Rikta Tithi: Which Tithis Are Rikta, With 2026-2027 Dates

The Rikta tithis are the fourth, ninth and fourteenth of each paksha: Chaturthi, Navami and Chaturdashi, in both the bright and the dark half. That makes six in every lunar month. Rikta means “empty”, and the muhurat rules the site applies avoid these tithis for undertakings meant to last. From 1 November 2026 to the end of the site’s daily table there are 86 of them, six in November 2026; the full list is below.

The Five Tithi Groups: Nanda, Bhadra, Jaya, Rikta, Purna

The fifteen tithis of a paksha are sorted into five groups by counting in fives: the first, sixth and eleventh tithi form one group, the second, seventh and twelfth the next, and so on. Each group has a name.

The Purna group’s third member is Purnima in the bright half and Amavasya in the dark half, which is why the same group holds both the full and the new moon. The last column is the list of tithis the site’s muhurat filter accepts, with Purnima, for a wedding, griha pravesh or upanayan. It draws on every group except Rikta, but not evenly, and the group name is not a verdict by itself: Ashtami is in Jaya and is not on the list. The Dwitiya, Saptami and Dwadashi of the Bhadra group are also one limb of the Dwipushkar and Tripushkar rule.

What the Muhurat Rules Do With a Rikta Tithi

The filter behind the muhurat pages uses tithis in two ways. For marriage, griha pravesh and upanayan it accepts only the favoured list above and Purnima, so Rikta tithis are out along with several others. For the seven remaining occasions (business start, vehicle purchase, namakaran, mundan, annaprashan, property or land deal and long travel or yatra) the main tithi test is that the day is not Rikta; the filter also turns down Amavasya for these, and Ashtami for namakaran, mundan and annaprashan. In both cases a day on a Rikta tithi fails the tithi limb, and the filter says so rather than hiding the day. That is the whole of what the label does on this site: it removes a day from a muhurat search. It does not mark a day as harmful, and nothing on this page says what will follow from anything done on one.

Festivals That Fall on Rikta Tithis

Avoiding Rikta tithis for new undertakings does not empty them of observance; several of the year’s major days are on them. Matching each committed festival row to its tithi, ten festivals between 1 November 2026 and the end of 2027 fall on a Rikta tithi:

• Narak Chaturdashi / Choti Diwali, Saturday 7 November 2026: Krishna Chaturdashi
• Sakat Chauth (Sankashti Chaturthi), Monday 25 January 2027: Krishna Chaturthi
• Maha Shivratri, Saturday 6 March 2027: Krishna Chaturdashi
• Ram Navami, Thursday 15 April 2027: Shukla Navami
• Narasimha Jayanti, Tuesday 18 May 2027: Shukla Chaturdashi
• Ganesh Chaturthi, Saturday 4 September 2027: Shukla Chaturthi
• Anant Chaturdashi, Tuesday 14 September 2027: Shukla Chaturdashi
• Maha Navami, Saturday 9 October 2027: Shukla Navami
• Karva Chauth, Tuesday 19 October 2027: Krishna Chaturthi
• Narak Chaturdashi / Choti Diwali, Thursday 28 October 2027: Krishna Chaturdashi

These are kept by their own rules, not by the muhurat filter. Six of the rows carry an explicit rule in the festival table, such as the tithi at midday or at midnight, and the Chaturthi fasts are read at moonrise. The Sakat Chauth (Sankashti Chaturthi) of 25 January 2027 is a case where the sunrise convention and the festival part ways: its Krishna Chaturthi begins at 08:10 that morning and ends at 06:00, 26 January, before the next sunrise, so a calendar read at sunrise never shows that tithi at all.

When a Rikta Tithi Holds No Sunrise, or Two

Over these spans a tithi lasts between about twenty and twenty-seven hours, so it usually contains one sunrise, and a calendar that reads the panchang at sunrise names the day by it. In this list the 86 Rikta tithis hold 83 New Delhi sunrises between them. Five hold none, falling wholly between two sunrises: the Krishna Chaturthi of 27 November 2026, the Krishna Chaturthi of 25 January 2027, the Shukla Chaturdashi of 19 April 2027, the Krishna Chaturdashi of 3 June 2027 and the Krishna Chaturdashi of 30 August 2027. Two hold two, so two consecutive days show the same Rikta tithi at sunrise: the Shukla Navami at the sunrises of 18 November and 19 November 2026 and the Krishna Chaturthi at the sunrises of 22 July and 23 July 2027. The shortest in the list is the Shukla Chaturdashi of 21 January 2027, 20 h 18 min, and the longest the Shukla Chaturthi of 12 December 2026, 26 h 42 min.

The tithi instants are from the JPL DE421 ephemeris with the Lahiri ayanamsa, cut to the minute in IST and the same across India; only the sunrise column belongs to New Delhi. No tithi edge in the list falls within a minute of a New Delhi sunrise, but a city several hundred kilometres east or west can see a different sunrise answer for a tithi that begins or ends near dawn. One more Rikta tithi, a Shukla Chaturthi, begins at 08:12, 31 December 2027 and runs past the end of the site’s sunrise table, so it is left out.

Related Pages

Each tithi has its own page in the panchang tithi pages, with its sunrise dates across the daily table, and the five limbs together are explained in how to read today’s panchang. The Chaturthi fasts on Rikta days have their own lists: Sankashti Chaturthi and Vinayaka Chaturthi. The panchang calculator gives the tithi at your own sunrise, and the shubh muhurat tool applies the tithi rule along with the others. In Hindi: रिक्ता तिथि क्या है: पाँच तिथि-समूह और 2026–27 की सूची.