What time does Fajr end?

Fajr is the prayer people most want a clock time for, and it is the one prayer that refuses to give you one. The answer to when it ends is a single word, sunrise, but the useful version of that answer needs a bit more than a word, because both ends of the window move daily and the start of it is easy to get wrong.

The window: true dawn to sunrise

Fajr begins at subh sadiq, true dawn, and ends the moment the upper edge of the sun breaks the horizon. Everything between those two points is the valid time for the prayer. Nothing before true dawn counts, and nothing after sunrise is on time.

In most inhabited places that window runs somewhere between roughly an hour and an hour and a half, widening as you move away from the equator and through the summer months. It is the shortest of the five prayer windows, which is part of why Fajr is the prayer most often missed.

True dawn and false dawn

Before true dawn there is an earlier glow, called subh kadhib or false dawn. Telling them apart matters, because a prayer offered at false dawn is not valid and has to be prayed again.

• False dawn appears as a narrow column of light rising upward from the horizon, like a tail. It fades, and darkness returns.
• True dawn appears as a whiteness spreading sideways along the horizon. It does not recede. Once it is there, it only grows until sunrise.

This is the distinction behind the description in the Qur'an of the white thread becoming clear from the black thread of dawn, which also marks the start of the fast. In practice almost nobody observes the horizon directly any more, which is where calculation comes in.

How apps work out Fajr, and why they disagree

Because true dawn is a light level rather than a position of the sun, timetables estimate it using how far the sun sits below the horizon. Different bodies settled on different angles: some use 15 degrees, others 18, others 18.5 or 19.5. On the same morning in the same city those can be twenty minutes or more apart.

None of this is a defect, it is the nature of estimating an observed phenomenon. The practical advice is to use whatever convention your local mosque uses, so you are praying in step with the community around you rather than ahead of it. At very high latitudes, where the sun never drops far enough below the horizon in summer for true dawn to occur at all, local scholars set the timings by a separate rule, so follow your local authority rather than a default setting.

The disliked moment at sunrise

There is a short prohibited stretch beginning as the sun starts to rise and lasting until it has climbed clear of the horizon. Voluntary prayer is not offered during it. This is why timetables usually print a sunrise time and treat it as a hard stop for Fajr rather than a soft one.

The exception people most need is this: if you begin Fajr before sunrise and the sun comes up while you are still praying, your prayer counts. Whoever catches one rakah of the dawn prayer before sunrise has caught the prayer. So if you wake with five minutes left, do not spend them deciding. Make wudu, drop the two sunnah rakahs, and pray the two obligatory ones.

If you wake up after sunrise

Pray it. Not later in the day, not at Dhuhr, but as soon as you realise. The Prophet ﷺ said that whoever sleeps through a prayer or forgets it should pray it when they remember it, and that there is no expiation for it other than that. It is reported in Sahih Muslim that he and his companions once slept past Fajr while travelling and prayed it after moving on from that spot, which is the clearest possible proof that sleeping through a prayer is not a catastrophe to be agonised over.

A few practical notes that follow from this:

• Pray it in full. A made up Fajr is still two rakahs, prayed the normal way.
• Do not skip it out of embarrassment. The prayer is owed until it is prayed, and the longer it is left the heavier it feels.
• Fix the cause, not the guilt. Almost every missed Fajr traces back to what time you went to sleep. Moving your bedtime does more than moving your alarm.
• Go to sleep already in wudu if you find the cold start is what stops you. It removes one step from the hardest moment of the day. If you are unsure whether yours survives the night, see what breaks your wudu.

Early or late within the window?

The window is valid from end to end, but the schools differ on which part of it is best. This is a genuine, long documented difference, not a modern dispute.

The short version

Fajr ends at sunrise and starts at true dawn, both of which move every day, so use a timetable rather than a memorised time. Catching a single rakah before the sun appears means you caught the prayer. Waking up late means you pray it immediately, not that you lost it. If you are still learning the prayer itself, work through how to pray salah step by step, and for the count of rakahs in Fajr and everything else see how many rakahs is each prayer.