Tithi List: All 30 Tithis, Their Meaning and Five Groups

There are 30 tithis in a Hindu lunar month: 15 in the bright fortnight (Shukla paksha), from Pratipada to Purnima, and 15 in the dark fortnight (Krishna paksha), from Pratipada to Amavasya. Each tithi is the time the Moon takes to gain 12° on the Sun, and tradition sorts the tithis into five repeating groups, Nanda, Bhadra, Jaya, Rikta and Purna, that guide which tithi suits which kind of work.

What a tithi is

A tithi is a lunar day. At the new moon the Moon and Sun stand together; as the Moon pulls ahead, the angle between them grows from 0° to 360° over the month. Each 12° step is one tithi.

Because the Moon’s speed varies, a tithi lasts anything from about 20 to 27 hours, so it rarely matches a calendar day. The tithi in force at sunrise, the udaya tithi, names the day. Now and then a tithi begins after one sunrise and ends before the next, so it never touches a sunrise and is called kshaya (lost); one that spans two sunrises is vriddhi (extra).

Each tithi is written with its paksha, as in Shukla Ekadashi or Krishna Ashtami, because the names repeat in both halves of the month.

How a tithi is worked out

Take the Moon’s longitude, subtract the Sun’s, and divide the difference by 12. Ignore the remainder and add 1: the answer, from 1 to 30, is the tithi.

Numbers 16 to 29 are the dark-fortnight tithis: subtract 15 to get the name, so 17 is Krishna Dwitiya and 23 is Krishna Ashtami. The full moon falls at the very end of Purnima, when the gap reaches 180°, and the new moon at the end of Amavasya.

All 30 tithis at a glance

The first 14 names come once in each fortnight; the 15th tithi is Purnima in the bright half and Amavasya in the dark half. The deities are those Muhurta Chintamani assigns to each tithi.

Many festivals keep the deity of their tithi: Ganesha on Chaturthi, the serpents on Panchami, Skanda on Shashthi, the Sun on Saptami and Shiva on Chaturdashi. Some observances are timed by the tithi at an hour other than sunrise, such as Shivaratri at midnight or Sankashti Chaturthi at moonrise, so a festival can fall on a day the Panchang names by a different tithi.

The five groups

Every fortnight runs through the five groups three times, in the same order. The group names say what each tithi is traditionally good for.

Amavasya takes the Purna place in the dark fortnight, but it is treated on its own: it is avoided for almost every new start and kept for honouring the ancestors. Purnima, too, suits worship, charity and some rites better than others, so the group is a guide rather than a rule. In every case the group describes the tithi’s character; whether a particular day works for a particular task still depends on the rest of the Panchang.

A few points prevent common mix-ups:

• Bhadra the tithi group is not Bhadra the karana. The Bhadra tithis are favourable. Bhadra, or Vishti karana, is the half-tithi tradition avoids.
• Rikta does not mean unlucky. The Rikta tithis carry some of the year’s most loved festivals. Tradition simply avoids them for starting things that are meant to grow.
• Ashtami is often avoided for beginnings, although it belongs to Jaya and is central to the worship of Krishna and Durga.

Bright half or dark half

Classical muhurat texts add a refinement. In the bright fortnight the Moon is still weak at first, so the first round of five tithis counts as weak, the second as middling and the third as strong. In the dark fortnight the order reverses: the first five, when the Moon is still bright, are strong, and the last five weak.

That is why the early tithis of the dark fortnight are still used for many muhurats, and why Shukla Pratipada, with the Moon barely visible, is often passed over.

Tradition also pairs each group with a weekday on which it is said to bring success, a siddha combination: Nanda on Friday, Bhadra on Wednesday, Jaya on Tuesday, Rikta on Saturday and Purna on Thursday. Notice that even a Rikta tithi has its good day.

Tithis in muhurat

For a muhurat, the tithi is one of five checks, alongside the nakshatra, yoga, karana and weekday. Each ceremony has its own list of suitable tithis, so our Muhurat finder applies a different rule for each activity:

• Weddings: every tithi except the three around the new moon, Krishna Chaturdashi, Amavasya and Shukla Pratipada, as modern wedding almanacs allow.
• Mundan: only good tithis of the bright fortnight.
• Naming ceremonies and business openings: a shorter list of good tithis that leaves out every Rikta tithi and Amavasya.
• Every activity: any stretch of Vishti karana, or Bhadra, is avoided.

Our guide to how a shubh muhurat is chosen explains the other four checks, and the vivah muhurat guide covers weddings in detail.

Tithis, fasts and the family calendar

Most Hindu fasts and festivals follow the tithi rather than the calendar date. Twice a month there is an Ekadashi, sacred to Vishnu, with its fast broken on Dwadashi. Purnima, the full moon, is kept with worship and charity, and Amavasya, the new moon, is the traditional day for offerings to ancestors. Shraddha for a family member is performed on the tithi of their passing, not on the calendar anniversary. In the same way, many families mark a birthday on the janma tithi, the tithi and lunar month in which a person was born, so a tithi birthday moves around the calendar from year to year.

Each tithi also has two halves, called karanas, which is why a Panchang lists a karana change roughly halfway through every tithi.

Because tithis move against the calendar, the same festival falls on a different date each year, and occasionally on different dates in two cities, since the tithi at local sunrise can differ. Regional customs differ too: the dark fortnight of a month is named differently in the Amanta calendar of the south and west and the Purnimanta calendar of the north, though the tithi itself is the same.

How to find today’s tithi

Open our free Panchang and choose your city. The tithi line shows the paksha and tithi running at sunrise, the time it ends, and the tithi that follows on a “then” line. It works for any date, so you can look ahead to find the next Ekadashi, Purnima or Chaturthi. For the other four limbs of the day, our guide to how to read a Panchang walks through each one.