A free Diwali 2026 and Rakhi 2026 countdown with a real muhurat calculator
festcountdown is a single-purpose tool built to answer two questions properly:when is the festival, and what time should the puja actually start. Most people searching "diwali 2026 date" or "raksha bandhan 2026 date" land on pages that bury the answer under horoscope widgets and kundli upsells, or on global holiday calendars that list a date with no timing at all. This site does the opposite: the countdown and the timings are the page.
Diwali 2026 kab hai, and Rakhi 2026 kab hai?
Deepavali 2026 falls on Sunday, 8 November, the night of Kartik Amavasya, with Lakshmi Puja performed during Pradosh Kaal that evening. The five-day festival opens with Dhanteras on 6 November 2026and closes with Bhai Dooj on 11 November.Raksha Bandhan 2026 — Rakhi — falls on Friday, 28 August, with an unusually clean morning window this year because Bhadra Kaal ends before sunrise. Both dates are verified against Drik Ganit panchang sources rather than copied forward from last year's page, which matters more than it sounds: Diwali is a lunar date that moves by weeks annually, and we have seen competing sites publish two different Diwali 2026 dates on two pages of the same website.
Why a calculator instead of a fixed timing table
Muhurat is not one number. Every auspicious window in the panchang is anchored to local sunrise and sunset, so a Lakshmi Puja muhurat published for New Delhi is simply wrong by half an hour or more in Mumbai, Kolkata, London or New Jersey. Most sites handle this by publishing a Delhi time and adding a disclaimer, or by making you pick a city from a dropdown that reloads the entire page behind an ad break.
Our muhurat calculator runs entirely in your browser. Choose from 32 Indian and diaspora cities and the sunrise, sunset, Pradosh Kaal window and all sixteen Choghadiya segments — eight for the day, eight for the night — recompute instantly, with no reload and no network request. Your choice is remembered, so returning to the page shows your city rather than a default.
How the timings are calculated
Sunrise and sunset come from the NOAA solar position algorithm computed for each city's latitude and longitude, with time zones and daylight saving handled by your browser's own IANA database. Choghadiya divides sunrise-to-sunset and sunset-to-next-sunrise into eight equal parts each, with the starting segment set by the weekday and the sequence following the standard rotation. Pradosh Kaal runs from sunset to one-fifth of the way through the night.
None of this is guesswork, and none of it is scraped. The calculation is covered by automated tests that check our output against DrikPanchang's own published tables for multiple dates and multiple cities — Delhi and Mumbai on Diwali, a second weekday to pin the rotation, and a US city across a daylight-saving boundary. Where something genuinely cannot be computed reliably per city, such as lagna-based windows like Vrishabha Kaal, we say so on the page and quote the New Delhi reference rather than inventing a number.
What else you will find here
Beyond the countdown, the Diwali 2026 guideexplains the five days, why the date shifts each year, and what muhurat means in plain language. Dedicated pages cover theDiwali 2026 date in India, a deeperLakshmi Puja muhurat and Choghadiya breakdown, copy-ready Happy Diwali wishes and messages, a gift guide, and atwelve-question FAQ. TheRakhi 2026 guide covers the Raksha Bandhan date, shubh muhurat, Bhadra Kaal, the thread-tying ritual and wishes on a single page.
Everything is free, works on a mid-range phone over a slow connection, and requires no sign-up. There are no horoscope forms, no birth-chart upsells and no interstitials between you and the timing you came for. If you spot a date or muhurat that looks wrong, tell us — we would rather fix it than defend it.