SalahNowSwitzerland prayer times
No Swiss institution publishes a national prayer timetable. This page explains which table the app serves, and why a mountain horizon changes what you actually see.
Matches the Diyanet timetable · 0-minute difference
Scope of this claim
For the selected settlement and day in the timetable Diyanet publishes for Switzerland, with personal minute adjustments set to zero.
Last verified: September 22, 2026
Prayer times in major cities
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 Swiss settlements; the calculation fallback uses Fajr 18° / Isha 17°.
- Asr
- The standard shadow ratio of one is the default for Switzerland; the Hanafi afternoon time can be selected in the app.
- Precaution minutes
- None. The app adds no precaution minutes of its own.
- Time zone
- Switzerland follows the European daylight saving schedule. The country spans about five degrees of longitude, so the sun sets roughly twelve minutes later in Geneva than in St. Gallen on the same evening.
- Hijri calendar and crescent
- Ramadan and the two Eids are announced by individual mosques and associations rather than nationally, and dates can differ by a day between communities. The Hijri date in the app is calculated.
FIDS is the national umbrella body for Islamic organisations in Switzerland but publishes no prayer timetable; times are set mosque by mosque.
Switzerland prayer times
A country with no timetable of its own
Switzerland has roughly four hundred thousand Muslims and a well-organised umbrella body in FIDS, but no Swiss institution publishes prayer times. Mosques print calendars from a variety of sources: Turkish-origin congregations generally use the Diyanet table, Balkan congregations often use the calendar of the Islamic Community of Bosnia or Kosovo, and Arab-origin mosques use calendars computed with other angles. The app serves the Diyanet table for Swiss cities, which is both the most widely printed and the one that could be verified settlement by settlement.
Why a printed time and a visible sunset differ in the Alps
Every prayer timetable in the world is calculated for a flat horizon at the given coordinates. In most countries that assumption is close enough to be invisible. In an Alpine valley it is not. In Brig, Chur or Sion the sun disappears behind a ridge long before it reaches the astronomical horizon, and in deep winter it may clear the ridge only for a few hours around noon. The printed maghrib is the astronomically correct time, and it is the time on which the Swiss calendars agree, but it can arrive well after the valley has gone dark. This is not an error in any table; it is the difference between a mathematical horizon and the one you can see, and it is the single most common reason Swiss users think their app is wrong.
Language regions, not time regions
Switzerland’s cultural divisions do not translate into timetable divisions. Geneva and Lausanne in the French-speaking west, Zurich and Basel in the German-speaking north, and Lugano in Italian-speaking Ticino all sit inside one time zone and within a few minutes of each other astronomically. What varies between them is not the method but the position: Geneva is about two degrees west of St. Gallen, which is worth roughly ten minutes at sunset. Choose the listed city nearest you rather than the largest one in your language region.
What the claim covers
The claim is that for a Swiss settlement and day in the published Diyanet table, the six times the app shows are identical to that table, with no minutes added. Each city here was checked against the institution’s own page and all six times matched in all thirty cities. It is not a claim that Diyanet is a Swiss authority, that FIDS endorses the times, or that your local mosque uses the same calendar.
Questions
Is there an official Swiss prayer timetable?
The sun sets behind the mountain long before the printed maghrib — which is right?
Do the clocks change in Switzerland?
Keep Switzerland prayer times in your pocket
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