Ganesh Chaturthi 2026: The Date, the Muhurat and the Arithmetic

Ganesh Chaturthi 2026: The Date, the Muhurat and the Arithmetic

Ganesh Chaturthi 2026 is Monday, 14 September 2026. The Chaturthi tithi runs from 07:06 on 14 September to 07:44 on 15 September, and the Madhyahna Ganesha Puja Muhurat is 11:20 AM–01:48 PM in Mumbai, 11:02 AM–01:31 PM in New Delhi and 10:18 AM–12:46 PM in Kolkata. Visarjan on Anant Chaturdashi is Friday, 25 September 2026.

Counted from 9 September 2026, that is five days to the sthapana and sixteen to the immersion.

Two platform-wide numbers are worth knowing before you plan who sees the day: across all 3,860 pages SubhSandesh has created since March 2026, spanning 15 page types, 49.6% of the 45,656 recorded views are opened on a phone, and 96.1% of started pages are actually published and shared. Below: the rule that produces 14 September, every visarjan date, and why 2026 landed eighteen days later than 2025.

What actually fixes the date of Ganesh Chaturthi?

Ganesh Chaturthi is the fourth tithi of the bright fortnight of Bhadrapada. A tithi is one-thirtieth of a lunation, and since the mean synodic month is 29.530588 days — the figure adopted by the Government of India's Calendar Reform Committee in 1955 — the average tithi lasts about 23 hours 37 minutes.

That is shorter than a solar day, so tithis slide backwards against the clock and almost never start at dawn. Which means the calendar has to decide, every year, which civil date a tithi "belongs" to.

Ganesh Chaturthi answers that with midday. Not sunrise, which is the more common rule.

Franz Kielhorn set this out in 1897 in The Indian Antiquary, in a survey of festal days of the Hindu lunar calendar that lists, under Bhadrapada-shuklapaksha, "IV. — Ganesa- or Varada-chaturthi; especially auspicious, when it falls on Sunday or Tuesday. [Midday.]" Kielhorn's framing of the underlying problem still holds: tithis "often commence after sunrise of one day, and end before sunset of the following day", so a rule is needed to say which day they attach to.

Dershowitz and Reingold give the same rule numerically in Indian Calendrical Calculations (Birkhäuser, 2011): Ganesh Chaturthi falls on the day when tithi 4 is current, in whole or in part, during the midday period from 10:48 a.m. to 1:12 p.m. in temporal time. If tithi 4 covers that window on two consecutive days, or misses it on both, the earlier day wins.

Ganesh Chaturthi 2026 date, tithi window and city muhurats

Apply that rule to 2026 and it produces a slightly odd result. Chaturthi begins at 07:06 on Monday 14 September — after sunrise, not before it — and ends at 07:44 the next morning. It is present across midday on the 14th, so the 14th is the day.

On the 15th it is present at dawn but gone well before midday, so the 15th is not.

That tithi lasts 24 hours 38 minutes: longer than a calendar day, which matters for the visarjan arithmetic further down.

The puja window itself moves with local noon. Drik Panchang's madhyahna muhurat for 14 September 2026 is 11:20 AM–01:48 PM for Mumbai, 11:16 AM–01:44 PM for Pune, 11:02 AM–01:31 PM for New Delhi, 11:08 AM–01:36 PM for Jaipur, 10:58 AM–01:25 PM for Hyderabad, 10:51 AM–01:18 PM for Chennai and 10:18 AM–12:46 PM for Kolkata. That is a spread of just over an hour across the country, and it is why a Kolkata household finishes sthapana before a Mumbai one has begun.

The moon-sighting prohibition applies for 11 hours 27 minutes in Mumbai, from 09:10 AM to 08:37 PM.

For the countdown, subtract from two fixed points: 14 September 2026 for the sthapana, 25 September 2026 for the visarjan. From 9 September 2026 that is 5 and 16 days.

Why 2026 landed eighteen days later than 2025

Ganesh Chaturthi normally arrives ten to twelve days earlier each year, because twelve lunar months run about eleven days short of the solar year. 2026 broke the pattern in the other direction.

The cause is a leap month. The Hindu lunisolar calendar corrects its drift by inserting an adhika masa roughly every three years, and 2026 had one: Adhika Jyeshtha, which ended on 15 June 2026. An extra month between the two festivals swallowed the eleven-day deficit and pushed the date forward instead.

The takeaway is practical — if you are planning leave or travel, last year's date is not a guide, and in a leap-month year it is not even close.

