Current time in Cairo, Egypt right now

It is 3:30 pm in Cairo, Egypt 🇪🇬 right now, on Friday, September 25, 2026. The city keeps Africa/Cairo, which is EEST at UTC+3, so Cairo is 3 hours ahead of UTC, where it is 12:30 pm. The sun rose in Cairo at 6:45 am and sets at 6:48 pm, which is 12 hours 3 minutes of daylight.

What time is it in Cairo right now?

The time in Cairo, Egypt is 3:30 pm, 15:30 on a 24 hour clock, on Friday September 25, 2026. The reading above ticks from your own device against the Africa/Cairo rules, so it stays right through a clock change rather than drifting an hour out twice a year.

Cairo sits at 30.04 degrees north and 31.24 degrees east, in the subtropical belt and 3,341 km from the equator. Its clock is set to a zone whose nominal meridian is 45.0 degrees east, and the city itself is 13.8 degrees west of that line. Those 13.8 degrees are worth 55 minutes 3 seconds of sun time, which is most of why solar noon here lands at 12:47 pm rather than on the stroke of twelve.

Cairo time zone and UTC offset

The IANA zone for Cairo, Egypt is Africa/Cairo. Right now it is running at UTC+3 and the abbreviation in force is EEST. Cairo is on summer time at the moment, which is why the offset reads UTC+3 rather than the UTC+2 it keeps in winter.

Daylight hours in Cairo today

The sun rose in Cairo at 6:45 am and sets at 6:48 pm, which is 12 hours 3 minutes of daylight. Solar noon, the instant the sun stands at its highest over Cairo, is at 12:47 pm, which is 47 minutes after clock noon. The sun's declination today is -0.93 degrees, so at this latitude it reaches about 59.0 degrees above the horizon at its highest, to the south.

The full month by month picture for this city, the extremes of the year and every twilight band are on the sunrise and sunset page for Cairo, which works from the same coordinates.

Where Cairo is on the map

The marker sits at the coordinates this whole page is computed from, so the sun times, the distances and the solar noon above all belong to this exact point rather than to the wider metropolitan area.

Time difference between Cairo and major cities

Every row below is computed at this instant, so daylight saving on either side is already in it. A positive figure means that city's clock reads later than Cairo.

Best time to call Cairo

Treating a working day as 9am to 6pm on both sides, this is the window the two cities genuinely share. Some of these pairs have no shared working hour at all, which is worth knowing before a meeting is proposed.

Other cities in Egypt

We cover 75 cities in Egypt. These are the ones nearest to Cairo, with the time on their clocks right now.

Cities on Africa/Cairo time

75 of our cities keep Africa/Cairo, so every one of them reads 3:30 pm at this moment and changes its clocks on the same night as Cairo. Nearest first:

Moon phase over Cairo tonight

The moon is a full moon tonight, 14.4 days into its cycle and about 100% lit. The next full moon falls on September 26, 2026 at 7:48 pm Cairo time, and the next new moon on October 10, 2026 at 6:49 pm. Both are the same instant everywhere on Earth, printed here on the Cairo clock, which is why the calendar date can differ from the one a reader further east or west sees.

When the clocks change in Cairo

The next change is on Thursday, October 29, 2026, 34 days from now, when the clocks in Cairo go back 1 hour at 11:59 pm and the offset moves from UTC+3 to UTC+2.

Two things follow from that. Any standing call with Cairo shifts by an hour on that date unless the other side moves the same weekend, and every offset printed on this page is the offset for today rather than a fixed property of the city.

How far Cairo is from other cities

Great-circle distance, computed from the coordinates rather than road mileage. The nearest city we cover to Cairo is Giza, Egypt at 5 km, and the furthest is Tauranga, New Zealand at 16,689 km, which is 83% of the way to being exactly opposite.

The antipode of Cairo

Dig straight through the centre of the Earth from Cairo, Egypt and you come out at 30.04 degrees south, 148.76 degrees west. That point is in the South Pacific Ocean. The nearest city in our catalogue to it is Tauranga, New Zealand, 3,327 km away from the antipode itself, where the clock currently reads 12:30 am on Saturday.

The antipode is worked out by flipping the latitude across the equator and swinging the longitude a half turn: 30.04 degrees north becomes 30.04 degrees south, and 31.24 degrees east becomes 148.76 degrees west. Two thirds of the planet is ocean and the land is unevenly spread, so most antipodes are open water: Cairo is no exception. The local time at the antipode runs close to UTC-9, roughly twelve hours from Cairo, because a half turn of longitude is a half turn of the day.

