Prayer Times Calculator
Islamic prayer times for your location with every major calculation method, the five prayer windows explained, and why Fajr and Isha angles differ by school.
Getting your location...
The five daily prayers are fixed to the sun, not to the clock, which is why a timetable copied from last month is already wrong. The Quran sets the principle directly: Surah An-Nisa 4:103 describes prayer as decreed upon the believers at specified times, and Surah Al-Isra 17:78 ties the window to the decline of the sun and to the recitation at dawn. The calculator above resolves those solar events for your coordinates and prints the resulting times.
The five prayer windows
Each prayer has an opening and a closing, and the closing of one is normally the opening of the next. Knowing the boundaries matters more than knowing the minute, because a prayer prayed inside its window is valid even if the clock on the wall disagrees.
| Prayer | Window opens | Window closes | Set by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fajr | True dawn (first light) | Sunrise | Sun angle below horizon (varies by method) |
| Dhuhr | After the sun passes its highest point | When Asr begins | Solar noon |
| Asr | When a shadow equals the object casting it (Standard) or twice it (Hanafi) | Sunset | Shadow ratio, chosen on the page above |
| Maghrib | Immediately after sunset | Isha begins | Sun below the horizon |
| Isha | When twilight ends | Midnight or Fajr, depending on the school's view | Sun angle or a fixed interval after Maghrib |
Calculation methods compared
Nothing about the solar geometry is disputed — the disagreement is about how far below the horizon the sun must be before dawn is considered true dawn and before twilight is considered over. That single number, called the Fajr or Isha angle, is what separates the methods. The angles below are the published parameters used by the named authorities and are the same values the calculator above applies when you pick a method.
| Method | Authority | Fajr angle | Isha rule |
|---|---|---|---|
| MWL | Muslim World League | 18° | 17° |
| ISNA | Islamic Society of North America | 15° | 15° |
| Egypt | Egyptian General Authority of Survey | 19.5° | 17.5° |
| Makkah | Umm al-Qura University, Makkah | 18.5° | 90 minutes after Maghrib |
| Karachi | University of Islamic Sciences, Karachi | 18° | 18° |
| Tehran | Institute of Geophysics, University of Tehran | 17.7° | 14° |
| Jafari | Shia Ithna-Ashari (Leva Institute, Qum) | 16° | 14° |
The practical rule is to use whatever your local mosque or Islamic centre uses. A 15° Fajr angle produces a later Fajr than an 18° angle, and in summer at mid latitudes the difference in the Isha time can reach well over an hour — so mixing methods across a community is a common source of confusion rather than a source of accuracy.
Standard Asr versus Hanafi Asr
Asr is the one prayer whose time is defined by a shadow rather than by an angle. The Shafi'i, Maliki and Hanbali schools take the moment when an object's shadow equals its own length plus the shadow it casts at noon — called the Standard or Shafi'i calculation. The Hanafi school waits until the shadow is twice the object's length plus the noon shadow. The Hanafi time is therefore always later, typically by 45 to 75 minutes depending on the season and latitude. Both are correct within their own school; the page above lets you switch between them so the timetable matches the practice of the mosque you pray behind.
Why the times move every day
Every prayer time is an astronomical event rather than an appointment. Solar noon drifts later and earlier through the year as the Earth's tilt and orbital speed change, so Dhuhr and Asr shift together; day length changes, so Fajr and Isha move most of all. Around the equinoxes the daily change is at its largest, which is why an unadjusted printed timetable goes stale within a couple of weeks. Use the Ramadan calendar through the fasting month, when Suhoor and Iftar depend on the same two events, and the Qibla finder if you have moved to an unfamiliar city and need the direction as well as the time.
High latitudes and unusual cases
Above roughly 48° of latitude — northern Britain, Scandinavia, northern Canada — the sun may never dip far enough below the horizon for true dawn or true twilight to occur in midsummer. The angle-based methods then return no valid time at all. Communities in those regions adopt one of a few established conventions, and the safest course is to follow the convention of the nearest established Islamic authority rather than an app default. In the far north of Norway, for example, mosques commonly follow the timetable of a lower-latitude city, or apply a fixed interval between Maghrib and Isha. The same applies to the post-prayer dhikr and to the voluntary prayers around Fajr and Isha, whose windows inherit the same problem.
Two smaller points worth knowing. First, the times shown are for the moment the sun crosses the horizon at your coordinates, so an elevation change of a few hundred metres can move sunrise by a minute or two — irrelevant for prayer, relevant if you are using the times to plan a commute. Second, seconds-level precision is meaningless: local atmospheric refraction and the terrain around you affect when you personally see first light. Building a routine around the window, and using the Hijri date converter to track it through the Islamic year, is the practical approach. The wider halal living guides cover the surrounding questions of practice.