Pradosh Vrat November, December 2026: Dates and Days

Four Pradosh Vrat evenings fall in the last two months of the year: Friday 6 November, Sunday 22 November, Sunday 6 December and Monday 21 December. The first is the evening of Dhanteras, the middle two are both Sundays, and the last is a Som Pradosh whose Trayodashi arrives only minutes after the sun has gone down in New Delhi. Below is how each date was reached, and why two of them differ from the date a sunrise panchang prints Trayodashi against.

The Test: Trayodashi in the Evening (प्रदोष व्रत)

Pradosh Vrat belongs to Trayodashi, the thirteenth lunar day of either fortnight, and it is an evening observance. Its day is therefore not the one whose sunrise falls in Trayodashi but the one whose pradosh kaal does. The festival tables on this site print that window as running from sunset for 144 minutes, two hours and twenty-four, and this page uses the same span: each Trayodashi is laid against every nearby evening’s window, and the evening the tithi covers for longest is the vrat day. In each of the four cases below, only one evening has any Trayodashi in its window at all.

The festival tables have no Pradosh rows, so the Trayodashi start and end times here are worked out by the site’s own lunar routine. That routine is tested every build against the 86 tithi start and end instants the DE421 tables do carry, and its worst miss among them is currently 1 minute. Sunsets are New Delhi’s.

The Four Evenings

The “Name” column is the weekday label the vrat manuals give a pradosh: Ravi for Sunday, Som for Monday, Bhaum for Tuesday, Budh for Wednesday, Guru for Thursday, Shukra for Friday, Shani for Saturday. The label follows the date and nothing more is read into it here. The last column is the date a sunrise-based calendar would show Trayodashi on; where it differs from the first column, the sunrise date is the one that does not count for this vrat.

Shukra Pradosh on the Evening of Dhanteras

The first of the four is not a separate calculation at all. Dhanteras is also a Krishna Trayodashi observance decided at pradosh, and the festival table’s row for it, dated Friday 6 November, gives the tithi from 10:31 on 6 November to 10:48 on 7 November, which the lunar routine reproduces. The Trayodashi opens in the late morning, well over five hours ahead of a sunset at 17:32, so the whole window, 17:32-19:56, is Trayodashi; the row prints that same window. By the next sunset the tithi has long been replaced by Chaturdashi, even though it is Trayodashi that a sunrise panchang lists against the 7th.

The 7th is Narak Chaturdashi / Choti Diwali in the tables and the 8th is Diwali / Lakshmi Puja, so the Shukra Pradosh fast and its evening puja fall on the opening evening of the Diwali days. The Dhanteras side of that evening is covered in Dhanteras 2026, and the day after in Narak Chaturdashi 2026.

Two Ravi Pradosh Evenings

The bright-fortnight Trayodashi of Kartika begins at 04:56 on 22 November, before dawn, and lasts until 02:37 on 23 November, so on Sunday 22 November the sunrise and the evening agree. It sits two days after Dev Uthani Ekadashi (20 November) and two days before Kartik Purnima (24 November).

A fortnight later the dark-half Trayodashi opens at 00:52, a little after the midnight that begins Sunday 6 December, and runs into the small hours of the 7th. The whole of that day, sunrise to past midnight, is Trayodashi, and the window from 17:24 to 19:48 sits in the middle of it. This is the fortnight the two calendar systems file differently. Almanacs that start the month at the new moon, the reckoning this site’s festival rules use, call it Kartika Krishna Trayodashi; those that start it at the full moon, common in the north, call it Margashirsha Krishna Trayodashi. The same split applies to the 6 November evening, Ashwina in one reckoning and Kartika in the other. Bright-fortnight names, such as Kartika Shukla for the 22nd, are the same in both.

Som Pradosh: a Trayodashi That Begins at Dusk

The Monday 21 December date is the one worth checking. Shukla Trayodashi begins at 17:36 that evening, and New Delhi’s sun sets at 17:28, so by the computed instants the tithi opens 8 minutes into the window. The exact moment of sunset is still Dwadashi; the remaining 136 of the window’s 144 minutes, about 94 per cent, are Trayodashi. A few minutes either way would move the opening to the other side of sunset, but it would not move the date, because the following evening has nothing to offer: the Trayodashi ends at 14:24 on 22 December, hours before the sun sets on the 22nd. A sunrise calendar will show Trayodashi on the 22nd; that is the day the tithi runs out, not the evening the vrat is kept.

