For NRIs, a wedding back in India usually means booking flights and taking time off work months ahead, well before the family finalizes an exact date. Knowing the general wedding-season windows helps you plan the trip before the precise muhurat is set.
Favorable season windows
Traditionally, mid-February through mid-June, and late November through early February, are considered favorable stretches for weddings in the Hindu calendar. Chaturmas (roughly July through November) is generally avoided.
Why an exact date comes later
The actual vivah muhurat depends on both partners’ birth charts, not just the season, so families typically only lock in a specific date after kundli matching and a detailed muhurat check are complete.
What to do in the meantime
Book flexible flights or hold dates within the broader favorable window, and confirm time-off requests once the family narrows things down to a shorter shortlist of candidate dates.
When the exact date is set
Check that day’s Rahu Kaal and Abhijit Muhurat on the muhurat page for the wedding venue’s city, so the day-of schedule accounts for local timing correctly.
For more on planning an India wedding trip from abroad, see the guide for Indians abroad.
What flight booking actually looks like in practice
Most NRIs we hear from end up booking in two stages, not one. The first booking is a flexible or fully refundable fare into the broad season window, usually 4-6 months out, once the family has agreed on roughly which fortnight the wedding will fall in but before the exact date is finalized. The second is either a date change on that booking or a fresh confirmed fare once the muhurat is locked, typically 6-10 weeks before the wedding.
Airlines flying into Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore from the US, UK, and Gulf routes see a genuine price jump for December and February wedding-season travel, often 30-50% above a comparable non-season fare booked the same distance out. If your family’s shortlist spans two candidate weeks, it’s usually cheaper to hold a flexible fare for the earlier week and cancel than to wait for certainty and book late into peak season pricing.
Leave requests: give HR the season, not the date
Most employers can’t process “I need two weeks off sometime between mid-January and early February, exact dates TBD” as a formal leave request, but they can informally flag it. The practical move: tell your manager about the season window as soon as your family confirms it, then submit the formal leave request the moment the exact date is set. This buys you goodwill for a possible late confirmed request and avoids the awkward version where you ask for two weeks off with nine days’ notice because the muhurat only got finalized late.
Watch for Adhik Maas overlapping the window
The 2026-27 season windows aren’t uniformly available every year. When an Adhik Maas (extra lunar month) falls inside or near a wedding-season stretch, that portion of the window gets treated as unsuitable for weddings by most families, which can compress an already tight late-November-to-February or mid-February-to-June window further. If your family is choosing between two candidate months, it’s worth checking whether either one overlaps an Adhik Maas before you commit flight dates around it, since a date that looks open on a generic calendar might not be one your family’s priest will actually approve.