SalahNowUnited States prayer times
No institution publishes a national prayer timetable for the United States. This page explains the calculation the app uses instead, why American mosques print different times, and which mosque timetable you can select directly.
Calculated · ISNA / North America
How these times are calculated
There is no published national prayer timetable in the United States. The Fiqh Council of North America declares a calculation method rather than a table, and the app calculates with the 15°/15° convention published as the ISNA method, which is the one most widely printed in North American calendars. Every row on a city page says that its time is calculated. Calendars that use a different angle, the other Asr shadow ratio, a moonsighting-based convention or added precaution minutes print different times. Mosques in the United States do not all use the same method, so a difference 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
- ISNA / North America
- Fajr 15°, Isha 15° — a calculation, not a published table.
- Asr
- These pages, and the app by default, calculate Asr for the United States with the Hanafi shadow ratio of two. American mosque calendars are split between the standard Asr (a shadow ratio of one) and the Hanafi Asr, and most print only one of them, so check which one your mosque uses. In the app, you can switch to the standard Asr with a single setting (School of Thought); it moves only the afternoon prayer and leaves the other five times unchanged. The setting affects the app only: the pages on this site always show the Hanafi Asr.
- Precaution minutes
- None. The app adds no precaution minutes of its own; many American mosque boards do add some.
- Time zone
- Most of the country moves to daylight saving time on the second Sunday in March and back on the first Sunday in November. Arizona outside the Navajo Nation and Hawaii do not, so a timetable that is correct in Phoenix in July is an hour out in Denver. The app reads the time zone of the selected city, so this is handled per city rather than per state.
- Hijri calendar and crescent
- Ramadan and the two Eids are announced separately by different councils and mosque networks. Some follow the Fiqh Council’s calculated calendar, others follow local or global sighting, and start dates can differ by a day within one city. The Hijri date shown in the app is calculated and may not match your mosque’s announcement.
The Fiqh Council issues calculation guidance for North America; it does not publish a national prayer timetable, and no federal or community body does.
Institutional timetable
United States prayer times
A method, not a timetable
American Muslim life is organised around mosques and regional councils rather than a ministry, and nothing in the United States plays the role that the Presidency of Religious Affairs plays in Türkiye or JAKIM plays in Malaysia. The Fiqh Council of North America issues guidance on how fajr and isha should be calculated, and calendars printed by ISNA and by thousands of mosques follow that guidance, but no one publishes a table that the country as a whole uses. That is why the pages below describe a calculation and name it, instead of naming an institution and its printed table.
Why two mosques in the same city print different times
The disagreement is almost entirely about the two ends of the night. Fajr and isha depend on how far the sun must be below the horizon before the sky is considered to have changed, and American calendars use 15 degrees, 18 degrees or a moonsighting-based rule that varies through the year. A mosque may also add a few precaution minutes to fajr, delay the isha adhan for the congregation’s convenience, or print the Hanafi Asr where its neighbour prints the standard one. Noon and sunset, by contrast, are astronomical events and barely differ at all — if two calendars disagree about dhuhr by more than a minute, one of them has a coordinate problem, not a convention problem.
Coordinates matter more in American cities than in European ones
American metropolitan areas are large. Greater Houston spans more than half a degree of longitude, and the difference between downtown and the outer suburbs is a couple of minutes at every prayer; across the Los Angeles basin it is more. City pages here use the coordinates of the city itself, which is the right reference for a published page, but if you live an hour out of town the app’s own location will serve you better than a city page will. The same applies near a time-zone boundary, where two towns twenty miles apart print times an hour apart on the clock while the sun does the same thing in both.
Selecting a mosque timetable instead
Where a mosque publishes its own annual timetable, the app can serve that table directly instead of calculating. The SALAM Islamic Center is available as an explicit choice: selecting it replaces the calculation with the centre’s own published table, with no minutes added, so the app and the centre’s printed calendar agree for the dates the centre published. That claim is deliberately narrow: it holds while the selected published timetable is used, and it is not extended to places the centre did not publish for.
Questions
Which calculation method does the app use for the United States?
Why does my local mosque’s fajr differ by ten minutes?
Are the times different in Arizona in the summer?
Keep United States prayer times in your pocket
Download SalahNow for adhan reminders, home-screen widgets and the monthly timetable.
