SalahNowAustralia prayer times
No institution publishes a national prayer timetable for Australia. This page explains the calculation the app uses instead, what the country’s seven time zones do to a printed timetable, and why two mosques in the same suburb can disagree about fajr.
Calculated · Muslim World League
How these times are calculated
There is no published national prayer timetable for Australia. Mosques and Islamic societies print their own, and the app calculates instead of copying a table: it uses the Muslim World League convention, fajr at 18 degrees and isha at 17, which is the method most widely carried by Australian community timetables. Every row on a city page says that its time is calculated. A timetable that uses different angles, the other Asr shadow ratio or added precaution minutes prints different times. Australian mosques do not all use the same convention, so a gap between this page and your local board is expected rather than an error.
Cities
Cities are listed by population. A city that is missing has no entry in the prayer-times database yet.
Calculation and source
- Institution
- No published national timetable
- Method
- Muslim World League
- Fajr 18°, Isha 17° — a calculation, not a published table.
- Asr
- The app’s default Asr for Australia is the shadow ratio of one, which is what most Australian community timetables print; congregations following the Hanafi ratio of two can change the setting in the app without affecting the other five times.
- Precaution minutes
- None. The app adds no precaution minutes of its own; many Australian mosque boards do add a few.
- Time zone
- Australia is the hardest country in this directory to print a single timetable for. New South Wales, Victoria, the ACT, South Australia and Tasmania move to daylight saving in early October and back in early April; Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory never do. South Australia and the Northern Territory also run half an hour off their neighbours. From October to April, Brisbane and Sydney share a latitude band but not a clock. Each city page here reads that city’s own zone, so the printed times are already correct for the city you picked — and a timetable brought from another state will not be.
- Hijri calendar and crescent
- ANIC announces the start of Ramadan and the two Eids for Australia, and most mosques follow it, though some communities follow the announcement of their country of origin instead. The Hijri date shown in the app is calculated and may fall a day either side of the announcement.
ANIC is the national body of imams and issues the Ramadan and Eid announcements that most Australian mosques follow. It does not publish a daily national prayer timetable, and neither does any federal or state body.
Australia prayer times
A calculation, not a national table
Australia has no ministry of religious affairs and no body that prints prayer times for the country. Islamic life here is organised through state councils, individual mosques and the Australian National Imams Council, and while ANIC speaks for the imams on the Hijri calendar, it does not issue a daily timetable that every mosque prints. That is why the pages in this directory name a calculation rather than an institution. Each city page states the method on the page and labels every row with where it came from, so you can see at a glance that the number is computed from the sun’s position at that city’s coordinates rather than copied from a table somebody published.
Distance is the whole story here
Australia spans roughly forty degrees of longitude and thirty of latitude, and both ends of that matter. East to west, the sun sets in Perth about two hours after it sets in Sydney by solar time, which is why the country needs several clocks in the first place. North to south, Darwin sits deep in the tropics where the length of the day barely changes through the year and fajr and isha stay close to the horizon’s schedule, while Hobart is far enough south that the summer night is short and the winter afternoon is over early. A timetable that works in Brisbane is not merely a few minutes out in Melbourne; in June it can be wrong by a quarter of an hour at asr and more at isha. This is the practical reason the app calculates per city instead of printing a national card.
Why two mosques in the same suburb disagree
Almost all of the disagreement in Australian timetables is about fajr and isha, because those two depend on how far the sun has to be below the horizon before the sky is treated as changed. Timetables circulating in Australian communities use 18 degrees, 15 degrees, or an angle inherited from the country the congregation came from, and in the southern summer that spread can put the start of the fast twenty minutes apart on the same street. A mosque may also hold the isha adhan back for the congregation, add a minute or two of caution to fajr, or print the Hanafi afternoon where its neighbour prints the standard one. Noon, sunrise and sunset, by contrast, are astronomical events: if two Australian calendars disagree about dhuhr by more than a minute, the difference is in the coordinates, not the convention.
What each city page shows
Every city page carries today’s six times for that city’s own coordinates, the Hijri date, and a thirty-day table in which each row is labelled with its source. Because no Australian institution’s table is integrated, those labels read as calculated, which is the honest answer rather than a placeholder. The cities are listed by population and the list can grow: if your town is missing it is because the prayer-times database has no entry for it yet, not because it was left out. If you live well outside a listed city — in the Pilbara, on the Darling Downs, or anywhere the nearest listed city is an hour’s drive away — the app’s own location will serve you better than any city page can.
Questions
Which calculation method does the app use for Australia?
Do the times change when daylight saving starts?
Why is my mosque’s fajr ten minutes earlier than this page?
Keep Australia prayer times in your pocket
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