Qibla finder

Find the Qibla, wherever you are

Face the Kaaba with confidence: the direction from true north, a live compass and a map, worked out on your own device.

Private by design: your location stays on your device. The direction is worked out in your browser and is never sent to us or to anyone else.

How the Qibla is worked out

The Qibla is the direction of the Kaaba in Makkah, which Muslims face in prayer. We follow the shortest path over the globe, a great circle, and give its starting direction in degrees clockwise from true north: 0° is north, 90° east, 180° south and 270° west.

A flat map can mislead. From New York, a straight line on a world map runs south-east, yet the Qibla is about 58°, north-east, because the shortest route arcs over the North Atlantic. The map below draws both lines, so you can see the difference for your own place.

A phone’s compass senses magnetic north, which can be several degrees away from true north. The live compass corrects for this with the World Magnetic Model 2025, the model NOAA and the British Geological Survey publish for navigation.

Getting an accurate compass reading

1. Remove any magnetic case or wallet, and step away from laptops, speakers and metal furniture.
2. Calibrate by moving the phone slowly in a figure-of-eight a few times.
3. Hold the phone flat and level, and let the reading settle.
4. Cross-check once against a second device, a satellite map of your street, or the nearest mosque.

Hold your phone flat, away from metal and magnetic cases. If the needle wanders, move the phone in a figure-8 to calibrate.

The bearing in degrees is exact for the place you chose. Only the compass can be off, so if the needle and the mosque disagree, trust the mosque and recalibrate.

Without a phone

• Your local mosque. The prayer niche and the rows show the direction the community agreed on. Note which way they face relative to a main road, and carry it home.
• The sun. Around 27–28 May at about 09:18 UTC, and 15–16 July at about 09:27 UTC, the sun stands almost straight above Makkah. Wherever it is up at that moment, a shadow points directly away from the Kaaba.
• Doing your best. When you honestly cannot be sure, make a careful estimate and pray. Our guide to finding the Qibla explains these methods and what scholars say about uncertainty, travel and planes.

Qibla from major cities

Bearings in degrees clockwise from true north, along the shortest path to the Kaaba, and the distance to it.

Qibla in every country

Every city of 15,000 people or more can be found with the search above. For tables of every larger city in a country, choose the country:

• Algeria
• Australia
• Azerbaijan
• Bangladesh
• Brazil
• Canada
• China
• Egypt
• France
• Germany
• India
• Indonesia
• Iran
• Iraq
• Malaysia
• Mexico
• Morocco
• Nigeria
• Pakistan
• Russia
• Saudi Arabia
• South Africa
• Spain
• Türkiye
• United Arab Emirates
• United Kingdom
• United States
• Uzbekistan

All countries

Free Qibla widget for your website

Mosques, Islamic schools and blogs can show the Qibla on their own pages. The widget is free, sets no cookies, tracks no one and works in 14 languages.

The widget always shows “Qibla by Awwab” with a link back to this page. It runs on awwab.app inside a frame: no cookies, no analytics, and a visitor’s location, if they choose to share it, stays in their browser. Developers can also use the free Qibla API and AI connector.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Qur’an 2:144: the command to face al-Masjid al-Ḥarām. Arabic text from the Tanzil Uthmani edition.
2. Kaaba position: 21.422487° N, 39.826206° E.
3. Cities: GeoNames, places of 15,000 people or more, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
4. Magnetic declination: the World Magnetic Model 2025, NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information and the British Geological Survey.
5. Map: Natural Earth, public domain.