families stay awake through — is the night of Sunday 25 October into Monday 26 October 2026. It is not the night of 26/27.

The daytime half — snan, daan, the Satyanarayan katha, anything needing the tithi to be running at sankalp — belongs to Monday 26 October and must finish before 9:41 AM, when the tithi ends.

The tithi, exactly

All times are for Delhi and are IST.

Why two dates circulate

Indian calendars name a day by its udaya tithi, the tithi running at sunrise. At sunrise on Sunday 25 October the tithi is still Shukla Chaturdashi, because Purnima only starts at 11:56 AM. At sunrise on Monday the tithi is Purnima. So by the sunrise rule the Purnima day is Monday the 26th.

But observances done after dark are not settled by sunrise. They are settled by whether the tithi is running when the observance takes place — at pradosh, at moonrise, or at nishita, the midpoint of the night. Sharad Purnima is a night observance from start to finish, so it follows the night rule, and by that rule it lands on Sunday evening, 25 October. That is why panchangs flag the festival on the 25th while still calling the 26th the Purnima day. Our tithi explainer covers the sunrise convention in more detail.

The two candidate nights, side by side

The night of 25/26 October sits under Purnima from dusk to dawn. The following night is Krishna Pratipada end to end, because the tithi finished at 9:41 that morning — in daylight, hours before the moon rose again at 5:34 PM.

Now the honest part: your eye cannot tell those two moons apart. The instant of exact full moon is the instant the tithi ends, 9:41 AM on Monday, in broad daylight, after the moon has already set at 7:36 AM. Sunday night's moon closes the gap all night and is about two hours short of full when it sets. Monday evening's moon rises about eight hours past full, already waning. Both look like a flawless disc from a terrace. The panchang is what separates them, and the panchang is not ambiguous.

The kheer under the open sky

Kheer — rice simmered slowly in milk, sweetened, usually with kesar, elaichi and chopped dry fruit — is cooked in the evening, offered to the moon after moonrise, and left in a clean vessel where the moonlight actually reaches it, covered with thin muslin so light passes and insects do not. In the morning it is taken as prasad, first by whoever kept the fast.

Two things people get wrong. Placement: a shaded balcony defeats the idea; the vessel needs open sky above it. Timing: the moon sets at 7:36 AM on Monday, so nothing is gained after that — bring the kheer in and eat it, rather than letting it stand through the day.

Kojagara: who is awake?

The night's other name is Kojagara, or Kojagiri, from the Sanskrit ko jagarti — "who is awake?" The tradition held in the medieval vrata digests is that Lakshmi moves over the earth on this one night asking exactly that, and stays where she finds a household awake: lamp lit, floor clean, family in worship.

The observance follows from the story rather than from an elaborate vidhi. A lamp burns through the night, Lakshmi puja is done in the evening beside the moon worship, and then there is jagaran — staying awake with singing, katha, or the light-hearted games of chance many families play only on this night. In Bengal it is Kojagori Lokkhi Pujo; in Maharashtra, Kojagiri, where the offering is masala doodh; in Odisha, Kumar Purnima. All belong to Sunday night, with nishita — the exact midpoint between sunset and the next sunrise — falling around 12:05 AM.

Raas Purnima

Vaishnava tradition knows this night as Raas Purnima. The Raas Panchadhyayi of the Bhagavata Purana opens on an autumn full-moon night with jasmine in bloom, and it is that night the Braj temples re-enact — Vrindavan, Barsana, Nandgaon — with raas leela until dawn. In Manipur the Maha Raas is performed on this Purnima in its own centuries-old form. The logic is unchanged: the leela belongs to the night when Purnima is running, which in 2026 is Sunday night.

"Amrit varsha": what can honestly be said

The belief attached to this night is that the moon's rays carry amrit, that it falls into the kheer, and that eating it in the morning brings health for the year. It is worth being precise about where that sits. The tradition genuinely holds that Chandra rose from the samudra manthan alongside the amrit, and that the Ashwin full moon is the one night on which the moon is described as complete in all sixteen kalas. The link between moon, nectar and this night is old and a real part of the parampara.

What no text supplies is a mechanism. There is no verse saying moonlight alters milk, no shastric instruction naming how many hours the vessel must stand, no described process and no stated result. The kheer practice is a living custom — strong in some regions, absent in others — and it deserves to be honoured as a custom rather than propped up with explanations it never asked for.

One thing nearby is textual. Ayurvedic ritu-charya treats sharad as the season when pitta accumulated during the rains gets aggravated, and prescribes sweet, cooling, light food. A milk-and-rice dish at the end of an October night fits that neatly. That is a seasonal dietary tradition, not a claim about what moonlight does.

A timeline for the night

About that Rahu kaal overlap: on Sunday it runs 4:17 to 5:41 PM in Delhi, covering moonrise. Worth knowing, but not a reason to move anything — Rahu kaal is avoided for beginning new undertakings, not for a parva bound to a tithi. If it still sits uneasily, offer arghya after 5:41 PM. Your city's window is on our Rahu Kaal page.

Your city is not Delhi

Every clock time above is Delhi and IST. The tithi endpoints are single instants and read the same on every clock in India; sunrise, sunset, moonrise and moonset do not. Kolkata sits about eleven degrees of longitude east of Delhi, so its moonrise comes roughly forty minutes earlier, while Mumbai and Ahmedabad run later. That changes when you should be outside looking up, not which night it is — 25/26 October is the Purnima night from Kanyakumari to Srinagar. Take your city's figures from our daily panchang, and for the rest of the month the October 2026 panchang has the full vrat calendar, Karva Chauth on 29 October included.