Vaikuntha Chaturdashi 2026: Date and the Midnight Question

Vaikuntha Chaturdashi is the fourteenth tithi of Kartika’s bright fortnight, the day that comes just before Kartik Purnima. In 2026 the sunrise rule gives it one clear date: Monday, 23 November 2026. What the sunrise rule does not settle is the night. The Chaturdashi closes at 23:42 that evening, a short way ahead of midnight, and households that keep the Vishnu worship of this day after dark will want to know what that does to their reckoning.

The 2026 Chaturdashi, Opening to Close

The festival table has no row of its own for this observance, so the opening instant is worked with the site’s lunar code, which matches the generated tables to within 1 minute across all 86 festival rows it can be checked against. That code puts the start of the Shukla Chaturdashi at 02:37 on 23 November 2026, deep in the night, at the moment the Trayodashi gives way. The close needs no separate working: it is the start of Kartik Purnima as the generated festival row prints it, 23:42 on 23 November 2026, and the lunar code lands within that same agreement figure. Opening to close is 21 hours 5 minutes, a little short of a civil day.

Set against three mornings, the daily panchang for New Delhi shows exactly one sunrise inside it:

• Sunday 22 November, sunrise 06:49: Shukla Trayodashi
• Monday 23 November, sunrise 06:49: Shukla Chaturdashi
• Tuesday 24 November, sunrise 06:50: Purnima

So there is no vriddhi to resolve and no lost tithi either. The Chaturdashi is 4 hours 12 minutes old when the Sun comes up on the 23rd, carries through the day, and is still running 6 hours 18 minutes after sunset at 17:24. A calendar that dates the observance by its sunrise tithi has only one candidate.

The Midnight Question

In the calendars that treat Vaikuntha Chaturdashi as a night observance, the deciding question is the tithi at nishita, the middle of the night. That is the day-part rule this site’s festival table already applies to Janmashtami, Maha Shivratri and Sharad Purnima. The program that generates the table tests that rule at a single instant, 23:58 on each civil day; that figure is the generator’s probe, not a time for any puja, and the nishita period proper is a span around local midnight that moves with the city.

Run that probe on the two nights the Chaturdashi could touch and it misses both:

• Night of Sunday 22 November: at the probe the tithi is still Shukla Trayodashi. The Chaturdashi does not open until 2 hours 39 minutes later.
• Night of Monday 23 November: the Chaturdashi has already closed at 23:42, 16 minutes before the probe, and Purnima is current.

Taken strictly, then, no midnight of 2026 falls inside this Chaturdashi. The second miss is the one to watch. A margin of 16 minutes is small beside the length of a nishita span, and an almanac that works that span for its own city, rather than probing one instant, is dealing with a window whose edge lies close to the Chaturdashi’s end; how it treats so near a miss is its own convention. Calendars can therefore differ here in how they describe the night, and this page does not pick a winner among them. What the figures do show is that the night of the 23rd is the only one with any Chaturdashi in its evening: the whole stretch from sunset to 23:42. The night of the 22nd carries the tithi only in its last hours before dawn, from 02:37, long after the probe.

If your family’s custom keeps the Vishnu puja late at night, the useful fact is the closing instant, 23:42, which is the same for all of India in Indian time. If its custom puts a rite in the hours before dawn, the Brahma Muhurat of the 23rd in the daily table, 05:13-06:49, lies wholly inside the Chaturdashi, while the pre-dawn of the 24th belongs to the Purnima.

Seven Cities, One Morning

Because both ends of this Chaturdashi fall in the dark, a shift in sunrise from east to west changes nothing. With the sunrise function used by the city panchang pages:

In every one of these cities the sunrise of the 23rd is the only sunrise the Chaturdashi holds, from Guwahati at 05:47 to Ahmedabad at 06:58, and in every one the tithi still has more than five hours to run after the local sunset. The midnight question above is the only part of the date where a local almanac could reasonably come out differently.

What Is Vaikuntha? (वैकुण्ठ चतुर्दशी)

In Vaishnava Puranic cosmology Vaikuntha is the realm of Vishnu, his own world beyond the heavens of the other gods. The name of the day ties this Chaturdashi to him; “Chaturdashi” is simply the fourteenth tithi of a fortnight. The timing has its own logic in the calendar: the Chaturdashi comes three days after Dev Uthani Ekadashi, which the table places on Friday 20 November 2026 and which Vaishnava households keep as the end of Vishnu’s four-month sleep.

Vaikuntha Chaturdashi should not be confused with Vaikuntha Ekadashi, a separate observance of the Sri Vaishnava temples in the south, held in a different month and fixed by a solar month rather than by Kartika. The Mokshada Ekadashi 2026 page explains how that one is placed.

Hari and Hara: Varanasi and Ujjain

In the temple calendars of Varanasi and Ujjain this Chaturdashi is a day for worshipping Vishnu and Shiva together, and the custom there swaps the usual offerings: bilva leaves, which ordinarily go to Shiva, are offered to Vishnu, and tulsi, ordinarily Vishnu’s, is offered to Shiva.

In Ujjain the meeting takes a public form. By the custom of the Mahakaleshwar temple, the deity is carried at night in a procession to the Gopal Mandir, and the encounter there is called Hari-Hara milan. The Ujjain tradition reads it as Shiva returning to Vishnu the charge of the world he held through Chaturmas. Both temples set the hour of their own rites from their own almanacs; this page gives the tithi, not the temple timings.

In the Last Days of Kartika

The Chaturdashi hands over without a gap: the instant it ends is the instant the Purnima opens, and the Purnima holds the next sunrise, so Kartik Purnima 2026 falls on Tuesday 24 November 2026, the morning after. Earlier in the same fortnight comes the Navami described in Akshaya Navami 2026. The rest of the month’s fasts and festivals are in the November 2026 vrat and tyohar list.

Vaikuntha Chaturdashi 2026 at a Glance

• Date by the sunrise rule: Monday, 23 November 2026 (the only Chaturdashi sunrise at New Delhi)
• Kartika Shukla Chaturdashi: 02:37 on 23 November 2026 (computed) to 23:42 on 23 November 2026 (festival table)
• Night reading: the Chaturdashi closes 16 minutes before the generator’s midnight probe; calendars may describe the night differently
• Sunrise and sunset on 23 November (New Delhi): 06:49 and 17:24
• Nakshatra and yoga at sunrise: Bharani, Variyan

The panchang tool computes a single place, New Delhi. To see how far sunrise and sunset move elsewhere, open the city panchang pages: the tithi there stays the national one, and only the clock times change. The year’s table-listed observances are on the festival pages. In Hindi: वैकुंठ चतुर्दशी 2026: तारीख और आधी रात का प्रश्न.