How Sehri and Iftar Times Are Worked Out in Ramadan

Every Ramadan the same small confusion surfaces: two timetables for the same city, printed by two different mosques or apps, disagree by a few minutes on when sehri ends. It's enough to make anyone anxious about whether they closed their pre-dawn meal a minute too late. The reassuring truth is that the disagreement is real, small, and completely explainable — it comes from *how* the times are calculated, not from anyone being wrong. This guide explains what the two moments are anchored to and why the minutes wander.

What sehri and iftar are actually anchored to

The fast has two edges, and each is tied to a daily prayer time, not to a clock time someone chose:

• Sehri (suhoor) ends at the start of Fajr — the moment of true dawn, when the first light appears along the horizon. From this point, eating and drinking stop.
• Iftar begins at Maghrib — the moment of sunset, when the sun's disc has fully dropped below the horizon. This is when the fast is opened.

So a Ramadan timetable is really just the Fajr and Maghrib columns of the daily prayer schedule, relabelled for fasting. That's the key insight: anything that shifts Fajr or Maghrib shifts your fasting times, and those two prayer times are astronomical events that depend entirely on where you are and how you define dawn.

Why your city — and even your neighbourhood — matters

Sunset and dawn happen at different clock times as you move across the earth. Even within a single country, a city in the west sees the sun set several minutes later than a city in the east. This is why a national timetable is only ever approximate, and why a timetable printed for Lahore will be a few minutes off for Karachi or Peshawar.

Why two honest timetables still disagree

Maghrib (iftar) is the easy one — sunset is a sharply defined astronomical moment, so timetables rarely differ by more than a minute, usually just from rounding. The disagreement is almost always about Fajr (sehri), and it comes down to how you define "dawn." Dawn isn't a single instant; it's the sun climbing toward the horizon from below, and different scholarly conventions fix the moment at a slightly different sun angle:

1. 1The Fajr angle. Calculation methods place true dawn when the sun is a set number of degrees below the horizon — commonly around 18°, but several established methods use 15° to 19.5°. A larger angle means an earlier Fajr, and therefore an earlier end to sehri.
2. 2The calculation authority. Bodies like the University of Islamic Sciences (Karachi), the Muslim World League, ISNA, Umm al-Qura, and others each adopt particular angles. Two mosques following two authorities will print two slightly different sehri times — both internally consistent.
3. 3Precautionary margins. Some timetables deliberately end sehri a few minutes *before* the calculated Fajr as a safety buffer, which widens the gap between schedules further.

Getting a schedule you can trust

To build a schedule for the whole month at your location, use the sehri & iftar Ramadan schedule — it derives the daily fasting edges from Fajr and Maghrib for your city. If you want the full five daily prayers alongside them (and the ability to see which calculation method you're using), the salah times calculator gives you the complete daily picture. And to line the fasting days up against the Islamic month itself, the Hijri date today tool shows where you are in Ramadan.

The bottom line

Sehri ends at Fajr, iftar begins at Maghrib, and both are astronomical events computed for your location — not arbitrary clock times. Iftar timetables barely differ because sunset is precise; sehri times vary a little because "dawn" is set by a chosen sun-angle that different authorities define differently. Use a schedule computed for your city, follow one trusted convention consistently, and the minute-level anxiety disappears.