Shubh Muhurat 2026: Which Windows Are Open, and Which Are Closed

The short answer for 2026

Of the 365 days in 2026, 102 are open for a marriage or a griha pravesh, in 5 separate stretches. The rest of the year is closed by one of nine overlapping periods, and two of those nine are unusual: 2026 carries an intercalary lunar month, which most years do not, and Jupiter goes combust in the middle of July.

The longest clear run is 32 days, 15 April to 16 May. If your family is choosing a month for a wedding, choose from this table first and pick the date inside it afterwards. Every date in the table comes out of the same generated ephemeris data as the rest of this site, so you can check any of it against a panchang.

Why this page does not list dates

A muhurat is not a property of a date. It is the tithi, vara, nakshatra, yoga and karana standing at a particular time in a particular place, weighed against two particular birth charts. The same calendar date can be a good muhurat in Chennai and a poor one in Amritsar, because the sunrise that fixes the tithi is nearly an hour apart; and a date that suits one couple can clash with the other's dasha.

There is a second reason, and it is the more practical one. A dated list is almost always copied forward from an earlier year. The lunar calendar drifts about eleven days a year against the Gregorian one, so a carried-over list is wrong in a way nobody notices by looking at it. The version of this page that ran until August 2026 did exactly that, and more than half of its wedding dates landed inside months in which no pandit would have conducted one.

So the useful division of labour is this. The closures below can be stated exactly, they are the same for everybody, and they are what decides whether the month you have in mind is possible at all. The day and the hour inside an open window need your charts, and that part needs a person — our astrologers will do it, and so will any competent pandit with your birth details.

The nine closures, and why each one is closed

Four of those nine move substantially from year to year, which is what makes a copied list unsafe. Kharmas is solar and recurs within a day, so it is the one a copied list gets right. Chaturmas is tithi-based: in 2026 it runs 25 July to 20 November, from Devshayani Ekadashi to Dev Uthani Ekadashi, and it can swing by a fortnight. The adhika maas exists in roughly one year in three. And the two asta windows depend on where Jupiter and Venus happen to be relative to the Sun, which no calendar rule predicts.

Dev Uthani Ekadashi itself, 20 November 2026, is treated in many traditions as auspicious in its own right even though it is the last day of Chaturmas, so the table's conservative reading of it as closed is stricter than some families need. The open window above therefore starts the day after; if your pandit accepts the Ekadashi itself, add it.

Guru asta and Shukra asta: the closure nobody prints

A planet within a few degrees of the Sun in longitude is asta — combust, literally "set". Jupiter and Venus are the two that decide a marriage date: Guru sanctifies the vivah and Shukra governs conjugal life. While either is combust, a pandit will decline the date however good the tithi and nakshatra look.

This is the exclusion that dated lists skip, because unlike Kharmas it cannot be worked out from a calendar — it needs an ephemeris for the specific year. In 2026 it removes more days than Kharmas does. Venus was combust from 26 November 2025 to 17 February 2026, 83 days straddling the new year, closest to the Sun on 6 January — which is why January and early February 2026, the months a copied list fills with wedding dates, had none. Jupiter is combust 14 July to 13 August, closest on 29 July.

That Jupiter window matters more than its 30 days suggest. Chaturmas begins on 25 July 2026, so the pre-Chaturmas summer window would otherwise have run to 25 July; Guru asta closes it eleven days early, on 14 July. A family working from a list that stops at Devshayani Ekadashi would think the second week of July was available. It is not.

The days that need no muhurat at all

Against all of the above sits the sade teen muhurat — three and a half days the tradition holds auspicious in themselves, needing no examination of tithi, nakshatra or yoga. They are called abujh, unasked, and they override the closures: three of the four below fall inside one.

Being abujh is not the same as being unconditionally best. It means the day does not have to be justified against the panchang, which is why a Gudi Padwa inside Kharmas or a Vijayadashami inside Chaturmas is still used for a purchase, a new venture or a first entry. For a marriage most families will still want a window calculated inside the day, because the lagna at the moment of the pheras is not something the abujh rule speaks to.

What each occasion actually asks for

These are the panchang-level filters, not dates. Apply them inside an open window from the first table and you will have a shortlist of candidate days; the time within the day, and the check against your own chart, is the part that follows.

Doing the first pass yourself

You can narrow a six-week band to a handful of days without any help. Take an open window from the first table, then use the daily panchang to read each day's tithi, nakshatra, yoga and karana, and drop the days that fail the filter for your occasion. The shubh muhurat finder does that filtering for you across a whole month and shows which rule each day passed or failed.

Two limits are worth knowing before you rely on the result. The panchang values on this site are computed for New Delhi, and while the tithi and nakshatra themselves hold everywhere — they are angles between the Sun and the Moon, not local observations — the sunrise that decides which tithi names the day is local, so close to a boundary the calendar day can differ in Chennai or Guwahati. And the five limbs change through the day rather than at midnight: Vishti karana can begin in the afternoon of a day whose tithi and nakshatra are both excellent and close the second half of it.

The second pass needs a person, and it is short. Ranking the surviving days against both charts, confirming neither partner is in an adverse dasha, checking Tara Bala and Chandra Bala against the birth nakshatras, and calculating the lagna window for the ceremony itself is an hour's work for a pandit and it is the highest-value hour in the entire budget.

Where the dates on this page come from