The other thing that moves is which panchang you trust. The 1955 Calendar Reform Committee found almanac-makers differing on a tithi's ending moment "by as much as five hours", and recorded the same festival fixed on two successive days in one city — Durga Puja in Calcutta in 1952, Saraswati Puja in 1953. It recommended that the tithi computed for a central station at 82½° E, 23° 11′ N govern all of India.

That is why a national holiday list and a neighbourhood pandit can still disagree by a day.

The 2026 visarjan dates, from one and a half days to Anant Chaturdashi

Households keep the murti for 1½, 3, 5, 7 or 10 days. All five 2026 dates below are Drik Panchang's, with the first auspicious choghadiya window for Mumbai.

1. One and a half days — Tuesday, 15 September 2026

The shortest observance, common where space is tight. The first auspicious window opens 12:34 PM–02:05 PM, with an evening Labha window 08:09 PM–09:37 PM.

2. Third day — Wednesday, 16 September 2026

The usual compromise in flats. Morning Shubha runs 11:01 AM–12:33 PM, with a long evening block from 08:09 PM to 12:33 AM on the 17th.

3. Fifth day — Friday, 18 September 2026

For households that want a full weekend of visitors first. The morning window is wide: 06:27 AM–11:01 AM, then 12:32 PM–02:04 PM.

4. Seventh day — Sunday, 20 September 2026

A Sunday in 2026, which makes it the easiest short option for working families. Morning window 07:58 AM–12:32 PM.

5. Anant Chaturdashi — Friday, 25 September 2026

The public immersion day and the end of the ten-day Ganeshotsav. Chaturdashi tithi runs 11:18 PM on 24 September to 11:06 PM on 25 September; morning choghadiya 06:28 AM–10:59 AM.

Notice that 14 to 25 September is twelve calendar dates for what is described as a ten-day festival. That is the 24-hour-38-minute Chaturthi doing its work: a tithi longer than a solar day occupies two sunrises and shunts everything after it a day forward.

How to include people who cannot be at your mandap on 14 September

A festival fixed to a date is a coordination device before it is anything else. Eleanor Power's study of a South Indian village, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B in May 2018, found that people who take part in collective religious ritual together are measurably more likely to have a supportive relationship than people who do not — and that the effect is strongest for the recurrent worship, not the once-a-year spectacle. Showing up on the same day, repeatedly, is the mechanism.

Which is the argument for making sure the people who cannot be in the room are still in the day.

The takeaway: the live call is the strongest signal and the hardest to schedule across a one-hour muhurat spread; the shareable page is the only option on this list that survives all ten days.

That last row is what the Ganesh Chaturthi page on SubhSandesh is for. The recipient offers the durva, kumkum, flowers and modak themselves, the aarti thali circles while Karpur Gauram plays, and they write their own prarthana back. You add your photo, your mandap and a card for an Instagram story.

If you would rather see the other festival formats first, the Holi greeting page is built the same way, and the full SubhSandesh template library lists all 15.

One planning note from our own data: the median gap between a page's first save and its last edit is 6.8 hours, sampled on the "I love you" page across 1,065 pages. People do not finish these in one sitting. Start on the 12th if you want it ready for the 14th.

When a Ganesh Chaturthi page is the wrong choice

It cannot hand anyone a modak. It cannot put you in the queue at Lalbaugcha Raja, and it cannot substitute for standing in your aunt's living room at 11:20 AM while the aarti is sung. If you can physically be at the mandap, be at the mandap.

It is also the wrong call for a grandparent without a smartphone. Platform-wide, 49.6% of page views are on a phone and the rest on desktop — a recipient with neither is not reachable this way. Print a photo and post it.

And it does nothing for the public half of Ganeshotsav: the pandal, the dhol, the procession on the 25th. A page is for the people missing the day, not a replacement for it.

Sources

• Drik Panchang, Ganesh Chaturthi 2026 date and puja time, Mumbai — tithi window, madhyahna muhurat, per-city timings. Undated.
• Drik Panchang, Ganesh Visarjan 2026 dates and choghadiya, Mumbai — immersion dates for every observance length. Undated.
• F. Kielhorn, "Festal Days of the Hindu Lunar Calendar", The Indian Antiquary vol. XXVI, pp. 177–187 (1897).
• Nachum Dershowitz and Edward M. Reingold, "Indian Calendrical Calculations", in Ancient Indian Leaps into Mathematics, Birkhäuser (2011).
• Government of India, Report of the Calendar Reform Committee, CSIR (1955).
• Eleanor A. Power, "Collective ritual and social support networks in rural South India", Proceedings of the Royal Society B 285:20180023 (23 May 2018), CC BY.