When is Akshaya Tritiya?

How the date is decided

Akshaya Tritiya is Vaishakha Shukla Tritiya — the third tithi of the waxing fortnight of Vaishakha — judged at madhyahna, solar midday.

Madhyahna is the midpoint between sunrise and sunset. It is not 12:00 on the clock, and on most days in most cities it is not noon either. The day whose madhyahna falls under Tritiya is the day that carries the festival, which is the same reference Ganesh Chaturthi and Ram Navami use.

The “no muhurat needed” claim

Akshaya Tritiya is described more often than any other day in the calendar as one of the sade teen muhurat — the three and a half self-evidently auspicious days on which no further timing check is required. It is worth being precise about what that is and is not.

It is a customary and widely held belief. It is not something the panchang computes, and it does not suppress anything the panchang does compute. On any Akshaya Tritiya you will still find:

• a Rahu Kaal window, on the ordinary weekday rule
• ordinary choghadiya slots, some of them marked inauspicious
• a Bhadra window, if the Vishti karana falls that day

We do not remove or override those on this date, because there is no computational basis on which to do so. What we can honestly tell you is the tithi, the day, and every window the ordinary rules produce. Whether a household treats the day as exempt from them is a matter of practice, and this site’s job is to be clear about which of the two it is reporting.

This is the same stance taken throughout: the classical material we can compute is computed, and the classical material we cannot is described as tradition rather than dressed up as output.

Why the Gregorian date moves

Vaishakha Shukla Tritiya lands in late April or May. The lunar year runs about eleven days short of the solar one, so the date drifts earlier each year until an intercalary month resets it and it jumps forward again. The eleven-year table above shows the full swing.

Major festivals are suppressed inside an Adhika month, so a leap Vaishakha does not produce two Akshaya Tritiyas — the festival falls in the true Vaishakha that follows.

Parashurama Jayanti

The same tithi carries Parashurama Jayanti in many almanacs. It is not computed as a separate observance here; where a calendar lists both, they are the same day under the same rule.

What we do not compute

We fix the day. We do not compute a special Akshaya Tritiya muhurat, purchase timings, or the regional observances attached to the date. For the day’s actual windows in your own city — sunrise, midday, the tithi boundaries and every auspicious and inauspicious slot — open the panchang for the date.