Days Until Pongal

This live countdown shows how many days are left until the next Pongal, the Tamil harvest festival. Thai Pongal marks the sun's transit into Capricorn (Makara) and the start of the Tamil month of Thai, so it is a solar festival that falls on 14 or 15 January each year — close to fixed, but shifting by a day because the transit does not line up exactly with the Gregorian calendar. This page tracks the correct upcoming date and refreshes automatically each time you open it, then rolls forward to the next year once the day has passed.

Because it always points to the very next Thai Pongal, you can bookmark it and it will stay right year after year. A clear number of days is handy in the run-up: it is time to plan the ceremonial cooking of the pongal dish in a new pot, arrange kolam designs at the doorstep, sort out sugarcane and fresh produce, and organise travel home for the four-day celebration that includes Bhogi, Thai Pongal, Mattu Pongal, and Kaanum Pongal.

The result shows which weekday the coming Pongal falls on, which helps with planning leave and travel. The figure is anchored to today's date and computed in a timezone-safe way, so it reads the same wherever you are, and everything runs privately in your browser.

To use it, just read the number — the days until Pongal appear automatically. On the day itself the page tells you Pongal is here rather than showing a countdown, and you can point the picker at any other date to count toward a different occasion. The upcoming Thai Pongal dates it uses are 15 January 2027, 14 January 2028, and 14 January 2029.

For the Tamil New Year that follows in April, the days until Tamil New Year page counts down the same way, and the days until date calculator counts toward any date you choose.

The countdown is the number of whole days from today to the next Thai Pongal, taken from a list of verified festival dates and calculated at UTC midnight so it is timezone-safe. Once the upcoming Pongal has passed, the page automatically targets the next date in the list. On the day itself the count is zero.