Teej 2026: Dates, the Three Days, and the Dar Night Before

Quick Answer

Teej — properly Haritalika Teej — runs from Monday, September 14 to Wednesday, September 16, 2026. The dar feast that most people actually attend falls on the evening before it starts: Sunday, September 13.

The day that carries the festival is the first one. Monday, September 14 is Haritalika Tritiya, when women keep the nirjala fast — no food and, in the strict form, not a mouthful of water for around twenty-four hours — and go to a Shiva temple in the largest single-day gathering of women anywhere in Nepal. At Pashupatinath the queue starts forming in the dark and runs for kilometres along the Bagmati by mid-morning.

The third day, Wednesday, September 16, is Rishi Panchami, the purification rite that formally closes the cycle. The middle day is quiet.

Use the September 2026 calendar for date browsing and the canonical Teej page for the full festival entity, its elements, and photographs.

2026 Dates

Event	Start	End	Nepali calendar
Teej (Haritalika Teej) 2026	Monday, September 14, 2026	Wednesday, September 16, 2026	Bhadra 29 - Bhadra 31, 2083 BS
Dar Khane Din (the eve)	Sunday, September 13, 2026	-	Bhadra 28, 2083 BS

Teej is the third day of the waxing moon in Bhadra — Bhadra Shukla Tritiya — and Nepal festival dates follow the lunar Bikram Sambat calendar, so the Gregorian dates move every year: Teej fell on September 6 in 2024 and August 26 in 2025, nearly three weeks apart. Do not reuse the 2026 dates for a later trip — check the current Nepal festival calendar.

The 2027 dates are not yet fixed. Lunar dates become final only when the official 2084 BS patro is published, so there is no reliable Teej 2027 date to plan against at the time of writing.

The Three Days, and the Night Before

Teej is counted as three days, Tritiya to Panchami. The weight is almost entirely on the first — and the single most attended event of the festival sits outside the count altogether, on the eve.

Day	Name	2026 date	Nepali date	What happens
Eve	Dar Khane Din	Sunday, September 13	Bhadra 28	Dar is a heavy meal eaten to carry you through a fast, and this is a whole night built around it. Women gather in groups — sisters and sisters-in-law, neighbours, office colleagues — for deliberately rich food (fried bread, meat curries, kheer, sweets, milk), then sing and dance in red saris, often well past midnight. Men are marginal to it or absent entirely.
1	Haritalika Tritiya — the nirjala fast	Monday, September 14	Bhadra 29	The fast, and the temple. The strict form takes no food and no water for about twenty-four hours, and many women observe it in full while working and running a household through the day. Modified fasts — fruit only, or water allowed — are ordinary and carry no stigma. The day's centre is a Shiva temple, above all Pashupatinath.
2	Chaturthi	Tuesday, September 15	Bhadra 30	The quiet day. The fast has been broken, the crowds have gone, and nothing public is scheduled.
3	Rishi Panchami	Wednesday, September 16	Bhadra 31	A purification bath, teeth cleaned with datiwan twigs, prayers to the Saptarishi — the seven sages. Traditionally the rite addresses ritual impurity accumulated through menstruation over the year; many women who perform it now read it instead as a restoration after the body's discipline. Practically, it is the day the red sari goes back in the cupboard.

Two things run through all of it rather than sitting on one day. Parvati and the Haritalika vow is the story the fast re-enacts — Parvati, promised by her father to Vishnu, fled to the forest with her closest friend (harit, taken away; alika, the female friend) and performed austerities there until Shiva accepted her. And Teej songs are both an unwritten call-and-response repertoire carried in memory and a commercial industry with a release calendar: new tracks drop through Bhadra and play from every shopfront and bus, and a substantial share of them now deal with domestic violence, property rights and marriage on women's own terms.

Where to Watch

• Pashupatinath, on the morning of Monday, September 14. The single most crowded place in Nepal that day. Non-Hindus cannot enter the main temple, but the day happens outside it anyway — the eastern bank, the river ghats, the hillside, and the queue itself. Be there before six or don't go; by nine the approach roads are solid.
• Any local Shiva or Bhagwati temple. Every town in the country has its own version at a scale you can actually walk through, and if you want to see the day rather than the crowd, this is the better choice. In the Kathmandu Valley the temples around the three durbar squares fill up; in a hill town, ask for the Shiva temple and go early.
• The dar season, in the cities. Individual gatherings are private by nature, so the accessible part is the run-up: from a week or two out, halls and restaurants across Kathmandu and Pokhara host them nightly, and groups of women in red walking home late is the signal the season has started.

Practical Notes

Pick your day deliberately — they are not interchangeable. Sunday the 13th is the atmosphere: music, food, dancing, an evening that runs late. Monday the 14th is the spectacle: colour, scale, silence in the queue, people doing something genuinely hard in public. If you can only manage one, the 14th is the one that will stay with you, but the 13th is the one you can enjoy.

It falls at the tail of monsoon. Bhadra is warm, humid and still wet — bring rain gear, and expect the Bagmati to be high and brown rather than picturesque.

September stacks up. Krishna Janmashtami falls about ten days before Teej, Indra Jatra begins eleven days after it (September 25 - October 2; see the Indra Jatra 2026 guide), and Dashain opens inside a month. A three-week trip anchored on Teej can take in two more major festivals without moving much.

Unlike Dashain, Teej does not empty the cities. It is largely observed where people already live, so there is no national travel peak to book around — but city hotels, party palaces and restaurants are heavily committed through the dar weeks, and traffic around major temples on the fast day is genuinely bad.

Etiquette

Teej is a fast, not a performance. Much of what you are watching is people being physically uncomfortable in public for reasons that matter to them.

• Don't eat or drink in a temple queue. Everyone around you has had nothing since the previous night.
• Don't press food on a fasting friend or colleague. They will not eat in front of you and they will not eat away from you. Offering once is a kindness; offering repeatedly lands as pressure.
• Ask before photographing a face. Wide shots of the crowd and the colour are uncontroversial. A close portrait of a woman mid-prayer, mid-fast, is not — most people will say yes, and the asking is the point.
• Red or bright colours if you are invited to a dar; never black. Nobody expects a foreign guest in a sari, and nobody minds one either.
• Accept prasad after the fast breaks. Taking some is the correct response.
• Don't treat it as a women-only space you are transgressing. Men are present at temples throughout; dar gatherings are the part that is genuinely women's own, and those are private anyway.