Kharmas December 2026: Start and End Dates, and What Pauses

When Kharmas Begins and Ends (खरमास: आरंभ और समाप्ति)

The December Kharmas — Dhanu Kharmas, from Dhanu, the Sanskrit name of Sagittarius — begins on Wednesday, 16 December 2026 and ends on Thursday, 14 January 2027. They are the two days on which the Sun crosses a sign boundary: into sidereal Sagittarius at 10:20 IST on the first, and out of it into Capricorn at 21:05 IST on the last. The interval between those two instants is 29 days, 10 hours and 45 minutes, and the whole of Kharmas is that interval.

Both instants come from the JPL DE421 ephemeris and hold everywhere in India. What depends on place is how each sits against the day: at New Delhi the Sun rises at 07:06 on 16 December, so the opening ingress comes a few hours into the morning, and sets at 17:45 on 14 January, so the closing one comes well after dark.

The site’s muhurat engine treats both edge days as closed in full, the conservative reading. On that reckoning the last open stretch of the year runs 21 November to 15 December and the next begins on 15 January 2027. A pandit working from the ingress minute may treat the edge days differently; the difference is a matter of hours at each end.

A Solar Period in a Lunar Calendar (सौर काल)

Most dates a Hindu household plans around are lunar, fixed by a tithi. Kharmas is defined instead by the Sun’s passage through Dhanu (Sagittarius) and Meena (Pisces) — the two signs the classical scheme gives to Jupiter. The second passage, Meena Kharmas, falls in the spring, 15 March to 14 April 2027.

Because it is solar, Kharmas keeps its calendar date. The previous Dhanu Kharmas ran 16 December 2025 to 14 January 2026 — the same two dates a year earlier. Compare two festivals near its start. Vivah Panchami falls on 14 December 2026 and Mokshada Ekadashi on 20 December 2026; their next occurrences, 3 December 2027 and 9 December 2027, come 354 days later, while the next Kharmas begins 365 days after this one. Twelve lunar months fall about eleven days short of a solar year, and that shortfall is why both festivals sit before the following December’s Kharmas instead of near its start.

“The same date every year” is close but not exact. The Capricorn ingress that ends this Kharmas arrives 365 days and 6 hours 1 minute after the previous year’s, and the next one 365 days and 6 hours 12 minutes after that — enough that the 2027–2028 Kharmas ends on 15 January 2028, a day later than this one. The leap day then pulls the calendar back, and the Sagittarius ingress that opens the Kharmas after that falls on 15 December 2028. Across the three years the ingress tables cover, a one-day wobble at either end is the whole of the variation.

The two passages differ in length: 29 days, 10 hours and 45 minutes through Sagittarius against 30 days, 8 hours and 28 minutes through Pisces in 2027. The ingress table records the Sun’s speed at each crossing: 1.017° and 1.019° a day at the edges of Sagittarius against 0.997° and 0.980° at the edges of Pisces, so the winter passage is the quicker one. It is slightly shorter than a lunation, which is why it opens on a Shukla Saptami and closes on a Shukla Shashthi, almost the same phase of the Moon, with one full moon (24 December) and one new moon (8 January) inside it.

Inside the sign the Sun crosses three nakshatras: Moola from the same minute it enters Sagittarius, since the boundaries coincide, then Purva Ashadha from 29 December and Uttara Ashadha from 11 January. The Moola nakshatra page covers the first.

The End Is an Ingress, Not a Festival Date (मकर संक्रांति)

Kharmas ends when the Sun enters sidereal Capricorn, which is also the Makar Sankranti ingress: 21:05 IST on Thursday, 14 January 2027. It is tempting to write “Kharmas ends on Makar Sankranti” and give a festival date. This page does not, because those are two different questions.

The ingress is astronomy and has one answer. The day on which Sankranti is kept — the bath, the daan, the punya kaal — is a matter of rule, and the rules differ on what to do with a crossing that comes after sunset, as this one does at New Delhi. Regional almanacs settle it their own way, and this site publishes no Sankranti observance date for any year; for the day itself, follow your family’s panchang. The Makar Sankranti 2027 page covers the festival; read here, it is simply the next solar marker after Kharmas.

The same instant opens Uttarayana as this site’s muhurat pages reckon it. The engine’s note on upanayan records that the Uttarayana half is strongly preferred for that rite, so a sacred-thread ceremony held over by Kharmas resumes inside it.

