Paush Month 2026: Start and End Date, Kharmas, Sundays

A Lunar Month Laid Over a Solar One (पौष मास)

Paush and the Kharmas overlap, but they are measured by different bodies. The Dhanu Kharmas is solar: it is the Sun’s stay in sidereal Sagittarius, which begins at 10:20 IST on 16 December 2026 and ends when the Sun crosses into Capricorn at 21:05 IST on 14 January 2027. The site’s Kharmas table gives exactly those two dates. Paush is lunar, counted between new or full moons, and neither version of it starts or stops with the Sun.

North Indian calendars run the month from full moon to full moon (purnimanta): Paush 2026 opens with the full moon at 06:58 on 24 December 2026 and closes with the next one at 17:47 on 22 January 2027, the day of Paush Purnima. The amanta calendars of Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka and the Telugu states run it from new moon to new moon, 01:54 on 8 January 2027 to 21:26 on 6 February 2027. All four instants are DE421 rows in the site’s lunation table. By New Delhi sunrise, the north’s Paush is 24 December 2026 to 22 January 2027, 30 sunrises, and the amanta month is 8 January 2027 to 6 February 2027, 30 sunrises.

Where the Kharmas and Each Paush Overlap

The Kharmas opens on 16 December, 8 days before north Indian Paush begins. The first 22 sunrises of that month, 24 December to 14 January, all fall inside the Dhanu Kharmas, and the last 8 sunrises fall after it. The amanta month starts much later and shares only 7 sunrises with it, 8 January to 14 January. The Capricorn ingress lands in the evening, more than 13 hours after that day’s New Delhi sunrise, so the morning of 14 January still belongs to the Kharmas. The day on which Makar Sankranti is kept is a separate question, and this page does not settle it.

Both versions of Paush contain the Sun’s entry into Capricorn, and for the amanta month it is the only solar ingress between its two new moons. The site’s panchang data defines an adhika (intercalary) month as a lunation with no solar ingress inside it, and its 2027 table records none. The north Indian custom that keeps the Kharmas defers weddings and other samskaras until the Sun has left Sagittarius; the Kharmas dates page sets out that window day by day. For a reader of a purnimanta calendar, then, most of Paush is Kharmas but not all of it, and the Kharmas’s opening dates, 16 December to 23 December, belong to Margashirsha.

The Morning of 24 December: Delhi Against the East

A month that begins at a full moon begins at an instant, but a calendar names days by their sunrise. The 24 December full moon comes at 06:58, and New Delhi’s computed sunrise that day is 07:10, 12 minutes later, which is why the site’s daily table prints Krishna Pratipada for that morning and counts it as the first day of Paush. That margin is under the half hour this site asks for before ruling on a sunrise tithi, so treat the New Delhi entry as the table’s arithmetic rather than a ruling. Further east the order reverses. Sunrise on 24 December, from the site’s sunrise code:

In Kolkata and Guwahati the Sun is up more than half an hour before the full moon, so 24 December dawns on the Purnima there and is still Margashirsha. For Mumbai, Delhi, Lucknow, Varanasi and Patna the gap is under half an hour either way, and a local almanac should decide. What every row agrees on is the next morning. The Krishna Pratipada ends at 03:07 on 25 December, at least 3 hours before sunrise in any of these cities, so 25 December is a Paush morning everywhere, and in the east the Pratipada never holds a sunrise at all. That end-time comes from the site’s lunar code rather than a table row; it agrees with the generated tables to within 1 minute across the 86 tithi instants both carry. The closing end is not in doubt: the Paush Purnima opens the previous night and the full moon comes at 17:47, more than 10 hours after New Delhi sunrise on 22 January.

Everything in Order, With Both Month Names

The lunations, the ingresses and the month’s observances in one sequence. Clock times are given only for table instants. The last two columns say which month each calendar assigns to that date’s New Delhi sunrise.

Only the bright fortnight carries one name everywhere. Saphala Ekadashi and the Amavasya of 7 January are dark-fortnight days that the north files under Paush and the amanta calendars under Margashirsha; the site’s festival rules note that north Indian sources name krishna-paksha days by the purnimanta month, one ahead. The amanta month’s own Amavasya is 6 February 2027, by which time the north is in Magha, so “Paush Amavasya” means two different days depending on the calendar. Sakat Chauth shows the same split from the other side: the festival rules file it as a Pausha krishna-paksha day, and it falls after north Indian Paush has ended. Putrada Ekadashi is dated by a narrower margin than the rest: the Shukla Ekadashi opens after sunrise on 18 January and runs on past the next New Delhi sunrise by 35 minutes, another end-time from the lunar code, so 19 January is the only morning it holds there. At Ahmedabad, where the Sun rises later, the margin falls to 27 minutes, too thin for this page to rule on; the Putrada Ekadashi page takes that up.

The Sundays of Paush (पौष रविवार)

In north Indian household custom the Sundays of Paush are set aside for worship of Surya, the Sun. That custom belongs to the purnimanta calendar, and inside the north Indian month there are four Sundays:

1. Sunday 27 December 2026 — Krishna Chaturthi at sunrise (07:12, New Delhi)
2. Sunday 3 January 2027 — Krishna Ekadashi at sunrise (07:14, New Delhi), which is also Saphala Ekadashi
3. Sunday 10 January 2027 — Shukla Tritiya at sunrise (07:15, New Delhi)
4. Sunday 17 January 2027 — Shukla Navami at sunrise (07:14, New Delhi)

The first three fall while the Sun is still in Sagittarius, inside the Dhanu Kharmas; the last comes after the Capricorn ingress. An amanta calendar would list a different set, 10 January, 17 January, 24 January and 31 January, of which only 10 January and 17 January overlap with the north’s; 24 January and 31 January are already Magha by the purnimanta count. How a family keeps these Sundays, and whether it keeps them at all, is its own practice; this page lists the dates and does not attach a result to them. The weekly Sunday observance more generally is covered in Sunday fasting.

Checking Your Own Town

Sunrise in your own town can move a boundary morning, as the 24 December table shows; the panchang calculator gives the tithi at your sunrise. The rest of the year is in the 2027 festival calendar and on the festival pages. In Hindi: पौष मास 2026 कब से कब तक: खरमास और रविवार.