Qibla direction in Provo

How to face the Qibla in Provo

Stand where you will pray and find north first. Then turn towards north and move a further 28.8° towards east: the result is the bearing of 28.8°. A small error of a few degrees is forgiven by most scholars, but aiming simply at north would leave you about 29° off.

Scholars agree that someone who can see the Kaaba must face it exactly, while someone far away faces its direction (jihat al-Ka‘bah) as precisely as reasonably possible. If a mosque is nearby, its mihrab and prayer lines are the easiest reference, since they were set when the building was laid out. At home, mark the direction once with tape or a small arrow so the whole family prays the same way.

Why a flat map shows a different direction

This is a place where maps mislead badly: a straight line on a flat map from Provo to Mecca points to 98.3° (east), a full 69.5° away from the true Qibla of 28.8° (north-east). The map line keeps one compass heading and is 1,954 km longer than the great-circle route. Because the Earth is a sphere, the shortest way to Mecca from Provo first heads north-east, and that is the direction to face.

The angle on this page is the initial bearing of the great circle from 40.2338° N, 111.6585° W to the Kaaba (21.4225° N, 39.8262° E). It is the method used by mosque architects and by every serious Qibla calculator, and it gives one exact answer for each point on Earth.

Distance from Provo to Mecca and Medina

Mecca is 12,550 km from Provo as the crow flies, and Medina, the city of the Prophet ﷺ, is 12,230 km away. A direct flight would take roughly 15 h 16 min, although most pilgrims from Provo connect through Jeddah or Medina airport.

Clocks in Provo run 10 hours behind Mecca in winter and 9 hours behind Mecca in summer, because of daylight saving time. Prayer times, however, depend on the sun at your own location, so always use the prayer times of Provo rather than those of Mecca.

Finding the Qibla with the sun in Provo

From Provo the sun never rises high in the Qibla direction of 28.8°, so you cannot simply face the sun. The opposite method works instead, as the right-hand column of the table shows.

On 365 days the sun stands exactly opposite the Qibla: then the shadow of any vertical object, a pole, a door frame or a plumb line, points straight towards Mecca. This is most frequent in January (31 days), for instance on 1 January 2027 at 14:27.

Twice a year the sun passes directly over the Kaaba, on 28 May 2027 and 16 July 2027. Both happen at night in Provo (03:18 and 03:27 local time), so they cannot be used here. Instead, on 13 January 2027 at 14:29 and 28 November 2027 at 14:09 the sun is over the point opposite the Kaaba, and every vertical shadow in Provo points straight to Mecca.

Provo compared with other cities

Compared with Washington D.C., 2,953 km away, the Qibla in Provo is turned 27.7° further anticlockwise (28.8° against 56.6°), and Mecca is 1,917 km farther away. The nearest city with its own Qibla page, West Jordan (48 km), prays towards 28.5°, a difference of 0.3°.

Across the 244 cities in the United States on this site, the Qibla ranges from 17.2° in Hillsboro to 350.9° in Anchorage, a spread of 333.7°. That is too large to use one national direction, so each city has its own bearing.

See all cities on the Qibla page for United States.

Qibla in cities near Provo

• West Jordan28.5° · 48 km
• Salt Lake City28.5° · 62 km
• Boise24.0° · 531 km
• Boulder34.7° · 544 km
• Las Vegas26.4° · 544 km
• Henderson26.6° · 549 km