Samvatsara Names: The 60-Year List, and 2026–27's Name

A samvatsara is a named year, and there are sixty names, used in a fixed order and then started again. In the count kept by Ugadi, Yugadi and Gudi Padwa almanacs, the year that opened on Thursday 19 March 2026 is Parabhava, number 40 of the sixty. It follows Vishvavasu. The next name, Plavanga, opens on Wednesday 7 April 2027, and Kilaka on Monday 27 March 2028.

If you were looking for the name a Hindi panchang from Varanasi or Ujjain prints for Vikram Samvat 2083, read the section on the northern count further down first. North Indian almanacs name their years by a different reckoning, and their name for the same spring is not the one given here.

Which Name Holds, 2025 to 2029

Each name runs from one Chaitra Shukla Pratipada to the day before the next, so the change falls in March or April and never on 1 January. A date in January or February 2027 is still Parabhava. The 2025 row starts before the site’s festival tables do, which is why it carries no date. The turn days for 2026 to 2028 are the Gudi Padwa and Ugadi rows of those tables. The Gudi Padwa 2027 page has that day’s tithi and nakshatra, and Chaitra 2027 gives the month that opens Plavanga.

Who Uses This Count

The site’s regional-calendar table puts the new year of Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh on Chaitra Shukla Pratipada, as Gudi Padwa, Yugadi and Ugadi. These almanacs number the year in the Shaka era and name it from the sixty-year cycle, which is why a Marathi or Telugu panchang for 2026 heads its pages with both Shaka 1948 and Parabhava.

The Tamil calendar uses the same sixty names. The table gives its era as “the sixty-year Prabhava cycle, named years rather than numbered ones”. A Tamil year opens at Puthandu, when the Sun enters sidereal Aries in mid-April, rather than at the spring new moon. So in the days or weeks between Ugadi and Puthandu, a Tamil almanac still prints the old name. This page does not give a Puthandu date.

To get the name from a Shaka year, subtract 1908 and take the remainder after dividing by sixty, where a remainder of 0 means number 60. Shaka 1948 gives 40, and 40 is Parabhava. From a Common Era year, take the year whose Ugadi you mean, subtract 1986, and reduce the same way: 2027 gives 41, which is Plavanga.

All Sixty Names in Order

The years column gives the three Ugadi years in which each name has opened or will open between 1927 and 2106. A name holds from that spring to the following one, so 1966 in the Parabhava row means the year from Ugadi 1966 to Ugadi 1967. Where almanacs print a name in more than one form, the other form is given too.

The names are labels in a fixed sequence. Almanacs often print a samvatsara phal, a reading of the year from its name or from its ruling planets, and this page gives none. Number 40 is Parabhava because 39 names came before it, not because of anything the year will bring.

Why Sixty, and Where Jupiter Comes In

Robert Sewell and Shankar Balakrishna Dikshit, in The Indian Calendar (1896), describe the samvatsara in its original form as a year of Jupiter: the time of the planet’s mean motion through one sign of the zodiac. They give its Surya Siddhanta length as about 361 days, a little short of a solar year. Twelve such years make one round of the zodiac, and five rounds make the sixty names.

Because a Jupiter year is about four days shorter than a solar one, the two drift apart. On Sewell and Dikshit’s account the old rule was to drop one name roughly every 85 years so that the count stayed with Jupiter, and the south abandoned that rule from Shaka 828 or 831, around 905 to 909 CE. Since then the southern names have advanced by one at every Ugadi, which is why the arithmetic in the section above works for any modern year without a correction.

The number sixty also turns up in the Chinese calendar, where ten stems and twelve branches make a cycle of the same length. The two cycles have different origins and do not line up year for year. The sexagenary cycle page covers the Chinese one.

The Northern Count, and Why No Name Is Given for It

North Indian almanacs name the year by a separate count, tied to Jupiter in the way Sewell and Dikshit describe for the older system. That count has not kept step with the southern one, and Hindi panchangs for Vikram Samvat 2083 head their pages with a name other than Parabhava.

The site does not compute the Jupiter-based count, and the published tables of it do not agree with one another about which name belongs to which Vikram year. So this page does not print one. For the northern year, use the name on your own almanac’s title page, and treat any table online that pairs a name with a Vikram year as a claim to check. The Vikram year number itself is not in doubt: Vikram Samvat 2083 gives it for every date from 2026 to 2028, along with the Shaka year.

The Return in the Sixty-First Year

A birth year’s name comes back exactly sixty years later. Someone born between Ugadi 1966 and Ugadi 1967 was born in Parabhava, and Parabhava came round again on 19 March 2026. The shashtiabdapurti, the sixtieth-year rite of South Indian custom, is timed to this return, so the samvatsara of a birth is worth knowing as well as its date.

To find yours, look up your birth year in the table above, remembering the spring boundary: a January or February birth belongs to the name that opened at the previous year’s Ugadi. For a birth close to Ugadi, check that year’s Chaitra Shukla Pratipada in an almanac, because the name changes on the Pratipada, not on a fixed calendar date.

In Brief

• How many samvatsaras: sixty, from Prabhava to Akshaya, then the cycle restarts
• Running on 27 October 2026: Parabhava, no. 40, Shaka 1948, in the Ugadi and Gudi Padwa count
• Next: Plavanga from Wednesday 7 April 2027, then Kilaka from Monday 27 March 2028
• Next Prabhava: opens at Ugadi 2047
• North Indian name for Vikram 2083: a separate Jupiter-based count, not printed here

The length of the months inside these years is covered in how long a lunar month is. Every festival in them is on the festival calendar. In Hindi: 60 संवत्सर के नाम: पूरी सूची, 2026–27 का संवत्सर पराभव.