Chhath Puja 2026: Nahay Khay, Kharna and the Two Arghyas

When Is Chhath in 2026? (छठ पूजा 2026 कब है)

Chhath takes its name from the sixth: chhath is the spoken form of shashthi, and the festival is fixed to the sixth lunar day of the bright fortnight of Kartika. The festival table behind this site places that Shashthi on Sunday, 15 November 2026, and that date is the evening arghya, the offering to the setting sun. The vrat itself is longer. As it is kept in Bihar, Jharkhand and the eastern districts of Uttar Pradesh, it opens two days earlier and closes the morning after, so the whole observance in 2026 runs from Friday 13 November to Monday 16 November.

The Shashthi tithi opens at 23:24 on the night of 14 November 2026 and closes at 02:01 in the small hours of 16 November 2026. That window is the whole calendar argument, and this year it is a tidy one: it covers every minute of daylight on the Sunday and the whole evening after it, and it has already ended by the time the next sunrise comes.

Four Days Counted From the Shashthi (नहाय खाय से उषा अर्घ्य तक)

The household custom does not date the four days independently. It fixes the Shashthi and counts outwards from it: Nahay Khay two days before, Kharna the day before, the Sandhya Arghya on the day, the Usha Arghya at the following dawn. Counting that way from 15 November gives the dates below. The custom also names each day by its tithi — Chaturthi, Panchami, Shashthi, Saptami — so the count can be checked against the daily panchang, and in 2026 the tithi running at sunrise matches the name on all four days.

Nahay Khay, Friday 13 November. The name means, plainly, bathe and eat. The vrati bathes, in a river or pond where the family can reach one, cleans the house and the kitchen, and eats a single meal cooked without onion or garlic. In Bhojpuri and Magahi households that meal is commonly kaddu-bhaat: bottle gourd, chana dal and rice. The daily table has Shukla Chaturthi at sunrise, which is the tithi the custom gives the day.

Kharna, Saturday 14 November. Also called Lohanda in parts of Bihar. The vrati goes without food and water through the day and breaks the fast after sunset with the Kharna prasad — in Maithili and Bhojpuri homes, kheer sweetened with gur and cooked on an earthen chulha, with roti or puri — which is offered first and then shared with the household. On the custom’s reckoning that meal opens the long nirjala fast, without food or water, that runs until after the dawn arghya two mornings later. Sunrise on 14 November is in Shukla Panchami, and Panchami is still running after sunset (17:28 at New Delhi) because Shashthi does not begin until 23:24. The Kharna meal therefore falls on the tithi the custom names for it, with hours to spare.

Sandhya Arghya, Sunday 15 November. The day of the Shashthi. Thekua — wheat flour and jaggery, shaped and fried in ghee — is made at home along with the other prasad, and the offerings are carried to the ghat in a bamboo basket (daura) and arranged on winnowing trays (soop): thekua, fruit, sugarcane, coconut. The vrati stands in the water facing west and offers arghya as the Sun goes down.

Usha Arghya, Monday 16 November. The household returns to the ghat before dawn, the vrati stands in the water again, now facing east, and the second arghya is offered to the rising Sun. The fast is broken only after that, with the prasad.

Why the Dawn Arghya Falls on Saptami

A panchang for 16 November shows Saptami, not Shashthi, and that is not an error. The Shashthi ends at 02:01, hours before sunrise at 06:44, so the Usha Arghya is offered on Saptami, and that is how the custom is built: the festival is dated by the evening arghya on the Shashthi, and the dawn arghya is the close of that same vrat on the morning after, whatever tithi that morning happens to carry. The two offerings frame one night. And because that morning is a Monday and not a Sunday, this Saptami is not a Bhanu Saptami.

The festival row carries the rule “tithi at pradosh”, the same rule this site’s generator applies to Diwali and Dhanteras, a natural fit for an observance whose central act happens at sunset. Pradosh at New Delhi on 15 November runs 17:27-19:51, and Shashthi covers all of it. The previous evening is no rival: at sunset on 14 November the tithi is still Panchami. Only one evening has Shashthi at sunset, so the rule has nothing to choose between.

