How we calculate prayer times

Dhuhr is solar noon at the city's longitude. Sunrise and Maghrib are the moments the sun's disc crosses the horizon. Asr is defined by shadow length, which is where the schools differ — the Shafi'i, Maliki and Hanbali position uses a shadow equal to the object's length, the Hanafi position uses twice that, so Hanafi Asr falls later.

Fajr and Isha have no observable disc crossing. They are defined by twilight, as an angle of the sun below the horizon, and each authority publishes its own angle. We apply the angle published for the country, not a single global default.

Each row below is the convention we apply for that set of countries, the angles it specifies, and the source document we cite for those angles. Where an authority publishes no public specification, the row says so rather than pointing at a substitute.

A high-latitude rule is applied in: Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Kazakhstan, Netherlands, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States

North of roughly 48° latitude, there are nights in summer when twilight never reaches the Fajr or Isha angle at all. The angle-based definition then produces no time, or an absurd one — without a high-latitude rule, Edinburgh on 21 June 2027 computes Fajr at 01:14 and Isha at 01:15.

For those countries we apply a high-latitude rule, which partitions the night between Maghrib and sunrise instead of waiting for an angle that never arrives. The countries where this applies are marked in the table above. This is a real area of scholarly disagreement, and local authorities in northern Europe differ on it.

City coordinates come from GeoNames, used under CC BY 4.0. Timezones come from the IANA time zone database, which is how daylight saving is handled correctly — including places like Arizona that do not observe it. The astronomical calculation uses the open-source Adhan library.

Nothing is fetched at page load. Every time on this site was computed at build time and written into a static file, which is why the pages work with JavaScript disabled and why the numbers are reproducible.

Three ordinary reasons, none of which means either timetable is wrong: your mosque may add a precautionary margin of a few minutes; it may follow a different convention from the national authority; and Fajr and Isha onset is not scientifically deterministic — it varies with season, latitude, altitude and air clarity, which is why authorities genuinely disagree about the angle.

Where our time and your mosque's differ, follow your mosque.

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Prayer Times. "How we calculate prayer times". https://prayertime.info/en/methodology/