Qibla direction in Tacoma

How to face the Qibla in Tacoma

Stand where you will pray and find north first. Then turn towards north and move a further 17.5° towards east: the result is the bearing of 17.5°. A small error of a few degrees is forgiven by most scholars, but aiming simply at north would leave you about 18° 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 Tacoma to Mecca points to 101.1° (east), a full 83.6° away from the true Qibla of 17.5° (north). The map line keeps one compass heading and is 2,756 km longer than the great-circle route. Because the Earth is a sphere, the shortest way to Mecca from Tacoma first heads north, and that is the direction to face.

The angle on this page is the initial bearing of the great circle from 47.2529° N, 122.4443° 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 Tacoma to Mecca and Medina

Mecca is 12,175 km from Tacoma as the crow flies, and Medina, the city of the Prophet ﷺ, is 11,840 km away. A direct flight would take roughly 14 h 49 min, although most pilgrims from Tacoma connect through Jeddah or Medina airport.

Clocks in Tacoma run 11 hours behind Mecca in winter and 10 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 Tacoma rather than those of Mecca.

Finding the Qibla with the sun in Tacoma

From Tacoma the sun never rises high in the Qibla direction of 17.5°, 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 13:26.

Twice a year the sun passes directly over the Kaaba, on 28 May 2027 and 16 July 2027. Both happen at night in Tacoma (02:18 and 02:27 local time), so they cannot be used here. Instead, on 13 January 2027 at 13:29 and 28 November 2027 at 13:09 the sun is over the point opposite the Kaaba, and every vertical shadow in Tacoma points straight to Mecca.

Tacoma compared with other cities

Compared with Washington D.C., 3,747 km away, the Qibla in Tacoma is turned 39.1° further anticlockwise (17.5° against 56.6°), and Mecca is 1,542 km farther away. The nearest city with its own Qibla page, Kent (21 km), prays towards 17.7°, a difference of 0.2°.

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 Tacoma

• Kent17.7° · 21 km
• Seattle17.6° · 40 km
• Everett17.7° · 83 km
• Portland17.5° · 193 km
• Gresham17.7° · 195 km
• Hillsboro17.2° · 197 km