Sabbath sunset times

Getting ready on Friday

Friday is the preparation day. Adventist.org suggests finishing what you can before sunset, so the Sabbath can begin calmly:

• Cook ahead, so Sabbath meals only need warming and setting out.
• Do the shopping and other errands earlier, so nothing needs buying on the Sabbath.
• Tidy the house: clear clutter, clean the kitchen, change the sheets.
• Arrange the time off work, and set up a place for prayer and Bible study.

If your evenings are full, the same page suggests doing a little each evening through the week. The General Conference statement adds that children can share the preparation, with tasks suited to their age.

How the calculator works

Pick a city, or type coordinates and choose the time zone the place uses. The calculator finds standard sunset: the moment the top edge of the sun meets a flat, sea-level horizon, using the standard 0.833° allowance for the sun's apparent radius and atmospheric refraction. It uses the open-source SunCalc library and shows each time in the place's own time zone, daylight saving included.

We checked it against U.S. Naval Observatory times for eight places, including both sides of the International Date Line and weeks when the clocks change. Every result was within a minute.

Your location and choices stay in your browser. They aren't saved or sent anywhere. Hills, buildings, altitude and weather can move the sunset you see by a few minutes, so treat these times as estimates and follow your local church's published time where it differs.

When the sun doesn't set

Far north and south, some days have no sunset or no sunrise. The calculator says so rather than invent a time. The General Conference statement says that where the time of sunset is hard to determine, the Sabbath begins at the end of the day as marked by the diminishing light. Ask your local church how your congregation applies this.

Put prayer before your phone

If your phone keeps pulling you back into the week, PrayLock puts a prayer before the iPhone apps you choose. Pray once a day with Daily Devotion, or take a prayer break before each app session with Mindful Moments. PrayLock doesn't know Sabbath times and won't lock apps on Friday evening by itself.

PrayLock requires a Pro subscription and iOS 18.0 or later. See how PrayLock works, or read the FAQ.

Sabbath times: common questions

Sources

• Adventist.org: How we can celebrate the Sabbath today (sunset to sunset, preparation day)
• General Conference: Sabbath observance (start at sunset, diminishing light, family preparation)
• Adventist Church in New Zealand: sunset times (Auckland, Friday 23 October 2026: 7:44 pm, matching this calculator)
• NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory: solar calculator (standard sunset definition)
• U.S. Naval Observatory: sun and moon data for one day (reference times)
• SunCalc 2.1.1 (the calculation library)
• IANA time zone database (city coordinates and time zones)

Checked on 22 October 2026.