Ganesh Chaturthi 2026 falls on Monday, 14 September. Ganeshotsav then runs until Anant Chaturdashi on Friday, 25 September, which is when the large public mandals of Pune and Mumbai take their idols to immersion.
If you are used to the festival landing in August, that is not an error. The date moves by two or three weeks from year to year, and the reason is worth understanding — it is the same reason Sankashti Chaturthi lands on a different weekday every month.
The festival follows the moon, not the calendar
Ganesh Chaturthi is set by the Hindu lunisolar calendar: it is the fourth day — chaturthi — of the waxing moon in the month of Bhadrapada. A lunar year runs about eleven days shorter than a solar one, so a purely lunar date would drift backwards through the seasons.
The calendar corrects for this by inserting a leap month, adhika maas, roughly every three years. The result is that festival dates oscillate within a window rather than drifting: Ganesh Chaturthi always lands somewhere between late August and mid-September, but exactly where depends on the year.
How the days are counted
The festival is usually described as lasting ten or eleven days, but the honest answer is that the span between Ganesh Chaturthi and Anant Chaturdashi is set by tithis, not by a fixed number of dates on a wall calendar.
A tithi is a lunar day, and it does not line up neatly with a solar one — it can run short or long, and occasionally one is skipped or repeated. That is why the gap between the first day and Anant Chaturdashi is not identical every year, and why it is better to check the actual dates than to count forward.
Which day is your visarjan?
Most households do not keep the idol for the full span. Families immerse after one and a half, three, five, seven or ten days, according to their own custom, and the choice is usually inherited rather than decided.
In 2026 those fall on 15, 16, 18, 20 and 23 September respectively. Only the large public mandals — and households that keep the full observance — go on Anant Chaturdashi itself.