Prayer Times in United Kingdom — All Cities

The one country here where the standard model runs out

Most prayer times are a straightforward astronomical result. Dhuhr follows the sun crossing the meridian, Maghrib follows sunset, and sunrise is sunrise. Fajr and Isha are different: they are defined by how far the sun has sunk below the horizon, 18 degrees for Fajr and 17 for Isha under the Muslim World League convention used for the United Kingdom.

That definition assumes the sun actually gets that far down. Above roughly 48 degrees of latitude there are weeks in summer when it does not. Every British city we publish lies above 51 degrees, from Bristol, Cardiff and London in the south to Glasgow and Edinburgh at nearly 56, so this affects the whole country. It is the most important thing to understand about British prayer times, and it is why a British timetable involves considered judgement in a way a timetable for Karachi or Lagos does not.

What happens in June and July

Through late spring the nights shorten from both ends. The gap between Isha and Fajr narrows week by week until, at some point in May or early June depending on how far north you are, it closes altogether. From then until July or August the sun never descends far enough below the horizon for astronomical night to occur at all, and a faint glow stays in the northern sky through the small hours.

In those weeks the angle calculation has no solution. There is no moment at which the sun is 17 degrees down, so there is no Isha to compute, and none at which it is 18 degrees down, so there is no Fajr. The period is shortest in the south and longest in the north: London and Bristol are affected for a matter of weeks around midsummer, while Glasgow and Edinburgh, four and a half degrees further north, lose astronomical night for a considerably longer stretch. During those weeks the Fajr and Isha figures on our British pages come from a recognised approximation rather than from the sun, and should be read as estimates.

Three ways British mosques resolve it

Because the astronomy gives no answer, the answer comes from jurisprudence, and British mosques and Islamic councils do not all reach the same one. Three approaches are in common use.

The first is nearest latitude, sometimes called aqrab al-bilad: take the times from the nearest latitude at which the sign still occurs, commonly around 48 degrees, and apply them locally. The second divides the night, splitting the period from sunset to sunrise in half and using the midpoint to close the Isha window and open Fajr. The third divides it into seven, placing Isha at the end of the first seventh and Fajr at the start of the last, which gives a later Isha and an earlier Fajr than halving does. Each has scholarly backing and each is followed somewhere in Britain, which is why two mosques in one city can publish Fajr times an hour apart in midsummer. We take no position between them. If you are praying in Britain in June or July, the ruling of your own mosque or Islamic council should override the figure here.

British Summer Time and the two weekends that move everything

Unlike most of the countries covered on this site, the United Kingdom changes its clocks twice a year, going forward on the last Sunday of March and back on the last Sunday of October. The sun does nothing unusual on those weekends, but every printed time jumps by an hour.

Our times are generated from each city's timezone identifier, so the change is applied automatically on the correct date. A printed timetable spanning either changeover therefore has to state which clock it uses, and one carried over from a previous year should be checked. It also gives the British year two shapes: through the summer, when the clock runs an hour ahead, the whole timetable reads late in the evening, which is part of why Isha falls so far into the night.

Asr, and why many British timetables print two

British congregations are drawn from everywhere, and the largest single strand traces to South Asia, where the Hanafi school predominates. Mosques in Bradford, Birmingham, Leicester and much of Greater Manchester and Yorkshire commonly serve Hanafi congregations, while others serve Arab, Somali, Turkish and Kurdish communities. Many British mosques accordingly print two Asr times on one timetable rather than choosing between them.

The two positions are these. The Shafi'i, Maliki and Hanbali schools open the Asr window once a vertical object throws a shadow equal to its own length, added to the shadow it cast at solar noon. The Hanafi school waits until that shadow has doubled. The figure here uses the first. At British latitudes the interval between them is not the forty to sixty minutes typical of the tropics: because the summer sun descends so slowly through the late afternoon, the gap can stretch beyond an hour in June, while in the short low days of December it shrinks to twenty minutes or so. If your mosque prints an Asr Hanafi time, that later figure is yours.

Ramadan, and the twelve cities we publish

A British Ramadan falling in summer is among the longest fasts anywhere, with Fajr very early and Maghrib very late, and it runs noticeably longer in Glasgow and Edinburgh than in Bristol or London. A winter Ramadan is among the shortest. If the month falls near midsummer, the estimate problem above applies directly to the close of suhoor, and your mosque or Islamic council is the authority to follow.

The cities here are London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leicester, Bradford, Leeds, Glasgow, Sheffield, Liverpool, Bristol, Cardiff and Edinburgh. Leeds and Bradford run within a minute of each other; Glasgow and Bristol are genuinely different cases in both latitude and longitude. Each page carries today's five prayer times, sunrise, a live countdown and a full monthly calendar, with the convention named beneath the table.