The festival generator behind this site’s tables, which tests Dhanteras-type observances at the single instant of sunset, would, on these instants, find this Trayodashi at no sunset at all: Dwadashi at one, already finished at the next. Its fallback for a tithi that holds no test moment is the day the tithi begins, which is the 21st again. The window test and the sunset test reach the same date here by different routes. The day before, Sunday 20 December, is Mokshada Ekadashi, so a household keeping both has an Ekadashi and a Pradosh on consecutive days.

The Trayodashi begins at one instant across India; sunset does not. Here is the 21st in six cities, with sunsets from the site’s solar routine for each city’s coordinates:

In Delhi, Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Chennai the tithi’s start lands within half an hour of sunset, after it in some and before it in others, so in those four almost the whole window, or all of it, is Trayodashi. In the east the sun is down before the tithi arrives: it opens 39 minutes into Kolkata’s window and 60 minutes into Guwahati’s, leaving 105 and 84 minutes of Trayodashi. Even the shortest share is 84 minutes, while on the 22nd the tithi ends more than two hours before the earliest of these sunsets. In every one of the six cities the 21st is the only evening the window rule can choose. A local almanac may still print its own reasoning; for your town’s sunset, use the panchang calculator.

What the Evening Involves

The vrat manuals set a fast through the daylight hours and place the main worship of Shiva after sunset, inside the pradosh window, with lamps, bilva leaves and a reading of the vrat katha; the fast is broken once that evening puja is done. That evening puja is why the window, and not the sunrise, decides the date. The Monday version shares its weekday with the ordinary Somvar fast, covered in Monday fasting for Shiva; for the year’s largest Shiva night, see Maha Shivratri 2027.

Masik Shivratri, the Night After the Dark-Half Pradosh

The monthly Shivratri falls on Krishna Chaturdashi, the tithi right after a Krishna Trayodashi, and is fixed by which midnight the Chaturdashi holds. Testing that at 23:58 each night, the nishita test the site’s generator applies to Maha Shivratri, gives Saturday 7 November and Monday 7 December, each the night after a dark-half pradosh, and each with more than half an hour of margin either side of the test. The 7 November night is also the date of Narak Chaturdashi / Choti Diwali in the tables.

Into January 2027

The next dark-half Trayodashi runs from 18:16 on 4 January to 20:40 on 5 January. It opens 39 minutes after sunset on Monday 4 January, so that evening’s window holds only its last 105 minutes, while Tuesday 5 January has Trayodashi for its whole window. The window rule gives the 5th, a Bhaum Pradosh; sunset alone, as the generator would test it, gives the same. A calendar that counted any Trayodashi inside the window would find it on both evenings; this page takes the evening it covers whole. That Chaturdashi then begins the same night and holds midnight, so the 5th also carries Masik Shivratri: the pradosh at dusk and the Shivratri test at midnight, on one date.

The bright-fortnight Trayodashi follows on Wednesday 20 January, a Budh Pradosh with the whole window from 17:50 to 20:14, in Pausha Shukla. The full year is listed in Pradosh Vrat 2027, and the monthly Shivratri dates in Masik Shivratri 2027.

In Brief

• Friday 6 November 2026: Shukra Pradosh, Krishna Trayodashi, window 17:32–19:56 at New Delhi
• Sunday 22 November 2026: Ravi Pradosh, Shukla Trayodashi, window 17:25–19:49 at New Delhi
• Sunday 6 December 2026: Ravi Pradosh, Krishna Trayodashi, window 17:24–19:48 at New Delhi
• Monday 21 December 2026: Som Pradosh, Shukla Trayodashi, window 17:28–19:52 at New Delhi

Every sunrise on which each Trayodashi held is listed on the Shukla Trayodashi and Krishna Trayodashi pages, which are records of sunrises rather than lists of vrat dates. The year’s festivals are gathered in the 2026 festival calendar, and the computed festival pages carry the years after it.