Rama Ekadashi 2026: Date, and a Parana on Dhanteras

Rama Ekadashi in 2026 is Thursday, 5 November 2026. It is the last Ekadashi before Diwali, and this year its fast ends on the morning of Dhanteras itself, with a deadline: the Dwadashi on which the fast is broken gives way to the Dhanteras Trayodashi at 10:31. The rest of this page shows where both of those figures come from.

Which Month It Belongs To (रमा एकादशी)

This is a dark-fortnight Ekadashi, and dark-fortnight months are where Indian calendars part company. A purnimanta calendar, the kind printed across Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, starts each month the day after a full moon, so the waning half that runs up to Diwali already counts as Kartika: in Hindi-belt almanacs this is Kartika Krishna Ekadashi. An amanta calendar, used in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra, keeps the month running until the new moon, so the same fortnight is still Ashwina, and the Ekadashi is Ashwina Krishna Ekadashi. This site’s own festival rules are amanta — they list Dhanteras as the Krishna Trayodashi of Ashwina — but the tithi, the day and the name Rama are identical either way.

The name is the feminine Ramā, an epithet of Lakshmi, not the Rama of the Ramayana; the Ekadashi falls in the week that ends with Lakshmi Puja.

From One Morning to the Next

The Krishna Ekadashi begins at 11:03 on 4 November and ends at 10:36 on 5 November. Those two instants are not in the generated festival tables, which have no Rama Ekadashi row; they are computed with the site’s lunar code, which on the 86 tithi instants where the DE421 tables also give a value agrees with them to within 1 minute.

Set beside the sunrises at New Delhi, the span is easy to place. On the 4th the sun rises at 06:35 on Krishna Dashami, and the Ekadashi does not open until more than four hours later. On the 5th the sunrise at 06:35 is inside the Ekadashi, which then lasts more than four hours into the morning before Dwadashi takes over. On the 6th sunrise finds Krishna Dwadashi. Only one of the three sunrises falls inside the tithi, so the sunrise rule names the 5th with nothing to weigh against it.

A reader who watches the clock will notice that for most of the 5th the running tithi is already Dwadashi. That does not move the fast. A day takes the name of the tithi current when it begins, at sunrise, and the fast is kept for the whole of that civil day. The Vaishnava test points the same way: the Hari Bhakti Vilasa refuses an Ekadashi whose arunodaya, the hour and a half before dawn, is still touched by Dashami, and here Dashami will have ended more than 19 hours before the sunrise of the 5th. Nothing on this table would push a Vaishnava calendar to a later day, though ISKCON computes its own for each city.

Breaking the Fast on Dhanteras Morning (पारण)

Here is what makes 2026 worth a page of its own. The parana, the meal that closes an Ekadashi fast, is by the custom of the vrat manuals taken on Dwadashi, after sunrise, and not left until the Dwadashi has run out. The Dwadashi morning this year is Friday 6 November 2026, which the festival table also gives as Dhanteras. The Dhanteras row records the Trayodashi beginning at 10:31 on 6 November, and that instant is the end of the Dwadashi. So the custom, read against the table, puts the parana on the 6th between sunrise at 06:36 and 10:31: a gap of more than three hours, generous but not open-ended. Panchangs that prefer the early part of the morning for parana print a shorter window inside this one. The site’s lunar code, computing the Dwadashi independently, ends it within the tolerance stated above of that table instant.

The panchangs that print a parana time also keep the fast unbroken through Hari Vasara, the first quarter of the Dwadashi. With Dwadashi starting mid-morning on the 5th, its first quarter is over before sunset that same day, so by the morning of the 6th it is many hours behind. It places no limit on the Dhanteras-morning parana, and this page gives no minute for it.

The two observances do not compete for the day. Dhanteras is decided by the Trayodashi in the evening — the table’s rule for it is the tithi at pradosh — so the fast closes in the morning and the Dhanteras puja belongs to the evening. A household keeping both breaks its fast on Dwadashi and lights its Dhanteras lamps on Trayodashi, the same date on the calendar. The day-by-day reckoning of that evening is on the Dhanteras 2026 page. Clock times here are for New Delhi; sunrise in other cities is on the city panchang pages.

Ekadashi to Lakshmi Puja, Morning by Morning

Rama Ekadashi sits three days ahead of Diwali, and every day between them is taken. The daily table’s sunrise tithi and the festival rows line up like this:

• Thursday 5 November: Krishna Ekadashi at sunrise; Rama Ekadashi fast
• Friday 6 November: Krishna Dwadashi at sunrise; Dhanteras (parana in the morning)
• Saturday 7 November: Krishna Trayodashi at sunrise; Narak Chaturdashi / Choti Diwali
• Sunday 8 November: Krishna Chaturdashi at sunrise; Diwali / Lakshmi Puja

The last line looks odd until you remember that Lakshmi Puja is an evening rule too: the sunrise of the 8th still shows Krishna Chaturdashi, and the Amavasya arrives at 11:28, in time for the evening. The Diwali 2026 puja page and the Narak Chaturdashi page take those days one at a time.

Chandrabhaga and Shobhana: The Katha

The vrat-katha collections take this Ekadashi’s story from the Padma Purana. Its people are King Muchukunda, his daughter Chandrabhaga, and her husband Shobhana, and it turns on Shobhana keeping the Ekadashi fast while visiting Muchukunda’s kingdom, where the king required it of everyone, though Shobhana was not strong enough to fast. What follows for the couple is the substance of the katha read aloud on the day. This page stops at the names and the setting; the tellings differ in detail, and it makes no claim about what the fast does for anyone who keeps it.

The Figures, Collected

• Vrat day: Thursday 5 November 2026; sunrise 06:35, sunset 17:33 (New Delhi)
• Krishna Ekadashi (computed): 11:03 on 4 November to 10:36 on 5 November
• Parana: Friday 6 November 2026, after sunrise (06:36) and before the Dwadashi ends at 10:31
• Nakshatra at the vrat sunrise: Uttara Phalguni

The next Ekadashi, Dev Uthani, has a quirk of its own this year: its tithi holds no New Delhi sunrise at all, which the Dev Uthani Ekadashi 2026 page works through. Every other computed date of the year is in the festival calendar and on the festival pages. In Hindi: रमा एकादशी 2026: तारीख और धनतेरस की सुबह पारण.