Prayer Times in Pakistan — All Cities

The Karachi convention, and why both ends of the night share one angle

Prayer times for Pakistan on this site are calculated to the convention published by the University of Islamic Sciences in Karachi. It is unusual in being symmetrical. Fajr begins when the centre of the sun sits 18 degrees below the horizon in the morning, and Isha begins when it reaches that same depth below the horizon in the evening. Dawn and nightfall are treated as mirror images rather than being given separate values.

That symmetry has a practical consequence. Because both times are tied to twilight and not to a fixed count of minutes, the gap between Maghrib and Isha stretches through the Pakistani summer and contracts through the winter. Anyone who has prayed in Saudi Arabia or the Emirates, where Isha is pinned at a flat ninety minutes after sunset whatever the season, notices the difference on returning home. The same Karachi convention is applied to India and Bangladesh, so the three countries share a calculation standard even though their clocks do not agree.

Asr, the Hanafi shadow, and the time your masjid announces

Asr is the one prayer where the disagreement is juristic rather than astronomical, and in Pakistan it affects nearly everyone. Two positions are in long-standing use. The Shafi'i, Maliki and Hanbali schools hold that Asr begins once a vertical object throws a shadow equal to its own length, measured on top of whatever shadow it was already casting at solar noon. The Hanafi school holds that the window opens later, once that shadow has reached twice the object's length plus the noon shadow.

The distance between the two on the clock is substantial, roughly forty to sixty minutes at Pakistani latitudes and wider in summer than in winter. Pakistan is overwhelmingly Hanafi, and the great majority of mosques from Karachi to Peshawar announce the later time. The Asr figure published on these pages uses the earlier reckoning, the one shared by the other three schools. So if the Asr namaz at your local masjid is called close to an hour after the time shown here, nothing has gone wrong: that is the Hanafi measure, and it is the one to follow. Neither position is a mistake, and neither school suggests the other is praying outside the window.

One clock, and half an hour of sun between Quetta and Sialkot

Pakistan keeps a single national time at UTC+5 and does not observe daylight saving, so nothing but the sun moves the timetable. The country is wide enough for that to show. Quetta and Karachi both sit close to 67 degrees east, while Lahore and Sialkot lie past 74 degrees, a separation of around seven and a half degrees of longitude. The earth turns through one degree every four minutes, which places roughly half an hour between the two ends of the list.

Maghrib therefore reaches Sialkot and Lahore first and Quetta and Karachi last, with Faisalabad, Sargodha, Multan and Bahawalpur ranged in between. During Ramadan that gap is real rather than theoretical, since a household in Lahore opens its roza around half an hour before a household in Karachi. The eastern cities also sit near the meridian on which UTC+5 is centred, so their clock time tracks their solar time closely, while in Karachi and Quetta every solar event falls later on the clock than the timezone alone would suggest.

From Karachi to Abbottabad: nine degrees of latitude

The north to south spread does something different. Karachi sits near 24.9 degrees north with Hyderabad a little above it, while Peshawar and Abbottabad lie past 34 degrees and Islamabad and Rawalpindi just below them. Latitude does not push the times earlier or later on the clock in the way longitude does. What it changes is how far the year moves them.

Northern Pakistan has a much wider seasonal swing than the south. Summer days in Abbottabad, Peshawar and Islamabad run appreciably longer than summer days in Karachi, and winter days appreciably shorter, so the interval between Fajr and Maghrib opens and closes further across the year. Sindh stays comparatively even. Islamabad and Rawalpindi are the opposite case entirely: the two sit a few kilometres apart and their calculated times differ by less than a minute, so either page can be read for both.

Sehri, iftar and the shape of the roza

During Ramadan the two figures that matter most are Fajr, which closes sehri, and Maghrib, which opens iftar. Both appear on every Pakistani city page, and the monthly calendar sets out the whole month at once, which is more useful than checking a day at a time.

Printed Pakistani timetables often carry a sehri ending time a few minutes before the calculated Fajr, held back as a precaution. We publish the astronomical Fajr itself without that margin, so treat the figure here as the outer limit and stop earlier if your mosque asks you to. Taraweeh follows Isha, and because Isha is set by a twilight angle rather than a fixed interval, the gap between iftar and Taraweeh is wider when Ramadan falls in the long days of summer and narrower when it falls in winter.

The fifteen cities we publish

We cover Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, Multan, Peshawar, Quetta, Hyderabad, Sialkot, Gujranwala, Bahawalpur, Sargodha, Abbottabad and Sukkur. Each carries its own coordinates rather than inheriting an approximation from the capital, which matters in a country half an hour wide.

Open any city for today's five namaz timings and sunrise, a live countdown to the next prayer, and a full monthly calendar. The calculation method in force is named beneath the times table on every page.