Prayer Times in France

Muslims and mosques in France

Islam is the second religion of France after Christianity. The French state does not record religion in its census, so the numbers come from surveys. The statistics institute INSEE and the demographic institute INED found in their 2019 to 2020 survey that about 10% of people aged 18 to 59 identify as Muslim, while their earlier 2010 survey counted 2.1 million declared Muslims. Overseas, Mayotte is the one department with a Muslim majority, with about 97% of its people following Islam. Most Muslims live in and around the large industrial cities, above all in the Paris region, Lyon and Marseille, and in Seine-Saint-Denis, according to 2005 figures, about 22% of children under 18 had Maghrebi roots against 6.9% across France.

The origins of French Muslims reflect the colonial and post-war past. In the older estimates of the demographer Michèle Tribalat, about 82% have Maghrebi roots: 43.2% Algerian, 27.5% Moroccan and 11.4% Tunisian. Another 9.3% come from sub-Saharan Africa and 8.6% from Turkey. Workers recruited from Algeria and Morocco in the decades after 1945, and their families who followed, built the communities that now include third and fourth generations born in France. Many were also soldiers: the Grand Mosque of Paris, begun in 1922, was built to honour the Muslim tirailleurs who fought for France in the First World War, notably at Verdun.

The number of places of worship is hard to fix. About 2,125 Muslim places of worship were counted in 2008 and French authorities reported about 2,500 prayer halls in 2016, a figure that includes small rooms in flats, garages and former shops as well as purpose-built mosques. The French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) was created in 2002 on the initiative of the interior minister of the time, Nicolas Sarkozy, as a private association modelled on the Jewish and Protestant consistories, and it speaks with the state on matters such as chaplaincies and halal certification. The 1905 law separating church and state, the 2004 ban on conspicuous religious signs in state schools and the 2021 law on the principles of the Republic form the legal background to mosque life.

For prayer times, France stretches from about 42 degrees north in Perpignan to 51 degrees north in Lille, so Fajr and Isha shift greatly with the seasons, and in the north the twilight does not fully end for some weeks in summer. Many French mosques use the 12 degree angles associated with the UOIF, which is the default here. The calendar is also a point of difference: in 2026 the CFCM announced Ramadan for 19 February after calculation, while the Grand Mosque of Paris and other mosques that follow Saudi Arabia started on 18 February. Congregation times are set by each mosque and are not published on this site.

Sources, checked 2026-10: INSEE: La diversité religieuse en France (survey TeO2, 2019 to 2020); Wikipedia: Islam in France; Awqatly: Hijri calendar and how countries decide month starts.