Pradosh Kaal: What Time It Starts and How Long It Lasts

Pradosh kaal is an evening window, never a morning one. It opens at sunset, and in every table on this site it runs for 144 minutes, which is 2 h 24 min, or three muhurtas of 48 minutes each. Because it is tied to sunset rather than to the clock, there is no single answer to “pradosh kaal kitne baje”: the window opens at a different minute in every city and on almost every day.

Almanacs do not all use the same span for pradosh. The 144-minute window is the one this site’s generated festival tables print: all 135 rows from 2026 to 2028 that carry a pradosh time follow it exactly, and a check at build time holds them to it.

How to Work It Out for Your City

Take the local sunset and add 144 minutes. That is the whole calculation. On Friday 6 November 2026, Dhanteras, the Sun sets at New Delhi at 17:32, so the window runs 17:32 to 19:56, which is exactly what the festival table prints for that evening. The only input that changes from place to place is the sunset, which the city panchang pages give for each day; panchang by city lists them.

On the same evening the window opens first in Guwahati, at 16:38, and last in Mumbai, at 18:02, one hour and 24 minutes later. India keeps one clock across a country so wide that sunset takes well over an hour to sweep across it, so the east gets its pradosh first and the west last. Latitude matters too. In November a northern city loses the Sun sooner, which is why Jammu, west of Chennai by 5.4° of longitude, still opens its window five minutes earlier. A pradosh time copied from a Delhi almanac is therefore 54 minutes late for Guwahati that evening and 30 minutes early for Mumbai, enough to miss a tithi that changes during the evening.

How Far It Moves Through the Year

At New Delhi the window on the fifteenth of each month of 2027 looks like this. The earliest sunset of the year, 17:23, comes on every day from 29 November to 5 December, and the latest, 19:23, on every day from 29 June to 4 July: the pradosh window drifts by 2 h 00 min between them.

Two things in that pattern are easy to miss. At New Delhi the earliest pradosh is not on the shortest day of the year, around 21 December, but weeks before it, and the latest is not on the longest day but about a week after it. The Sun’s timing drifts across the year independently of the day’s length, and that drift pulls the earliest sunset forward into November or early December and the latest back into late June or July. All fourteen cities show it: each one’s earliest 2027 sunset falls between mid-November and mid-December, before the shortest day, and each one’s latest after the longest day.

Broadly, the farther north the city, the more its pradosh wanders: Jammu’s moves by 2 h 18 min across the year, Kochi’s by only 51 min. Where the table gives a run of dates, the sunset stays on the same minute for all of them; near its turning point it barely moves from one day to the next.

Festivals Fixed by the Tithi at Pradosh

Most festivals take the tithi current at sunrise. A few are decided instead by the tithi current inside the pradosh window, and for these the day on the calendar can carry a different tithi in the morning. In the site’s festival rules they are Dhanteras, Naraka Chaturdashi, Diwali Lakshmi Puja and Chhath, read by the tithi at pradosh, and Holika Dahan, read by the Purnima at pradosh with Bhadra excluded.

The 2026 Diwali days are the clearest case. On each of Friday 6 November, Saturday 7 November and Sunday 8 November, the sunrise tithi is the one before the festival’s own; the right tithi only begins in the late morning and is still running when the Sun sets. A reader who opens the panchang for Dhanteras 2026 and sees Krishna Dwadashi has not found an error. In 2027 all three are already running at sunrise, Dhanteras’s Trayodashi from the small hours and the other two from the evening before, so the sunrise tithi and the pradosh tithi agree. Holika Dahan falls on a Chaturdashi morning in both years, because the Purnima it needs begins in the evening. For a single year’s detail, see Diwali 2027 and Holika Dahan 2027.

Pradosh Vrat and the Trayodashi Evening

The name most people meet the window by is Pradosh Vrat, the twice-monthly fast on the Trayodashi. In the vrat manuals the day is a fast and the Shiva puja belongs to the evening, inside this window, which is why the vrat is fixed by the evening that holds the Trayodashi rather than by the morning. When a Trayodashi touches two evenings, the site gives the vrat to the one whose window it covers for longer. Every date worked out that way is on Pradosh Vrat in November and December 2026 and the 2027 Pradosh Vrat list.

Asking whether pradosh kaal is good or bad treats it as a verdict, and it is not one. It is a moment of the day at which certain tithis are read, the way sunrise is for most festivals and nishita, around midnight, is for Janmashtami. This page gives the window; it does not rate it for travel, purchases or any other undertaking. When a tithi neither holds a sunrise nor sits where expected, kshaya and vriddhi tithis explains what the calendar does. In Hindi: प्रदोष काल कब होता है और कितनी देर रहता है.

In Brief

• When: evening, from sunset
• How long: 144 minutes in this site’s tables, three muhurtas of 48
• How to find it: your city’s sunset plus 144 minutes
• One evening across India: 1 h 24 min between Guwahati and Mumbai on 6 November 2026
• Across a year: 2 h 00 min of drift at New Delhi, earliest around the start of December, latest around the start of July
• Festivals read by it: Dhanteras, Naraka Chaturdashi, Diwali, Chhath, Holika Dahan and the Pradosh Vrat