Prayer Times in Giza, Egypt Today

Separate city, identical sun

Giza stands at roughly 30.01 degrees north and 31.21 degrees east, on the west bank of the Nile opposite central Cairo. Those coordinates differ from the capital's by about three hundredths of a degree in each direction. Converted into time, that is a fraction of a second. The honest summary of this page is that Giza's prayer times and Cairo's are the same times.

It is better to say that plainly than to manufacture a distinction. If you set this table beside the capital's, every entry will agree to the minute on every day of the year. Giza has its own page because it is a governorate capital of several million people with its own mosques and its own daily rhythm, not because the sun treats it differently.

What the plateau does, and what it does not

The western edge of the city rises onto the desert plateau, several dozen metres above the floodplain where most of the population lives. That is enough of a rise to be visible from the river, and it prompts a reasonable question about whether height changes anything.

For practical purposes it does not. A few dozen metres of elevation buys well under a minute at sunset, and the calculation used here — like the calculation every mosque in the governorate works to — assumes an observer at ground level with a flat horizon. What the plateau genuinely does is block the low western sky for anyone standing on the floodplain beneath it, so the sun disappears from view slightly before the listed Maghrib. The listed time is still the operative one. Following what you can see from a particular street would mean no two neighbourhoods in Giza agreed with each other.

Where the useful differences actually are

Since the timetable does not distinguish Giza from Cairo, the differences that matter to a worshipper are organisational. Giza governorate stretches a long way west and south of the built-up area, and its mosque network is correspondingly uneven: dense in Dokki, Agouza and Haram, thin across the agricultural and desert fringes. The interval between the adhan and the iqama tends to be longer where people have further to walk.

That interval is the single most common source of confusion. This page reports when a prayer's time enters. It does not report when your mosque stands up, and the two can be five or fifteen minutes apart entirely legitimately.

Egypt's parameters in one paragraph

The figures come from the General Authority of Survey convention — 19.5 degrees of solar depression for Fajr, 17.5 for Isha — applied to Giza's coordinates on the national clock, which now includes a seasonal hour change. The reasoning behind those angles sits on the Egypt prayer times hub rather than being repeated here.

The shadow rule this table follows

Asr is placed at the moment an upright object's shadow has lengthened by the object's own height, measured beyond the shadow already present at midday. That is the Shafi'i and Maliki reckoning and it is what nearly every mosque in the governorate uses. The Hanafi threshold is a doubled shadow and falls appreciably later in the afternoon.

Both positions are long established and a published table has to commit to one. If you follow the later one, take Asr from a mosque that does and use this page for the other four prayers, which are unaffected.

Seasonal movement at thirty degrees north

The year moves this table by a substantial amount. Between midsummer and midwinter the interval from sunrise to sunset changes by close to four hours, and Fajr and Isha widen that further because both are set by twilight rather than by the sun's edge.

One consequence worth planning around: the gap between Maghrib and Isha is not a fixed quantity. Because Isha is judged by how far the sun has sunk rather than by a set number of minutes, that gap opens out in summer and closes in winter. Anyone scheduling a regular evening class or gathering between the two prayers has to revisit the arrangement every few months rather than fixing it once.

Fasting across a governorate of long commutes

A large share of Giza's residents work across the river, and during Ramadan the commute is often what decides where a person breaks the fast rather than the timetable itself. Fajr ends the pre-dawn meal, Maghrib opens iftar, and both are listed for the whole month in the monthly view so that a journey can be planned around them in advance.

Sunrise appears in the table too and is not a boundary of the fast. It closes the window in which Fajr remains valid, which under Egypt's wide dawn angle is a long window. Local calendars that print an imsak a little before Fajr are adding a deliberate cushion; the figure on this page is the calculated dawn itself.

Friday on the west bank

Jumu'ah takes the place of Dhuhr for those attending and is anchored to the Dhuhr time listed above. Because so much of the working population crosses into Cairo, congregation sizes at Giza's own mosques vary a good deal by district and by day. Sermon length and iqama practice are set mosque by mosque. Anyone praying at home performs Dhuhr at the ordinary listed time.

Direction, Arabic and neighbouring tables

Work out which way to face with the Qibla direction tool rather than carrying over a bearing from elsewhere; it calculates from your own coordinates. The Hijri calendar covers Ramadan and Eid dates, and an Arabic Giza schedule carries the same table. Cairo prayer times are the far bank and are effectively this page; for a table that genuinely differs, see Hurghada prayer times on the Red Sea, roughly ten minutes ahead.