How to Check If Your Prayer Times Are Accurate

If your app says Maghrib is 6:42 and your mosque calls the adhan at 6:47, neither is necessarily wrong. Prayer times combine an objective astronomical calculation with a set of human conventions, and almost every disagreement you'll encounter comes from the conventions — not the astronomy.

Here's how to check any prayer timetable, including ours, and work out which part of it you should trust.

Start with the part that can't be argued with

Sunrise and sunset are objective events. They don't depend on which school you follow or which authority your country recognises. That makes them the perfect test.

Take your app's sunrise time and compare it against any independent astronomical source — a weather service, your phone's built-in weather app, or a printed almanac for your city. They should agree within one to two minutes.

If sunrise matches, the underlying solar model is sound, and any disagreement in Fajr or Isha is a matter of convention, not a bug. If sunrise is off by more than a few minutes, something is genuinely wrong — usually the location.

The five real causes of disagreement

1. Calculation method (by far the most common)

Fajr and Isha are defined by how far the sun sits below the horizon, and different authorities set that angle differently:

| Authority | Fajr | Isha | |---|---|---| | Muslim World League | 18° | 17° | | ISNA (North America) | 15° | 15° | | Umm al-Qura (Saudi Arabia) | 18.5° | 90 min after Maghrib | | Karachi (South Asia) | 18° | 18° | | Egyptian Authority | 19.5° | 17.5° |

Three degrees of difference can move Fajr by 10–20 minutes depending on your latitude and season. This single setting explains most app-vs-mosque gaps. Check which method your app is using — ours is stated on every page — and switch it to the one your local community follows.

2. Asr and the shadow ratio

Asr begins when an object's shadow equals its own length plus its noon shadow (Shafi'i, Maliki, Hanbali) — or twice its length (Hanafi). This isn't an error in either direction; it's a genuine difference between schools, and it typically shifts Asr by 30–60 minutes. If your Asr looks dramatically "late," you're probably looking at a Hanafi calculation.

3. Precautionary minutes

Many mosques deliberately add a few minutes to Fajr and Maghrib as a safety margin — praying slightly after the calculated moment rather than risking slightly before. Your app shows the astronomical instant; the mosque shows a deliberately cautious version. Both are working correctly.

4. Location precision

A city's times are computed for one reference coordinate. In a large metropolitan area, actual sunset can differ by a minute or two between the eastern and western edges. Worse, if your app resolved your location by IP address, it may have placed you in a different city entirely — check the city name it's showing before blaming the calculation.

5. Daylight saving transitions

On the weekend a country shifts its clocks, apps that cache times or use a stale timezone database can be an hour out for a day. If everything is suddenly exactly 60 minutes wrong, this is almost always why.

A five-minute accuracy check

1. Confirm the location. Does the app show your actual city, not a neighbouring one?
2. Compare sunrise against an independent source. Within two minutes? The solar model is fine.
3. Check the method the app is using and compare it to what your local mosque or national authority follows.
4. Check the Asr convention — Hanafi or standard — against your own school.
5. Compare Maghrib to your mosque. A gap of 2–5 minutes is almost certainly precautionary minutes, not an error.

If all five check out and there's still a large discrepancy, the app has a genuine problem.

Verifying the Qibla without any technology

There's an elegant test for Qibla accuracy that needs no compass at all. Twice a year — around 27–28 May and 15–16 July, at 12:18 pm Makkah time — the sun passes directly overhead the Kaaba. At that exact moment, anywhere on Earth where the sun is visible, your shadow points directly away from the Qibla.

Stand a vertical object in the sun at that instant and mark the shadow. The line from the shadow's tip back to the object points at Makkah, with no magnetic declination to correct for. Mosque committees have used this method for centuries, and it still outperforms a phone compass indoors, where metal and electronics distort magnetic readings. Our guide to Qibla calculation explains the underlying geometry.

What "accurate" actually means

It's worth being precise about the claim any prayer app can honestly make.

The astronomical calculation is accurate to within about a minute anywhere on Earth. That part is settled science — the sun's position is one of the best-understood quantities in physics.

The convention — which twilight angle, which shadow ratio, how many precautionary minutes — is a matter of jurisprudence and local practice, not calculation. No app can be "more accurate" than another on this axis; it can only be better matched to your community.

So when an app claims to be the most accurate, treat it with mild scepticism. The honest claim is: correct astronomy, transparent conventions, and the ability to match your local practice. That's what our methodology page sets out in full, including where we know we're imprecise.

When to follow your mosque instead

If your local mosque's timetable differs from any app — including this one — follow the mosque. Praying in congregation with your community carries weight that a two-minute calculation difference does not, and your mosque may be applying a local convention that no general-purpose calculator knows about.

Apps are best used for the situations mosques can't cover: travelling, working somewhere unfamiliar, checking tomorrow's Fajr before you sleep, or living somewhere without a nearby masjid. For everything else, the timetable on the wall wins.

If you find an error

If a time on this site doesn't match your local authority and you've worked through the checks above, tell us — the city, the expected time, and the source. Genuine location or method-assignment errors do occur across a database of this size, and specific reports are the only reliable way to find them.