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Sehri — also written suhoor or sahur — is the pre-dawn meal, and its deadline is unforgiving: the moment Fajr begins, eating and drinking stop and the fast starts. This page counts down to that exact moment in your city, second by second, so nobody in the house has to guess whether there are twenty minutes left for tea or only four.
The Prophet ﷺ called sehri a blessed meal and encouraged not skipping it, even if it is only a sip of water. But blessing aside, the practical problem is timing: Fajr moves earlier by roughly a minute a day through Ramadan 2027, and it differs from city to city. The timer above reads today's Fajr straight from your chosen city's stored timetable and converts it using the city's own time zone.
Ramadan 1448 is expected to begin on Monday 8 February 2027, subject to moon sighting. Before the month begins, the page runs in preview mode against day 1 of the calendar — useful for setting alarms and testing your wake-up routine before the first real morning.
A common and costly confusion is mixing up Fajr with sunrise. The fast begins at Fajr — true dawn, when the first light spreads across the horizon — which in February 2027 falls roughly an hour and twenty minutes before sunrise in most of our cities. Eating until sunrise would mean eating well past the start of the fast.
That is why this countdown targets Fajr alone and why the calendar prints the two times in separate columns. If your household wakes to an alarm, set it from the Fajr time on this page, not the sunrise time on a weather app.
The countdown turns a vague intention — 'wake up early enough' — into a budget of minutes. Work backwards from the timer: if Fajr is at 05:35 and you want twenty minutes to eat calmly, ten to prepare and a few for wudu and the intention, the alarm belongs at about 04:55. Many people set two alarms, one for waking and a second 'last bites' warning fifteen minutes before the countdown ends.
Slow-release food buys you comfort later in the day: oats, eggs, yoghurt, dates and plenty of water spread across the meal rather than gulped at the end. The last half hour shown on this page is a good moment to finish eating, brush teeth, and make the intention for the fast while the house is still quiet.
It happens to almost everyone at least once: the alarm fails, the countdown reaches zero, and dawn has begun. The fast for that day still counts if you simply begin fasting from when you wake — you do not eat 'to make up for it' — and scholars advise continuing the day normally. A missed sehri makes for a harder afternoon, not an invalid fast.
If it keeps happening, the fix is usually boring rather than spiritual: an earlier night, a louder alarm across the room, or a family wake-up rota. The preview mode on this page before Ramadan is a good time to test which alarm actually works on you.
Households often contain different schedules — teenagers doing taraweeh late, parents up for tahajjud, children attempting a half-day fast. Because the switcher covers all 144 cities, relatives abroad can open the same page set to their own city and see their own deadline; nobody has to convert times in their head at 4 a.m.
For the full month at a glance — including how much earlier Fajr creeps each week — follow the calendar link under the timer to your city's complete timetable, where you can also download the PDF version with the sehri dua printed on it.
Sehri ends at Fajr, the start of true dawn. From that moment eating and drinking stop and the fast begins. In Jafari fiqh a precautionary stop ten minutes before Fajr is widely practised; the countdown targets Fajr itself.
Those seconds are real — the timer targets the stored Fajr instant for your city — but timetables carry a tolerance of about a minute, so the safe habit is to treat the final minute as finished and stop.
If it was a genuine mistake, stop as soon as you realise and continue the fast; scholars differ on details, so for a ruling on your exact situation, ask a scholar you trust. Deliberately eating after Fajr is a different matter and breaks the fast.
Yes. In February and March, Fajr generally gets a little earlier each day in the northern hemisphere — across the month the shift can be twenty to thirty minutes — which is why a fixed alarm set on day 1 can leave you short by day 30.
Outside the month there is no 'today' in the Ramadan calendar, so the page honestly labels its figures as a day 1 preview and counts towards day 1's Fajr, letting you plan alarms and routines in advance.