Prayer Times in Cairo, Egypt Today

The reference point the rest of Egypt's pages are measured against

Cairo sits at approximately 30.04 degrees north and 31.24 degrees east. Every other Egyptian city on this site is, in practice, described by how far it stands from that pair of numbers, because the capital is where the national convention was worked out and where most people's mental image of "the Egyptian prayer table" comes from.

The distances are not trivial. Sharm El Sheikh lies about three degrees of longitude east of here, which puts its sun roughly twelve minutes ahead of Cairo's on the clock. Alexandria lies more than a degree to the west and runs about five minutes behind. Aswan, seven degrees of latitude south, has a noticeably narrower spread between its summer and winter days. A single Egyptian table cannot serve all of that, which is the reason each city gets its own page rather than a shared one with the capital's figures reprinted.

Where the 19.5 and the 17.5 came from

Egypt's official parameters were set by the General Authority of Survey: a dawn angle of 19.5 degrees below the horizon for Fajr, and 17.5 degrees for Isha. Those two numbers are what this page applies to Cairo's coordinates, and they are also the reason an Egyptian table and a Gulf table published for the same city would not agree. The background, including how far the convention travelled beyond Egypt's borders, is on the Egypt prayer times hub.

The asymmetry is worth noticing on its own terms. A wider angle at dawn than at nightfall means Fajr opens comparatively early relative to sunrise, and Isha arrives comparatively soon after Maghrib. Anyone moving to Cairo from a country that uses eighteen degrees at both ends will find the morning shifted earlier and the evening pulled in.

Asr, and the two schools you will hear on the same street

Cairo has both Shafi'i and Hanafi communities of long standing, and they do not measure Asr the same way. The Shafi'i threshold, which this page uses, is reached when an upright object's shadow has grown by an amount equal to the object's own height beyond whatever shadow it cast at midday. The Hanafi threshold waits for that growth to double.

In practice the two land roughly forty minutes to an hour apart depending on the season. That is not a calculation error and it is not a dispute to be resolved on a website. If you follow the Hanafi position, take Asr from a mosque that does, and use the remaining four times here as normal, since the schools do not differ on those.

Thirty degrees north, and a four-hour range across the year

Cairo's latitude produces an annual day-length swing of a little under four hours: the longest days of the year run close to fourteen hours from sunrise to sunset, the shortest a shade over ten. Fajr and Isha stretch that further at both ends, because both are set by twilight rather than by the sun's disc.

Layered on top of the astronomy is the clock. Egypt returned to summer time in 2023, so the whole table steps forward by an hour on the changeover weekend in spring and back again in autumn. The sun does nothing unusual on those dates; the numbers simply move. It is the one occasion each year when a printed monthly schedule can be genuinely misleading if you carry it across the boundary without checking.

Why the mosque you can hear may start later than this page

What is listed here is the moment each prayer's time enters at Cairo's coordinates. It is not a timetable of when congregations stand up. In a city of this size the interval between the adhan and the iqama varies enormously — some mosques allow a few minutes, some a quarter of an hour, and large congregational mosques often wait longer still to let people arrive.

Nearly every reported discrepancy between a phone and a nearby minaret comes down to that interval, or to an application still configured for a method other than Egypt's. Check the method setting before assuming the arithmetic is wrong.

Sahur, imsak and the line this page prints

Through Ramadan, Fajr closes the pre-dawn meal and Maghrib opens the fast. Sunrise appears in the table but bounds neither; its function is to mark the end of the window in which Fajr may still be prayed, and with a 19.5-degree dawn angle that window is long.

Many Cairo calendars also print an imsak a few minutes ahead of Fajr as a precaution. This page publishes the calculated Fajr itself and does not fold that margin in. Treat the figure here as the outer boundary and take your imsak from your own mosque if you prefer to keep the cushion.

Friday, from Al-Azhar outward

Jumu'ah stands in place of Dhuhr for those attending, and the call is anchored to the Dhuhr entry above. Al-Azhar has been a centre of teaching and of Friday congregation in this city for a very long time, and its practice carries weight, but sermon length and starting habits still differ from one district mosque to the next. Anyone praying at home performs Dhuhr at the listed time.

Orientation, the Arabic table and the monthly view

Rather than rely on a bearing remembered from somewhere else, work out the direction of prayer for where you actually are with the Qibla direction tool. Ramadan and Eid fall on the Hijri calendar, and an Arabic Cairo schedule carries the same figures. For a city where the difference from this page is large enough to matter, see Aswan prayer times.