Prayer Times in Austria

Muslims and mosques in Austria

Austria no longer asks about religion in its register-based census, so recent numbers are estimates. An estimate for 2021 attributed to Statistics Austria puts the number of Muslims at 745,608, or 8.3% of the population, up from 22,267 in 1971, 338,988 in 2001 and 570,876 in 2011. Islam is the country's second-largest religion after Christianity. About 216,345 of Austria's Muslims, 38%, live in Vienna. Among Muslims with foreign citizenship, 21.2% are Turkish and 10.1% Bosnian, and other large groups include about 120,000 Bosniaks, 50,720 Afghans (2018), about 25,000 Chechens, Syrians and Arabs. Many of the Turkish families arrived as guest workers, and refugees from Syria and Iraq came in large numbers during 2015.

Austria has a longer Muslim story than most of Western Europe. After the Habsburg takeover of the late 17th century Muslims were expelled, although some stayed after the Treaty of Passarowitz of 1718. In 1878 the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina brought the largest number of Muslims under Austrian rule, and in 1904 Bosnian Muslim students in Vienna founded the first Muslim association in the country. Under the 1874 Recognition Act Muslims could be recognised as a religious society, and in 1912 Austria recognised Muslims 'of the Hanafite rite' under the Islamgesetz, a law that gave Islam a legal basis in the country. The Islamic Faith Community in Austria (IGGÖ) was organised in 1979.

A new Islamgesetz was passed in February 2015. It bans foreign funding of mosques and the payment of imams' salaries from abroad, requires a community to present its central tenets to the authorities in German, and gives Muslims rights to halal food and to military pastoral care. Austria has 205 registered mosques and hundreds of unregistered prayer rooms, and four mosques were purpose-built with minarets (Öktem, 2015). Alevism was recognised as a religious community in 2013.

For prayer times, Austria lies between about 46.4 and 49 degrees north, and Vienna at 48.2 degrees is just above the 48-degree line where Awqatly applies a high-latitude rule, so in June Fajr and Isha are set with the seventh-of-the-night rule. On this site's calculation the fast from Fajr to Maghrib in Vienna lasts about 17 and a half hours on 21 June and 10 and a half hours on 21 December. Because the Turkish and Bosnian communities that form the core of Austrian Islam follow the Hanafi school, this site uses the Hanafi Asr time for Austria. As in other countries, communities follow different calendars, with some mosques taking their dates from Turkey, Bosnia or Saudi Arabia, and each mosque sets its own congregation times.

Sources, checked 2026-10: Wikipedia: Islam in Austria; Islamic Faith Community in Austria (IGGÖ).