Sahaar › Isha time

Isha time: what it is and how it is calculated

Published 2 November 2026 · Sahaar requires iOS 26 or later

What is Isha time?

Sahaar defines Isha as the moment the sun sets to a given angle below the horizon, when evening twilight ends. With an interval method it is simply a number of minutes after Maghrib. Isha’s window runs until the next Fajr, past midnight.

Which angle or interval does each method use?

A larger angle gives a later Isha. The Türkiye method uses 16.1° outside Türkiye, which follows Diyanet’s timetables for cities abroad more closely than 17°, and adds a few minutes of temkin everywhere.

Isha in Ramadan with Umm al-Qura

Umm al-Qura sets Isha 90 minutes after Maghrib for most of the year and 120 minutes in Ramadan. Sahaar applies the 120 minutes and reads the month from the Umm al-Qura calendar itself, not from the Hijri calendar you chose in Settings. Bahrain is suggested the Qatar method, which keeps 90 minutes all year.

Why does Isha differ between apps?

• The angle or interval. 12°, 15°, 17°, 18° or 90 minutes are all in use.
• The high-latitude rule. In summer it decides Isha, not the angle.
• Ramadan. An app that skips the Umm al-Qura Ramadan rule shows Isha half an hour early for the month.
• Location and clock. As for every other prayer.

More in Why prayer times differ between apps.

What happens at high latitude?

On summer nights far from the equator, evening twilight may last until morning, so there is no moment when the sun reaches the Isha angle. With a plain middle-of-the-night rule, Isha and the next Fajr can then fall at the same minute: in Hamburg on 21 June both come out at 01:22. That is why Sahaar checks the gap between them.

Three rules are in common use:

• Middle of the night. Fajr is never earlier than the midpoint between Maghrib and sunrise, and Isha never later than it.
• One seventh of the night. Fajr is never earlier than the start of the last seventh of the night, and Isha never later than the end of the first seventh.
• Angle-based. The night is divided in proportion to the angle: an 18° Fajr is never earlier than the last 18/60 of the night.

What Sahaar does depends on the method and the place, and there is no separate setting for it:

• Above 48.5°, Sahaar suggests the middle-of-the-night rule for most countries. On nights when that rule would leave less than 20 minutes between Isha and the next Fajr, or would push Fajr onto the previous calendar day, Sahaar switches to the angle-based rule for that day.
• With the Türkiye method outside Türkiye, between 45° and 62° north, the times come from Diyanet’s own district timetable when Sahaar has one within 20 km. Without one, summer Fajr and Isha come from a model built from those timetables. Further north, the one-seventh rule applies on nights when the angle is not reached.
• In the United Kingdom Sahaar suggests the Moonsighting Committee method, which adjusts Fajr and Isha by season and uses one seventh of the night above 55°.

Isha times in your city

City pages show this month’s Isha with the calculation method named on the page: Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dublin, London, Toronto, New York City. Every country Sahaar covers is listed on Prayer times by country.

More on prayer times

• Fajr time explained
• Dhuhr time explained
• Asr time explained
• Maghrib time explained
• How many rak‘ahs is each prayer?
• Why prayer times differ between apps