Dhanteras, and what pradoṣa actually means
The popular claimThe festival is fixed to an evening, not a date — and "evening" has a definition.
Dhanteras is the first of the five days that end in Bhai Dūj, and it is the one people most often get wrong by a day — because it belongs to an evening, and calendars print mornings.
Which tithi, and which part of the day
The day is Kārttika kṛṣṇa Trayodaśī: the thirteenth of the dark half, two days before the new moon. But the tithi alone does not fix it. The nibandha texts take Dhanatrayodaśī as the day on which Trayodaśī is present in the pradoṣa.
Pradoṣa is a defined window. It begins at sunset and runs for about two and a quarter hours — three muhūrtas of the night, in the usual reckoning. If Trayodaśī covers that window on one evening, that evening is Dhanteras. If it covers it on two consecutive evenings, the first is generally taken, because the lamp for Yama, which belongs to the same evening, is placed on the thirteenth going into the fourteenth.
That is the whole rule. It does not care whether Trayodaśī was present at sunrise.
2026, computed
Trayodaśī begins at 10:31 AM on Friday 6 November and ends at 10:48 AM on Saturday 7 November — Delhi times from this site's panchang engine.
- Friday 6. Sunset 5:31 PM, so the pradoṣa runs roughly 5:31 to 7:55 PM. Trayodaśī, which began that morning, covers the whole of it.
- Saturday 7. Trayodaśī ended at 10:48 in the morning. By sunset the tithi is Caturdaśī. The pradoṣa test fails.
Dhanteras 2026: Friday 6 November, after sunset. Not Saturday, even though Saturday is the day Trayodaśī is present at sunrise — which is why a calendar that applies the ordinary sunrise rule out of habit will print the 7th and be wrong.
In Toronto the same tithi runs from 12:01 AM on the 6th to 12:18 AM on the 7th, local time, and Toronto's sunset on the 6th is a little before five. The pradoṣa of Friday the 6th is covered; Saturday's is not. Both cities: Friday.
The two stories on one evening
Two things are attached to this evening, and they are older than the shopping.
The first is Dhanvantari. In the Bhāgavata Purāṇa's account of the churning of the ocean, Dhanvantari rises from the milk-sea holding the pot of amṛta, and later tradition places that emergence on this tithi. He is the physician of the devas, and the day is kept in his name as Dhanvantari Jayantī — which is where the word dhana in Dhanteras comes from. It is not "wealth" in the first instance. It is his name.
The second is the Yama-dīpa — a single lamp placed outside the house, facing south, at pradoṣa, for Yama. The Dharmasindhu records it with the day. It is a small, quiet rite and it is the reason the timing is fixed to the evening at all: a lamp is lit at dusk.
The purchase of metal on this day — a vessel, a coin — is custom, widely followed, and this page is not against it. But it is not in the texts named above, and a reader deserves to know which parts of the evening are rule and which are habit.
Why the times above are not the times for you
Pradoṣa starts at your sunset. In November that is 5:31 PM in Delhi and closer to 4:55 PM in Toronto, and by December it is earlier still. The tithi boundary is the same instant everywhere, converted; the window it has to cover is local. This site's panchang computes both for the city you type, which is the only way to get the day right in the years when the boundary falls close to dusk.
What this page does not say
It does not say that something bought on this evening will multiply, and it does not say that a house without the lamp is in any danger. Dhanvantari's day is kept in the name of a physician; Yama's lamp is placed as the texts describe it. What either means to you is not a computation, and this page stops where the texts stop.
Source — Dharmasindhu and Nirnayasindhu on pradosha-vyapini trayodashi for Dhanatrayodashi and on the Yama-dipa; the Bhagavata Purana (8.8) and the Vishnu Purana on Dhanvantari rising from the churning of the ocean; sunrise, sunset and tithi boundaries computed by this site's panchang engine for Delhi and Toronto
Every claim on this site names its source, and every calculator shows its arithmetic.