What the Custom Defers (क्या टाला जाता है)

In north and central Indian panchang practice, Kharmas is a pause on beginnings: the samskaras and undertakings a family would ordinarily look up a muhurat for are held over until the Sun has left the sign. This site’s muhurat engine encodes that as a rule. Of the 10 occasions it evaluates, it closes the Kharmas days for 9: Marriage (Vivah), Griha Pravesh, Business start, Vehicle purchase, Namakaran (naming), Mundan (first hair-cut), Annaprashan (first food), Upanayan (sacred thread) and Property / land deal. The one it leaves open is long travel / yatra, which carries no closures of any kind.

That list is wider than the one for Chaturmas. Every occasion the engine closes for Chaturmas it also closes for Kharmas, but business start, vehicle purchase, namakaran (naming), mundan (first hair-cut), annaprashan (first food) and property / land deal are closed by Kharmas but not by Chaturmas. The engine’s notes give the reason: Dhanteras and Diwali, the traditional days to open account books, fall inside Chaturmas, and a purchase is not a samskara. For marriage, the wedding season guide sets out the other closed periods, and the December marriage page shows the engine’s day-by-day result with the Kharmas days marked.

Pandits who explain the custom do so through the signs: the Sun is in Guru’s two rashis, and their tradition reads that as unsuited to a new start. This page reports that reading without adopting it as a mechanism. A story told in Hindi-speaking households derives the name from khar, a donkey: in it the horses of the Sun’s chariot are rested for a month and donkeys draw it in their place, more slowly.

Hindi usage often calls this period malmas. In many texts, though, malamasa names the adhika maas, the intercalary lunar month, which is lunar, irregular and absent from most years. When a source says “malmas”, check which it means.

What Continues: Vrats and Festivals (व्रत और पर्व)

Kharmas defers beginnings, not worship, and the festival calendar runs straight through it. Vivah Panchami, which the Awadh and Mithila traditions keep as the wedding day of Rama and Sita, falls on Monday, 14 December 2026, two days before Kharmas begins; its Panchami tithi runs from 16:48 on 13 December to 19:16 on 14 December. In 2027 it falls on 3 December, further from that year’s Kharmas.

Mokshada Ekadashi falls inside the period, on Sunday, 20 December 2026. The table carries it as “Mokshada Ekadashi & Geeta Jayanti”, because the Vaishnava calendar dates Krishna’s teaching of the Gita to Arjuna to this Ekadashi. Its tithi opens at 22:09 on the night of 19 December and closes at 20:15 on 20 December, so 20 December is the day holding the sunrise inside it. An Ekadashi fast inside Kharmas is kept as it would be outside it, and in north Indian households the month is a common time for extra japa, recitation and daan.

Dhanurmasa in the South (धनुर्मास)

The Tamil calendar is solar, and its months begin at the Sun’s sidereal ingresses, so the Tamil month of Margazhi is the Sun’s passage through this same sign under another name, and the period is widely called Dhanurmasa. In the Srivaishnava tradition it is the month of Andal’s Tiruppavai, a cycle of thirty verses recited one each morning through the month, in temples and in homes. The Tirumala temple’s own practice is to set the Suprabhatam aside for the month and recite Tiruppavai in its place.

Which civil day counts as the first of Margazhi follows the Tamil almanac’s own rule, which this page does not compute; the same caution applies to Thai, the month that opens at the Capricorn ingress.

After Kharmas

The engine’s open stretch that follows runs from 15 January to 13 March 2027. Holashtak then begins on 14 March, and Meena Kharmas opens the next day, the Sun entering Pisces at 06:55 IST on 15 March and leaving it at 15:23 IST on 14 April. That makes the stretch between the two Kharmas the first of 2027’s open windows, and the open and closed windows page explains each kind of closure. The muhurat hub runs the same filter for every occasion, and the muhurat finder shows why each day is in or out.

None of those tools produce a muhurat: they narrow a month to the days that pass the five limbs and sit outside every closure, and electing the window inside the day is a second step. For a single date, the daily panchang gives the tithi, nakshatra, yoga and karana, and how to read a panchang explains them. In Hindi: खरमास दिसम्बर 2026: आरंभ और अंत की तारीखें, क्या टलता है.