Two things that often make festival dates differ do not apply here. Kartika Shukla is named the same in the amanta and purnimanta reckonings, because the two systems differ only in what they call the dark fortnight, so there is no month-name dispute. And because Shashthi opens after sunset on the Kharna evening in every city in the table below and closes before sunrise on the Usha morning in all of them — and no place in India sets the Sun near midnight or raises it before two in the morning — the date does not move with where in India you live. Only the clock times move. A printed calendar that dates Chhath to a different day this year is using a different rule, and should say which.

Sunset and Sunrise at the Ghats (अर्घ्य का समय)

Both arghyas are offered to the Sun on the horizon, so the times that matter are sunset on 15 November and sunrise on 16 November, and those depend on where the ghat is. The site’s panchang tables are computed for New Delhi, well west of the Chhath heartland, so the table below is computed for the cities on the site’s city list in or near it, with Delhi for comparison.

These are computed, not looked up. They come from the solar-position routine the site’s city panchang pages use, run on each city’s centre coordinates, and they follow the panchang convention of timing sunrise and sunset by the upper edge of the Sun’s disc on the horizon, with refraction allowed for; seconds are dropped rather than rounded. The Delhi row uses the same coordinates as New Delhi and reproduces the tabulated daily panchang to the minute, which is the check that the routine and the table agree. At Patna the Sun sets 27 minutes earlier than at New Delhi on the Shashthi and rises 37 minutes earlier the next morning. Kolkata is earliest of the five on both counts and Delhi latest.

A city-centre time is not a ghat time. A river bank with a clear western horizon will see the Sun go down at very nearly the computed minute; a pond hemmed in by buildings or trees will lose it earlier, and haze over the water in November can hide the disc before it touches the horizon. The Sun on the horizon, not the table, is what the arghya is offered to. Day-by-day figures for each city are on the Patna panchang and the other city panchang pages, and the national figures on the daily panchang.

The figures also give the custom’s “thirty-six hours” a frame. From sunset on the Kharna evening at Patna (17:01) to sunrise on the Usha morning (06:07) is 37 hours 6 minutes by this computation. The fast is counted from the Kharna meal, which comes some time after sunset, to the parana after the dawn arghya, so the round figure the custom uses sits close to it.

Surya, Chhathi Maiya and the Custom (सूर्य और छठी मैया)

Chhath is addressed to two figures together. One is Surya, the visible Sun, to whom the arghya is offered at both ends of the vrat; the other is Chhathi Maiya, the mother-goddess of the sixth, whom many families in Bihar identify with Shashthi Devi. The Bhojpuri, Maithili and Magahi songs sung at the ghats and through the night of the Sandhya Arghya call on both, and the families who keep the festival count the singing as part of the observance rather than an accompaniment to it.

In the custom as Bihar keeps it, very little stands between the vrati and the object of the offering. There is no image to install and no priest is required; the vrati stands in the water and offers to the Sun directly. The prasad is home-made, and in many households new or freshly cleaned vessels are kept for it.

The Shashthi falls on a Sunday this year, the Sun’s own weekday, but that is a coincidence: the date comes from the tithi alone. The weekly Ravivar vrat is a separate observance with its own calendar. The Moon at sunrise on 15 November is in Uttara Ashadha, which the site’s nakshatra table lists as ruled by the Sun; the festival row and the daily row agree on it. That too is a fact about 2026 rather than a condition of the festival.

Chhath is kept twice in the lunar year. Alongside the Kartika observance there is Chaiti Chhath, on the Shukla Shashthi of Chaitra in the spring, with the same four-day shape. This site’s festival table does not carry a Chaiti Chhath row, so this page gives no date for it.

In Short

Chhath 2026 runs from Nahay Khay on Friday 13 November, through Kharna on Saturday 14 November and the evening arghya on Sunday 15 November, to the dawn arghya on Monday 16 November. The sunrise tithi matches the custom’s name on all four days, and the date is the same anywhere in India. At Patna the evening arghya is at sunset, 17:00, and the dawn arghya at sunrise, 06:07. Next year’s Shashthi falls on Thursday, 4 November 2027; the Chhath 2027 page works it out the same way, and the 2026 festival calendar and the festival index place it among the rest of the year. In Hindi: छठ पूजा 2026: नहाय खाय, खरना और दोनों अर्घ्य.