How every festival is dated

Muhurtha carries 138 festivals, and every one of them is a rule rather than a list of dates. This page lists the rules. The same rule lands on a different day every year, so no date is shown until you pick a year: choose one of 2026 to 2040 in the filter below and each festival gains its date for that year.

Reading a rule

Most rules have the same four parts: a lunar month, a fortnight (Shukla, the waxing half, or Krishna, the waning half), a tithi within it, and the moment of the day at which that tithi has to be running. Ashwina Krishna Amavasya, judged at dusk is Diwali.

When a rule is awkward

• A tithi can last about 26 hours, so it can be running at the chosen moment on two days in a row. The festival goes on the first of them.
• A short tithi can fall between two moments and be running at neither. It is then kept on the day it begins or the day it holds at sunrise, so no festival drops out of a year.
• Adhika (extra) months are skipped: festivals are kept in the regular, nija month.
• Ekadashi festivals follow the fast. They take their day from the same Ekadashi logic as the Fast card on Today, including the shift when Dashami touches the dawn.
• Two festivals in one nakshatra month — a nakshatra such as Pusam can come round twice while the Sun is in one sign. The one that falls with the full moon is kept.
• Where almanacs genuinely disagree, the app says so on the day, with the reason, rather than silently choosing.

Amanta or Purnimanta?

The two systems agree on every bright-half (Shukla) rule. They differ only for the dark half (Krishna), where Purnimanta names the month one later. So the same rule reads Ashwina Krishna Amavasya in Amanta and Kartika Krishna Amavasya in Purnimanta. The festival is the same day either way. Switch below to see the rules named the way your calendar names them.