What Is Candle-Lighting and How Do You Find the Right Time?

Updated

Candle-lighting is the moment that begins Shabbat and Jewish holidays, and its time is not fixed — it depends on local sunset in your city on that specific date. To find the right time, look up candle-lighting for your city and calendar day using a Jewish calendar tool such as Hebcal, which supports candle-lighting and Havdalah times for over 100,000 world cities. The time you need is the one calculated for your location, not a national or generic time.

Why the time changes

Jewish days begin at nightfall, so Shabbat and holidays start at sunset rather than at midnight or a fixed clock hour. Because sunset shifts through the year and varies by latitude and longitude, candle-lighting times move with both the date and the place.

This is why a single "Shabbat starts at" time cannot be correct everywhere. Two cities in the same time zone can have different candle-lighting times on the same Friday.

Candle-lighting vs. Havdalah

Candle-lighting Havdalah
Marks Start of Shabbat/holiday End of Shabbat/holiday
Timing Before sunset (commonly 18 minutes, other customs exist) After nightfall
Depends on Local sunset + community custom Local nightfall

The 18-minute convention is common, but some communities use different intervals, so treat any published time as the one matching that community's custom rather than a universal rule.

How to find the time for your city

  1. Open a Jewish calendar tool such as Hebcal.
  2. Go to the Shabbat times section, which provides candle-lighting and Havdalah times for Shabbat and holidays, plus start and end times for fast days.
  3. Enter your city. Hebcal supports over 100,000 world cities, so smaller locations are usually covered.
  4. Select the date or view the year at a glance.
  5. Read the candle-lighting time for that date and city, and the Havdalah time for the end of Shabbat or the holiday.

Expected result: a specific clock time for your location on that date, plus the corresponding Havdalah time.

Making it part of your routine

Looking up times week by week gets tedious, so Hebcal lets you carry them with you:

  • Download Jewish holidays and Hebrew dates to iPhone, iPad, Android (via Google Calendar), Outlook, macOS Desktop Calendar, or any app that supports iCalendar (.ics) feeds.
  • Use the year-at-a-glance view to see Shabbat times across the year.
  • Set up reminders so the times arrive without a manual lookup.

If you manage a synagogue or community site, Hebcal also offers JavaScript, JSON, and RSS APIs under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license to embed its content directly.

Common snags

  • Wrong city selected. A nearby larger city may have a different sunset time. Use your own location when it is listed.
  • Assuming one time fits all. Candle-lighting is location- and date-specific by design.
  • Confusing the two times. Candle-lighting is before sunset; Havdalah is after nightfall. They are not interchangeable.
  • Holidays that are not Shabbat. Holidays also have candle-lighting and Havdalah times, and fast days have their own start and end times — check the specific entry rather than reusing a Shabbat time.