Prayer Times in Suez, Egypt Today

Cairo's parallel, five minutes of sun to the east

Suez lies at roughly 29.97 degrees north and 32.55 degrees east. Its latitude is within a tenth of a degree of Cairo's, which makes the pair about as clean a comparison as Egypt offers: two cities with the same day length, the same seasonal behaviour and the same annual pattern, separated purely by longitude.

That separation is a little over one and a quarter degrees, and at four minutes to the degree it comes to roughly five minutes. Every prayer here enters about five minutes before the capital's — Fajr, Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib and Isha without distinction — and the offset holds on every date of the year. It does not grow in summer or shrink in winter, because longitude does not work that way.

Why the offset is worth respecting on the Cairo road

Five minutes sounds small enough to ignore, and for Dhuhr on an ordinary weekday it probably is. During Ramadan it is not. Someone driving in from Cairo who keeps the capital's schedule will break the fast five minutes late every evening of the month, and someone travelling the other way will break it five minutes early.

The rule of thumb for Egypt is that north-south movement along the Nile costs you very little and east-west movement costs you a great deal. Suez is only a couple of hours from the capital by road but sits a meaningful distance east of it, which is why the two pages differ more than the map suggests they should.

Sinai across the water, and what the table ignores

The Gulf of Suez opens to the south and the mountains of Sinai stand across it to the east. High ground on the eastern side raises the point at which the sun first becomes visible, so on a clear morning the actual first sight of the sun can come after the listed sunrise.

The calculation makes no attempt to model that. Sunrise and sunset are computed for a flat horizon at ground level, which is the universal convention and the one the city's mosques are working to. Following what you can see from a particular street would leave neighbourhoods disagreeing with each other, and in any case sunrise is not a prayer time — it marks the close of the window in which Fajr can still be prayed.

A year identical to the capital's, shifted five minutes

Because the latitudes match, the shape of the year here is Cairo's shape exactly. Day length runs from close to fourteen hours at midsummer down to a little over ten at midwinter, roughly four hours of range. Fajr and Isha extend beyond that at both ends because both are twilight-based rather than tied to the sun's disc.

What does not follow the sun is the clock change. Egypt keeps summer time again, so the whole table steps forward an hour in spring and back in autumn on dates that have nothing to do with astronomy. It is the one point in the year where a printed monthly schedule can genuinely mislead.

The parameters, stated once

Fajr is calculated at 19.5 degrees of solar depression and Isha at 17.5, the General Authority of Survey figures used across Egypt. Applied to the coordinates above, that is the entire method. The Egypt prayer times hub explains where the convention came from and how far it spread.

Two readings of the afternoon shadow

Asr on this page enters when an upright object's shadow has grown by the object's own height on top of the shadow it cast at midday. That is the Shafi'i and Maliki threshold. The Hanafi school doubles the required growth and reaches Asr something like forty minutes to an hour later, depending on the time of year.

Egypt contains both schools, so hearing two different Asr calls in the same city is normal and is not evidence that either is miscalculated. The other four prayers are identical under both readings.

Fasting around continuous operations

The canal, the port and the refineries here run on rotas rather than on a nine-to-five day, and during Ramadan those rotas cut across both boundaries of the fast. The monthly table is the more useful view: Fajr and Maghrib both drift steadily through the month, so a shift plan built on the first night's figures will be out by several minutes by the last.

The interval between Maghrib and Isha also changes with the season, because Isha here is fixed by a twilight angle rather than by a set number of minutes after sunset. Anyone arranging taraweeh around a shift change should check the gap rather than assume it.

Friday at the head of the gulf

Jumu'ah takes the place of Dhuhr for those attending and is anchored to the Dhuhr entry above. How soon after the call a mosque begins is decided locally and varies widely between the older city and the newer industrial districts. Those praying at home perform Dhuhr at the listed time in the ordinary way.

Direction of prayer and further reading

Work out the direction from your own coordinates using the Qibla direction tool; a bearing that was correct in Cairo is not exactly the bearing here, and estimating from a room's alignment is unreliable in any case. Ramadan and Eid dates appear on the Hijri calendar, and an Arabic Suez schedule carries the same figures. Port Said prayer times cover the northern end of the canal and Ismailia prayer times the middle.