Varanasi Panchang

Across the 730 days tabulated here the sun rises in Varanasi as early as 05:07 and as late as 06:45. Neither of those belongs to a single morning. Sunrise is printed to the whole minute, and within a few weeks of a solstice the true value moves by well under half a minute a day, so the printed time stops changing: the earliest stands on 40 days spread across both years and the latest on 28 days spread across both years. The longest day here is 13h 43m of daylight, held on 22 days spread across both years, and the shortest is 10h 33m, held on 6 days spread across both years.

How far daylight moves in Varanasi

Between those two extremes daylight travels 190 minutes, and that figure is very nearly a direct reading of latitude. At 25.3176°N it puts Varanasi 25th of 38 among the cities covered here, counted from the narrowest swing upward. That is the middle of the range, between Thiruvananthapuram's 61 minutes and Jammu's 260 minutes.

Sunrise does not cross that range at an even rate. The fastest seven-day shift in Varanasi is 8 minutes, in the week beginning 23 March 2026; the slowest week moves it by not one minute at all. Those slow weeks are what produce the longest flat stretch on the whole table: sunrise here reads 05:07 on 20 consecutive days, from 31 May 2026 to 19 June 2026. Nothing is wrong with the arithmetic there: the sun really does rise at a slightly different instant on each of those mornings, and the difference is smaller than the minute the table is written in.

That stretch begins within 21 days of the June solstice, which is where sunrise turns around and briefly stops moving. Two things push sunrise through the year: the sun’s changing declination, whose effect on the clock grows with latitude, and the equation of time, whose effect does not. At 25.3176°N the first dominates — sunrise here travels 98 minutes in all, 3.2 times the 31 minutes the equation of time moves local midday — so the turning point lands where declination turns, at the solstice.

Noon in Varanasi is not twelve o’clock

India keeps one clock across roughly 29 degrees of longitude, fixed to the 82.5°E meridian. Varanasi sits 0.47 degrees east of that line, and at four minutes to the degree that is 2 minutes. This part is arithmetic and it never moves: it is the same on every date of every year, and it means the sun stands highest over Varanasi roughly 2 minutes before the clock reads noon rather than at noon.

What moves on top of it is the equation of time. The earth’s orbit is an ellipse and its axis is tilted, so the sun runs ahead of a uniform clock for part of the year and behind it for the rest. Measured across these 730 days, the midpoint of sunrise and sunset in Varanasi falls between 11:41 and 12:12, a spread of 31 minutes. That spread is almost identical in every Indian city, because it belongs to the orbit rather than to the place. What is local is the 2 minutes of longitude the paragraph above worked out, and the two together are why midday here is never twelve o’clock. This is the correction that matters most in chart work, where a birth time copied off a wall clock is IST while the ascendant depends on where the sun actually stood.

Varanasi is one of only 7 cities on this site that lie east of the meridian, which reverses the sign of everything above: here the sun crosses the meridian before the clock reaches noon, not after. Across the whole cluster this correction spans 77 minutes — Guwahati at the eastern end runs 37 minutes ahead of the clock and Ahmedabad at the western end 40 minutes behind it — so two cities keeping the same time can hold local noon more than an hour apart. The nearest city to Varanasi on this measure is Visakhapatnam, whose own correction differs by 1 minute.

Why Rahu Kaal is not ninety minutes here

Rahu Kaal, Gulika and Yamaghanta are each one of eight equal parts of the interval from sunrise to sunset. Their length is therefore a fraction of daylight, and it moves with the season along with everything else on the table. In Varanasi an eighth runs from 79 minutes to 103 minutes depending on the date. A source quoting a flat ninety minutes is out by more than ten minutes on 228 days of the 730, and by as much as 13 minutes at worst. Where it errs long it holds the window open past its real end, which is the direction that matters if the reason for knowing the window is to stay clear of it.

Abhijit is a fifteenth of the same interval rather than an eighth, so it is shorter and it swings less — 42 minutes to 55 minutes across the two years — and it is tied to local midday rather than to the clock, which is the section above restated. Brahma muhurat is the one window on these pages whose length never changes at all, because tradition defines it as a fixed span before sunrise rather than as a fraction of daylight: ninety-six minutes, every day of the year, moving only with sunrise itself.

One more consequence of measuring rather than assuming. Daylight in Varanasi exceeds twelve hours on 392 of these 730 days, which is more than half of them — in 2026 it first passes twelve hours on 16 March 2026 and last holds it on 27 September 2026. The surplus is atmospheric rather than astronomical: sunrise is taken as the moment the sun’s upper edge clears the horizon, and refraction lifts the image of the disc, so the sun is visible for a few minutes before it geometrically rises and for a few minutes after it geometrically sets. Every city on this site shows the same surplus for the same reason, and it is the sort of claim a reader can check by reading down the day-length column on any month page below.

Against Delhi, whose figures are the ones a national table publishes, sunrise here runs from 15 to 31 minutes earlier depending on the month. That the two ends differ by 16 minutes is the point: a longitude correction on its own would give one fixed figure for the whole year, and latitude is what makes it seasonal. The published Rahu Kaal window then carries a second displacement of its own — up to 29 minutes from Varanasi’s on the worst day of the two years — because both cities take the same numbered eighth on a given weekday, and here that eighth is a different length.

Correcting a national table for sunrise does not remove that second part. On 14 June 2026 the two cities’ sunrise differs by 15 minutes while their Rahu Kaal opens 29 minutes apart. Measured from each city’s own sunrise, which takes the sunrise difference out altogether, the same window still sits up to 14 minutes from Delhi’s — worst on 21 June 2026. That residue is the eighth-length term by itself, multiplied by however many parts of daylight the weekday’s window counts.