Sunrise and sunset in Cairo

Today the sun rises in Cairo at 6:45 am and sets at 6:48 pm, giving 12 hours 3 minutes of daylight. The dedicated page for this city carries the month by month table, the longest and shortest days of 2026, the golden and blue hour bands at both ends of the day, and all three twilight stages: sunrise and sunset times in Cairo.

Sun and moon in Cairo today

The sun is up in Cairo for 12 hours 3 minutes today, from 6:45 am to 6:48 pm. The moon sets in Cairo at 5:18 am and comes up again at 6:02 pm. The next phase is the full moon on September 26, 2026. It is 98% lit at the moment, a full moon, filling out by about 3.0 percentage points a day.

Twilight is graded by how far the sun has dropped below the horizon. Civil twilight ends six degrees down, which is roughly the point at which you need a light to read outside. Nautical twilight ends at twelve degrees, when the horizon at sea stops being usable for a sextant sight. Astronomical twilight ends at eighteen degrees, which is full darkness for an observer.

Golden hour is the stretch with the sun between six degrees above the horizon and four below it, and blue hour runs from there down to six degrees below. Neither is literally an hour: each is as long as the sun takes to cross those few degrees, which is minutes near the equator and can be most of the evening at high latitude.

Moonrise and moonset are computed to the moment the moon's upper edge touches a flat horizon, allowing for refraction, for the size of the disc and for the moon's parallax, which together put the centre of the moon at 0.125 degrees above the horizon at the instant it rises. That is a different horizon from the one sunrise uses, and it is why a moonrise time cannot be worked out with a sunrise formula.

Prayer times in Cairo

Seven days from September 25, 2026, computed for Cairo, Egypt at 30.04 degrees north, 31.24 degrees east, on the clock of Africa/Cairo. The method is Muslim World League (Muslim World League, Mecca), which puts Fajr at 18.0 degrees below the horizon and Isha at 17.0 degrees. Asr uses the Standard shadow ratio of 1, which is the Shafi'i, Maliki and Hanbali position.

Dhuhr is solar noon at Cairo, Egypt, the instant the Sun crosses the local meridian, so it moves with longitude inside the time zone and with the equation of time through the year rather than sitting at a fixed clock reading. Sunrise and Maghrib are the standard refracted horizon, the same 0.833 degrees every almanac uses. Every figure above is computed from the Sun's position for this exact coordinate; none of it is copied from a table.

Different methods disagree, and that is expected rather than an error. Fajr under ISNA at 15 degrees comes later than Fajr under Egyptian General Authority of Survey at 19.5 degrees, by twenty minutes or more depending on latitude and season. Follow whichever your local mosque follows.

Qibla direction from Cairo

From Cairo, Egypt the qibla is 136.1 degrees on a true compass, which is southeast, or 43.9 degrees west of due south. The Kaaba is 1,287 km away, 800 miles, measured over the surface of the Earth.

That figure is the initial bearing of the great circle from Cairo, Egypt to 21.4225 degrees north, 39.8262 degrees east, which is the Kaaba inside Masjid al-Haram.

The bearing is measured from true north, not magnetic north. A magnetic compass points at the magnetic pole, and the difference between the two can be anything from nothing to more than twenty degrees depending where you are, so check your compass reading against magnetic declination for Cairo, Egypt before you use it. A phone compass set to true north, or the shadow of a vertical stick at local solar noon, avoids the problem entirely.

Cairo time now: common questions

What time is it in Cairo, Egypt right now?

3:30 pm on Friday September 25, 2026. Cairo runs on EEST, UTC+3.

What time zone is Cairo in?

Africa/Cairo, currently EEST at UTC+3. 75 of the cities on this site keep that zone.

What is the UTC offset for Cairo?

UTC+3 at this instant. It alternates between UTC+2 and UTC+3 across the year.

Does Cairo observe daylight saving time?

Yes. The next change is October 29, 2026, when the clocks go back.

How many hours ahead or behind is Cairo of New York?

Cairo is 7 hours ahead of New York, where it is 8:30 am right now.

What time does the sun set in Cairo today?

6:48 pm, after a sunrise at 6:45 am and 12 hours 3 minutes of daylight.

What is on the exact opposite side of the Earth from Cairo?

30.04 degrees south, 148.76 degrees west, in the South Pacific Ocean.

When is the best time to call Cairo from London?

Between 11:00 am and 6:00 pm in Cairo, which is 9:00 am to 4:00 pm in London.

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