When is Chhath Puja?

How the date is decided

Chhath is Kartik Shukla Shashthi — the sixth tithi of the waxing fortnight of Kartik — judged at sunrise.

That is the whole rule, and it is one of the simpler ones in this calendar. The interesting part of Chhath is not how the day is chosen but how little the day tells you about when to actually stand in the water.

The date is national, the timings are not

Most festivals have a puja that can be performed within a broad window, so a national date is nearly all you need. Chhath is different: the two arghyas are offered at sunset and at sunrise, not merely near them.

Those are astronomical events at your own horizon. Sunset on the same date differs by well over an hour between Patna and Ahmedabad, and by far more for readers in Toronto, London or Dubai. A published national time would be wrong for almost everyone reading it.

So this page gives you the date, and the panchang gives you sunrise and sunset for your own city on that date. Those are the numbers the observance runs on.

The four days

The sequence spans four civil dates, and only the third is the tithi this page computes:

1. Nahay Khay — Chaturthi
2. Kharna — Panchami, the day-long fast broken after sunset
3. Sandhya Arghya — Shashthi, the evening offering. This is the date above.
4. Usha Arghya — the following sunrise, on the next civil date

Because the sequence is counted through consecutive tithis while the arghyas are tied to sunset and sunrise, the fourth step lands on the morning after the date we publish. That is not an off-by-one in the table; it is how the observance is structured.

Why the Gregorian date moves

Chhath falls in late October or November, six days after Diwali in tithi count — Diwali is the Kartik Amavasya, Chhath the Shashthi of the fortnight that follows. Because the two are separate rules judged at different moments (Diwali at pradosh, Chhath at sunrise) and tithis vary in length, the civil gap is usually but not always exactly six days.

The whole cluster drifts earlier each year by about eleven days until an intercalary month resets it. Major festivals do not fire inside an Adhika month, so a leap Kartik moves the sequence to the true Kartik.

What we do not compute

We fix the Shashthi and give you local sunrise and sunset. We do not compute the ghat-specific timings municipalities publish, the regional variations in the Kharna schedule, or Chaiti Chhath in Chaitra. For the day’s fuller picture — tithi boundaries, the nakshatra, and the auspicious and inauspicious windows — the panchang for your city carries all of it.