SalahNowFrance prayer times
France has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe and three widely used prayer conventions that disagree. The times shown come from the timetable Diyanet publishes for France; this page explains the disagreement rather than pretending it away.
Matches the Diyanet timetable · 0-minute difference
Scope of this claim
For the selected settlement and day in the timetable Diyanet publishes for France, with personal minute adjustments set to zero.
Last verified: September 22, 2026
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 national authority
- Method
- Diyanet
- The timetable Diyanet publishes for French settlements (fajr 18° / isha 17° when calculated). One of at least three conventions in use in France, not a French national standard.
- Asr
- The standard shadow ratio of one is the default for France, following the Grande Mosquée de Paris, which prints the shadow-one afternoon; the Hanafi time remains available as a setting.
- Precaution minutes
- None. The app adds no precaution minutes of its own.
- Time zone
- France follows the European daylight saving schedule. Metropolitan France sits mostly west of the meridian its time zone implies, so the clock runs ahead of the sun — around forty-five minutes in Brest, less in Strasbourg — and evening prayers fall late by the clock everywhere in the country.
- Hijri calendar and crescent
- The start of Ramadan is discussed at the annual nuit du doute convened by the Grande Mosquée de Paris, but federations do not always follow the outcome and some mosques announce independently or follow Morocco or Saudi Arabia. Start dates can differ by a day within one city.
The Grande Mosquée de Paris publishes a prayer timetable for Paris and is widely referenced, but it holds no monopoly: several federations publish competing calendars and no body speaks for all French mosques.
Institutional timetable
France prayer times
Twelve, fifteen or eighteen degrees
The question that divides French prayer calendars is how far below the horizon the sun must be at dawn and dusk. The Grande Mosquée de Paris publishes a twelve-degree convention, which produces a notably later fajr and an earlier isha than most European tables. Other federations print fifteen degrees. Turkish-origin mosques follow the eighteen-degree table used across much of Europe. At Paris’s latitude in June those conventions put fajr more than half an hour apart, and an observer in a mixed neighbourhood can hear the dawn adhan from two mosques at noticeably different times. None of the three is a mistake; France simply never settled on one, and no body has the authority to settle it.
What the match claim covers
Several countries in this directory carry a claim that the times shown are identical to a published table. In France that table is the one Diyanet publishes for French settlements: when it is selected in the app, the times shown match it with a 0-minute difference, and every row names it as the source. The fifteen French cities listed below were checked line by line against Diyanet’s own pages and all six times matched in all fifteen. Diyanet is not a French authority, and the claim says nothing about other conventions: if your mosque follows the Paris convention, the app’s fajr will be earlier than the board in your mosque, consistently and by a predictable amount, and that gap is a convention gap rather than an error in either table.
A long country on one clock
Metropolitan France stretches from about 5 degrees west at Brest to 8 degrees east at Strasbourg, and all of it keeps Central European Time. The result is a clock that runs well ahead of the sun, most dramatically in Brittany, where solar noon falls close to 13:45 in summer. Sunset differs by around forty minutes between the Atlantic and Alsatian ends of the country on the same evening, which is why a national list of times would be useless and city pages are necessary. Marseille and Nice, in the south, have noticeably shorter summer evenings than Lille.
Selecting a mosque timetable instead
Where a French mosque publishes its own annual timetable, the app can serve it directly. The Mosquée Tariq ibn Ziyad des Mureaux publishes an annual timetable, and selecting it in the app replaces the Diyanet table with that mosque’s own printed values, with no minutes added. The claim that accompanies that choice refers to that mosque’s timetable.
Questions
Why is the app’s fajr earlier than the Grande Mosquée de Paris?
Is there an official French prayer timetable?
Can I follow my own mosque’s calendar in the app?
Keep France prayer times in your pocket
Download SalahNow for adhan reminders, home-screen widgets and the monthly timetable.
