Methodology
Accuracy and respect matter more here than anywhere. This page explains exactly where our data comes from, how prayer times are calculated, and what we deliberately do not do.
Where the listings come from
Our 3,100 listings across all 50 states and the District of Columbia come from two sources, and every record is tagged with the one it came from.
1,024 listings come from OpenStreetMap, the open geographic database maintained by a worldwide community of volunteers. We query places tagged as Muslim places of worship, then normalize the name, address, and coordinates. This was the original directory and it is still the part we trust most, because a local volunteer put each record there.
2,076 listings come from Google Maps place data, collected in July 2026 to cover metro areas where OpenStreetMap had no mosque tagged at all. From those records we take the name, address, coordinates, phone number, and website.
We do not publish the star ratings or review counts that arrive with the Google records, although we hold them. Those are Google’s content and other people’s reviews, not something we collected and not ours to restate. Nothing on this site shows a rating for any mosque.
Licensing and attribution
The 1,024 OpenStreetMap-derived listings are available under the Open Database License (ODbL), and anything we derive from them is shared on the same terms. That license covers those records only. It does not extend to the 2,076 Google-sourced listings, which we hold under Google’s terms and do not offer for redistribution. Map tiles across the site are served by OpenStreetMap and its contributors.
© OpenStreetMap contributors, for the 1,024 OpenStreetMap-derived listings. Those listings are available under the Open Database License; map tiles are under the Open Database License and the associated cartography license.
How prayer times are calculated
Daily prayer times are computed, never scraped. For each mosque we calculate Fajr, Sunrise, Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib, and Isha from the mosque’s latitude and longitude using the open-source PrayTimes astronomical algorithm and the ISNA method (Islamic Society of North America): Fajr and Isha at a 15-degree sun angle, with the standard Asr calculation. This is the most common method across North America.
These times are careful estimates for planning. They can differ by a minute or two from other calculators depending on the method and rounding, and they are not a religious ruling. For precise times, follow your local mosque’s announced schedule.
Jummah and iqama times
The Friday Jummah prayer and the congregation (iqama) times are decided locally by each mosque and shift through the year. They cannot be calculated. We publish a Friday time only when the mosque has published it about itself, and every one we show is quoted from that page, dated, and linked back to it. 463 of our 3,100 listings carry one today, 163of them with the mosque’s daily iqama table as well. Where we have no such time, the listing says nothing rather than guessing.
How we read them: we fetch the mosque’s own website, follow at most two internal links that look like a prayer schedule, and take a time only when the page is unambiguous. We identify ourselves honestly as MosqueIndexBot, we respect robots.txt, and we make one request at a time to any single site.
We refuse far more than we accept, on purpose. We do not publish a time written without am or pm, a time from a page listing several campuses (we cannot tell which one is this mosque), a time from a timetable we cannot read the direction of, a one-off event listing, or anything outside the hours a Friday prayer plausibly falls in. A wrong Friday time sends someone to a locked door, so publishing nothing is always the cheaper mistake. If your mosque’s time is missing or wrong, tell us and we will fix it.
What we do not do
- We do not publish Google’s star ratings or review counts for any mosque.
- We do not present calculated times as an authoritative religious ruling.
- We do not make sectarian judgments about any mosque.
- We do not write listing descriptions with a language model.
- We do not run offensive or non-halal advertising.
- We do not sell or misrepresent mosque contact information.
- We do not disguise our reader as a web browser to get past a site that has blocked it, or ignore a robots.txt that asks us not to read a page. Some Friday times are missing from this site for exactly that reason, and we would rather ask the mosque.
Which listings we submit to search engines
Every mosque we hold has a page, and every page is reachable from its city and its state. We are more selective about which of those pages we put in our sitemap and ask search engines to rank. Our standard is that a listing carries a full street address, including the city, and at least one way to reach the mosque, a phone number or a website. 2,426 of our 3,100 listings meet it.
The rest stay exactly where they are. They are live, they are linked, they show the same address, map and calculated prayer times, and you can find them by browsing or by searching this site. We simply do not think a page holding a name and little else has earned a place in someone else’s search results. This is not a judgment about the mosque. Plenty of small mosques have no website and no listed telephone, and recording them is a large part of why this directory exists.
We are applying the standard in stages rather than all at once, because a directory that changes shape overnight is hard for a search engine to read and we would rather move slowly than surprise anyone. Today we submit 2,788 listings and all 1,171 of our city pages.
The standard is a live test, not a list. The moment a listing gains an address or a contact, from a community submission or from a data refresh, it goes back into the sitemap on the next build. Nothing has to be approved by hand and nothing is permanently excluded.
Data quality
Mistakes we find in our own data get written down here rather than quietly fixed.
12 August 2026: we were listing 280 mosques twice. When we added the Google-sourced records in July, our merge treated a scraped place as an existing listing only if it was nearby and its name was similar. Mosques routinely carry a descriptive English name in OpenStreetMap and a transliterated or society name in Google Maps, so 280 mosques failed the name test and were published a second time under a second URL. We reviewed every pair of listings within 150 metres of each other, merged each one into a single listing, and permanently redirected the 302 duplicate URLs to the surviving page. Where the two records used different names we kept both, shown as “also listed as” on the listing. A further 17 URLs were facilities beside a mosque rather than mosques themselves, such as a school, a funeral home or a food pantry; those redirect to the mosque they belong to. We removed 23 records that were map entries with no connection to a mosque at all. The directory went from 3,442 listings to 3,100, and every city and state count on the site is recomputed from the corrected data. 41 pairs were too close to call and are still published separately while we check them; we would rather show a duplicate for a few weeks than merge two mosques that turn out to be different. The merge itself has been changed so that co-located records with names that disagree are held for review instead of published.
12 August 2026: this page was wrong about our sources. Until today this page said we did not use Google Maps data, and credited the whole directory to OpenStreetMap under ODbL. That was accurate when it was written and stopped being accurate on 15 July 2026, when we added 2,076 Google-sourced listings and did not update it. The sourcing above is now computed from the dataset itself, so it cannot fall out of date again.
Corrections
Found something wrong or missing? Community corrections keep this directory accurate. Submit a mosque or a correction and we will review it.