Sunrise & Sunset in Dubai — Times for Any Date

Why Dubai's daylight barely moves

Dubai sits at 25.2° N and 55.27° E, close enough to the Tropic of Cancer that its day length hardly changes with the seasons. The shortest day of 2026 is 10 hours 34 minutes on 18 December; the longest is 13 hours 43 minutes on 19 June. The whole year fits inside a swing of 189 minutes — roughly half the 367-minute swing in Chicago.

The calculator above computes sunrise, sunset, solar noon, and the golden and blue hours from the Sun's position for whatever date you enter. The sections below explain what is specific to Dubai: an almost vertical noon Sun, a solar clock that runs late all year, and — the part that trips people up reading other sites — the complete absence of daylight saving time.

The Sun stands almost directly overhead in June

At the June solstice the Sun's declination reaches +23.45°, only 1.75° short of Dubai's latitude. Solar noon therefore puts the Sun 88.3° above the horizon — a hand's width from vertical. At that angle a one-metre pole casts a shadow about 3 centimetres long, which is why midday shadows in Dubai all but disappear in late June.

December is the opposite extreme. On 21 December declination is −23.42°, and the noon Sun stands at 41.4° — barely half as high. Between those two dates the noon altitude climbs and falls by 47°, and that steepness is what shortens the golden hour: the Sun drops through the 10° band between +6° and −4° faster in Dubai than it does in any of the higher-latitude cities on this site.

Dubai sits west of its time meridian

Gulf Standard Time is anchored on the 60° E meridian. Dubai is 4.73° west of it, worth 18.9 minutes of clock time. Because the Sun reaches meridians from the east, a location west of its meridian sees solar noon late — and the calculator confirms it: noon falls between 12:03 in early November and 12:33 in mid-February.

That 30-minute drift is the equation of time, unmodified. Dubai has no clock change to mask it, so the seasonal wobble of the apparent Sun shows up directly in the times: the same city, the same longitude, and noon moving half an hour across the year with no legislation involved. It is the mirror image of Chicago, which sits east of its meridian and therefore sees noon always before 12:00.

No daylight saving, ever

The United Arab Emirates has never adopted daylight saving time. Clocks there run on UTC+4 from 1 January to 31 December, every year. That makes the calculator's output unusually simple: the time it prints is the time on the wall. No conversion, no seasonal offset, no hour to add.

If you are used to London, Rome, Toronto or Chicago, this is the one habit to unlearn. On every other city page here you have to ask which side of a clock change your date falls; in Dubai the question does not arise. The table below is therefore single-valued.

The shape of the year is asymmetric in a way that catches people out. The earliest sunrise is not on the longest day: it falls on 9 June at 05:28, twelve days before the solstice. The latest sunset falls on 4 July at 19:13, thirteen days after it. Meanwhile the earliest sunset arrives on 30 November at 17:29 — eighteen days before the shortest day, which is 18 December.

The formula behind every Dubai sunrise

Sunrise and sunset are not stored per city. They fall out of the Sun's geometry on that date at that latitude, and the calculator implements the NOAA solar-position algorithm in four steps.

1. Fractional year. The day of the year becomes an angle: γ = 2π / 365 × (dayOfYear − 1 + 0.5).

2. Equation of time. The gap between apparent and mean solar time, in minutes: eqTime = 229.18 × (0.000075 + 0.001868 cos γ − 0.032077 sin γ − 0.014615 cos 2γ − 0.040849 sin 2γ).

3. Solar declination. How far the Sun sits above or below the celestial equator: δ = 0.006918 − 0.399912 cos γ + 0.070257 sin γ − 0.006758 cos 2γ + 0.000907 sin 2γ − 0.002697 cos 3γ + 0.00148 sin 3γ.

4. Hour angle. The Sun's angular distance from local noon when its upper limb touches the horizon, solved at the standard zenith of 90.833° — the extra 0.833° covers refraction plus the Sun's own radius: cos H = cos(90.833°) / (cos φ cos δ) − tan φ tan δ.

Solar noon then lands at 720 − 4 × longitude − eqTime + timezone × 60 minutes, with sunrise and sunset 4H minutes either side. For Dubai the longitude term is −4 × 55.27 and the timezone term +4 × 60; the first pulls noon later, the second pulls it back, and the remainder lands just after 12:00.

Three worked examples

Each example is the calculator's own output for that date. No clock conversion is needed — Dubai stays on UTC+4 throughout.

Example 1 — the June solstice, 21 June 2026

• Solar noon: 12:20
• Sunrise: 05:29
• Sunset: 19:12
• Length of day: 13h 42m
• Evening golden hour: 18:38–19:27, a 49-minute window
• Blue hour closes at 19:37

Compare the same date at 41.9° N: the golden hour there runs 63 minutes rather than 49. The difference is not the date but the angle. Dubai's Sun descends steeply, crosses the 10° golden band quickly, and the usable warm light is correspondingly brief.

Example 2 — the December solstice, 21 December 2026

• Solar noon: 12:16
• Sunrise: 06:59
• Sunset: 17:34
• Length of day: 10h 35m
• Morning golden hour: 06:45–07:34, a 49-minute window
• Blue hour: 06:35–06:45 before sunrise, 17:49–17:59 after sunset

This is the shortest day, and at 10h 35m it is barely two hours shorter than midsummer — the practical reason Dubai's outdoor season runs from October to April rather than following a summer calendar.

Example 3 — the March equinox, 20 March 2026

• Solar noon: 12:26
• Sunrise: 06:23
• Sunset: 18:30
• Length of day: 12h 07m — seven minutes over twelve hours
• Golden hour: 06:10–06:54 and 18:00–18:44, 44 minutes at each end

Equinox daylight exceeding twelve hours is expected, not a rounding error: the 90.833° zenith measures the first appearance of the upper limb, and refraction lifts the disc roughly half a degree higher than geometry alone would place it.

Golden hour and blue hour in the Gulf

The calculator defines the golden hour as the window in which the Sun stands between −4° and +6° above the horizon, and the blue hour as the deeper band from −6° to −4°. In Dubai those bands are the shortest of any city on this site: 49 minutes at the solstices and 44 minutes at the equinoxes, against 63 to 65 minutes in Chicago and Toronto.

Two practical consequences follow. First, the evening window is predictable enough to plan around — it stays within a few minutes of 45–50 all year, so a shoot at sunset needs almost no seasonal adjustment. Second, because the Sun sets almost vertically, there is very little of the long horizontal light that photographers chase at high latitudes; the trade-off is a very short but very clean window, with the dust haze over the Gulf doing most of the colour work.

Where the numbers can surprise you

• There is no clock change to correct. Dubai runs UTC+4 all year, so the printed times are wall-clock times. Do not add or subtract an hour.
• Solar noon is late, not early. Between 12:03 and 12:33, because Dubai lies west of the 60° E meridian that defines its zone.
• The earliest sunrise is in June, not on the solstice. It falls on 9 June at 05:28; the solstice sunrise on 21 June is one minute later.
• The earliest sunset is in November. 30 November at 17:29, eighteen days before the shortest day.
• Noon shadows almost vanish. The June noon Sun reaches 88.3°, leaving a one-metre pole with roughly a three-centimetre shadow.
• The horizon is hazy, not clear. The algorithm assumes an unobstructed sea-level horizon; dust and humidity over the Gulf can delay the visible sunrise by several minutes compared with the computed time.

Sources and standards

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