Kali Yuga: How Many Years Have Passed and How Many Are Left

Since the Hindu new year of 19 March 2026, 5,127 years of the Kali Yuga have been completed and the 5,128th is running. The Surya Siddhanta, the classical astronomical text whose figures this page uses, gives the whole age 432,000 years, so 426,873 years remain, and the count will move on by one at the next new year, on 7 April 2027. That is the answer on one text’s arithmetic. Other texts and teachers divide the ages differently, and two of them are set out below with what their numbers give; none of the answers can be checked against anything outside the text that states it.

How Long the Kali Yuga Is

In Ebenezer Burgess’s 1860 translation of the Surya Siddhanta (verses 1.15-17 and his table beneath them), the four ages are measured in divine years of 360 ordinary years each, and each age is flanked by a dawn and a twilight one tenth of its own length. For the Kali, which Burgess calls the Iron Age, that gives:

The other three ages are exact multiples of it: Krita (Satya) 4 times, 1,728,000 years; Treta 3 times, 1,296,000 years; Dvapara 2 times, 864,000 years. Burgess points out that the names Krita and Kali come from the game of dice, the four-dot and one-dot faces of the die, and he reports Manu’s picture of virtue standing on four feet in the first age and on one in the last. The ratio 4:3:2:1 is the whole of the scheme’s structure. The longer ladder of ages, manvantaras and kalpas built on top of it is worked through on the yuga, manvantara and kalpa page.

When the Kali Yuga Began

Burgess gives the instant the Surya Siddhanta counts from: midnight on the meridian of Ujjain (Ujjayini) between 17-18 February, 3102 BC. The text treats it as the moment of a mean conjunction of all the planets at the starting point of the zodiac. Burgess adds, from positions computed for him at the American Ephemeris office, that no exact conjunction of that kind ever took place, though the planets were then grouped fairly near that point. The date is therefore a computed epoch, the start of an astronomer’s count. Burgess calls the start of the Iron Age the only possibly historical point in the whole system of ages, and adds that even this point was fixed by astronomical computation.

Counting the Years: Three Routes to 5,127

The number of complete Kali years can be reached three ways, and the site’s calendar checks that they agree. From the epoch: 3102 BC to the spring of 2026 AD is 2,026 + 3,101 = 5,127 years, the extra year falling away because there is no year zero between 1 BC and 1 AD. From the Shaka era: Burgess records that it began after 3,179 complete Kali years, so Shaka 1948 + 3,179 = 5,127. From the Vikram era: its first year was the 3,045th of the Kali, so Vikram Samvat 2083 + 3,044 = 5,127. The 135-year gap between the two offsets is the gap between the Shaka and Vikram eras themselves.

The new-year dates are the site’s computed Chaitra Shukla Pratipada for New Delhi, the day the Vikram and Shaka years turn in a north Indian or Deccan panchang; how those two eras run, and why Gujarat’s Vikram year turns just after Diwali instead, is on the Vikram Samvat 2083 page. Burgess’s own figure makes a check across 167 years: he wrote that 4,960 complete Kali years had passed on 11 April 1859, and 4,960 + (2026 − 1859) = 5,127.

5,127 or 5,128? Complete and Running Years

Both numbers are correct and they answer different questions. 5,127 counts the years already finished, the way a person who has turned 30 is in the 31st year of life. The Shaka year is quoted the same way, which is why Shaka 1948 began in 2026 although the era opened in 78 AD: 2026 − 78 = 1948. A date written with the running year will read 5,128 for the same day, and the two forms differ by exactly one.

The day the count goes up depends on the kind of year. The table above turns it with the lunisolar new year, as the Vikram and Shaka years do. The Surya Siddhanta itself counts sidereal solar years, which turn when the Sun enters Mesha in April; Burgess’s 11 April 1859 is such a date. In the days or weeks between the lunisolar new year and the solar one, the two ways of counting disagree by one.

How Much Is Left, and When It Ends

On the Surya Siddhanta’s figures, 5,127 of 432,000 years is 1.19% of the age. The last of its 432,000 years would end in the year 428,899 AD, which is 2026 + 426,873. The division into dawn, age and twilight gives a less familiar result: the first 36,000 years are Kali’s dawn, so on this arithmetic the present year lies inside the dawn of the Kali Yuga, with 30,873 years of it still to run. The twilight, the last 36,000 years, would begin after year 396,000, 390,873 years from now. Before the Kali came the Krita, Treta and Dvapara, 3,888,000 years together, and on the text’s cycle a Krita of the next great age follows the Kali’s end.

How Aryabhata Dated Himself by the Kali Yuga

An early dated use of this count is in the Aryabhatiya. In W. E. Clark’s 1930 translation, verse 3.10 reads that when three yugapadas and sixty times sixty years had elapsed, twenty-three years of the author’s life had passed. Clark works it out: if Aryabhata started the Kali in 3102 BC, as later astronomers did, the date is 499 AD. The site’s offsets reproduce it: 3,600 Kali years minus 3,179 is Shaka 421, and Shaka 421 + 78 is 499 AD, so the verse puts his birth in or about 476 AD.

The same verse shows a different scheme. Clark notes that Aryabhata’s word yugapada, a quarter of a yuga, implies four equal quarters rather than the 4:3:2:1 split, and that Brahmagupta attributed equal quarters to him. On that reading his Kali quarter is 1,080,000 years, two and a half times the Surya Siddhanta’s, and 1,074,873 of it would remain today. The starting point is the same; the length is not.

Is the Kali Yuga Already Over? A Different Reckoning

People also ask whether the Kali Yuga ended in 2025. One modern count that does say the Kali is already over is The Holy Science (1894) by Swami Sri Yukteswar, which uses a cycle of 24,000 years, a descending and an ascending arc of 12,000 each. On his dates the low point came in 499 AD, the ascending Kali ran to 1599, its transition to 1699, and the transition into the Dvapara ended in 1899. By that scheme the present is not Kali at all but the ascending Dvapara, which on his figures runs to 4099. Neither Yukteswar’s book nor the Surya Siddhanta puts an end to the Kali in 2025; the Surya Siddhanta’s Kali is 360 times Yukteswar’s 1,200 years, and nothing outside the texts can settle which, if either, is right.

What This Page Does Not Say

Every number above is arithmetic on a stated text. The page does not describe what life in the Kali Yuga is like, does not list signs of its end, and does not connect any year, eclipse or planetary event to it. Where the texts describe the character of an age, that is their teaching, and it is reported here only where a translator has stated it, as with Burgess on Manu’s four feet of virtue. The sixty-year cycle of named years that panchangs also print is a different count; it is on the samvatsara names page.

In Brief

• Complete: 5,127 Kali years since 19 March 2026; 5,128 from 7 April 2027; 5,129 from 27 March 2028
• Running: the 5,128th year
• Left: 426,873 of 432,000 years, on the Surya Siddhanta; the age would end in 428,899 AD
• Formula: Kali years = Shaka year + 3,179 = Vikram Samvat + 3,044
• Epoch: midnight at Ujjain, 17-18 February, 3102 BC (Burgess)
• Other reckonings: Aryabhata’s equal quarter, 1,080,000 years; Yukteswar’s 24,000-year cycle, which puts the present in the Dvapara

In Hindi: कलियुग कितने साल का है और कितना बाकी है.