Ask returning pilgrims about the moment that stayed with them longest and, surprisingly often, it isn’t their first sight of the Kaaba. It’s the ten minutes or so they spent standing on green carpet in Madinah, in the small stretch of the Prophet’s Mosque known as the Rawdah ash-Sharifah. The Prophet (peace be upon him) described this space as a garden from the gardens of Paradise, and praying two rak’ahs there sits near the top of almost every pilgrim’s wish list. It is also, as of mid-2026, one of the most tightly managed spaces in either holy city.
Entry now runs entirely on a permit system. The permit is free, it is mandatory, and it is issued only through Nusuk, the official platform of the Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah. Slots are scarce, they appear at odd times, and they disappear in seconds. Handle the booking badly and you may find the door politely but firmly closed for the rest of your trip — and possibly for the rest of the year. This guide walks through the whole process: what the Rawdah actually is, how the booking system works, when slots are released, the separate timings for men and women, and what to do with your few precious minutes once you’re inside.
What exactly is the Rawdah?
The Rawdah is the area of the Prophet’s Mosque that lies between the minbar — the pulpit from which the Prophet (peace be upon him) delivered his sermons — and the room that was once his house, where he now lies buried alongside Abu Bakr and Umar (may Allah be pleased with them both). The distance between the two is often quoted at a little over twenty metres, which tells you how small the space really is: a modest rectangle inside a mosque complex that can hold hundreds of thousands of worshippers at a time.
Its significance rests on a hadith recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari, in which the Prophet (peace be upon him) said that what lies between his house and his minbar is a garden from the gardens of Paradise. You’ll spot the boundary the instant you arrive: the carpets of the Rawdah are green, while the prayer halls around it are laid in red. The ornate white pillars within it stand apart from those elsewhere in the mosque, and the whole area carries a hush that is hard to describe until you’ve felt it.
Because millions of pilgrims pass through Madinah every year and the Rawdah can only hold a few hundred people at once, unmanaged access used to mean crushing, sometimes frightening crowds. The permit system introduced in recent years — and now consolidated entirely within Nusuk — exists to fix that. It works. Visits today are calm, orderly and far more dignified than the free-for-all older pilgrims remember. The trade-off is that you must plan, and plan properly.
The permit: free, mandatory and only from Nusuk
Let’s deal with the essentials first. A Rawdah permit costs nothing. It is issued exclusively through the Nusuk app or website as a Ministry e-service, and there is no legitimate way to buy one. If anyone — a tour operator, a hotel concierge, a helpful stranger outside the mosque — offers to sell you a Rawdah slot, they are charging you for something that is free, and quite possibly for something that doesn’t exist. Group operators can legitimately book on behalf of their pilgrims through their own channels, but the permit itself never carries a fee.
You’ll need a working Nusuk account before you can book anything, registered against the same passport you’re travelling on, and every member of your party needs their own profile — companions can be added under a lead account, but each person must hold their own permit. Setting this up takes ten minutes at home and considerably longer in a Madinah hotel lobby on patchy wi-fi, so do it before you fly. We cover the whole registration process in our guide to setting up your Nusuk account. Once you’re logged in, the Rawdah booking lives among the app’s e-services: pick your date, pick an available time window, confirm the visitors, and the app issues a QR-coded permit for each person.
One visit a year — and the Instant Track wrinkle
Here is the part that catches people out. Advance Rawdah permits are strictly rationed. As of mid-2026, it is widely reported that the system issues one standard permit per person per 365 days, and that the cap applies across trip types — a permit used in Ramadan on an Umrah visa still counts against you if you return in Dhul Hijjah on a visit visa. One garden, one entry, one year. That single fact should shape how you treat the booking: it is not a slot you casually grab and casually skip. It is, for most pilgrims, the one shot.
There is, however, a second route. Nusuk includes a proximity-based option — commonly called the Instant Track — which unlocks additional slots when your phone’s geolocation shows you physically near the Prophet’s Mosque. These slots refresh roughly every twenty minutes and cover visit windows in the hours immediately ahead. Reports conflict on whether Instant Track bookings sit inside or outside the 365-day cap, and the behaviour seems to shift with updates to the app. The sensible reading, and the one we’d plan around: the yearly cap applies to advance bookings; Instant Track availability varies, so check the app when you’re actually in Madinah rather than building your plans on it.
What does this mean in practice? Treat the advance permit as your banker and Instant Track as a possible bonus. If you’re travelling as a family, coordinate so that everyone books the same window under one lead account — a household split across three different time slots on three different days is a logistical headache in a city where you’ve usually only got two or three nights.
When slots are released — and how fast they vanish
Rawdah slots are not released months in advance. Availability typically opens only seven to ten days before the visit date, which means that if your Madinah stay is five weeks away, there is nothing to book yet and nothing wrong with your app. Mark the date a week or so before you arrive and start checking then.
The main daily release commonly lands around 12:00 Saudi time, with smaller batches appearing hourly or every twenty to thirty minutes through the day. Cancelled permits recycle back into the pool at thoroughly unsociable hours — 2am to 4am Saudi time is the window pilgrims report again and again for stray slots reappearing. And when they appear, they go. Popular windows vanish in seconds, not minutes, so have your profile complete, your companions pre-selected and your thumb ready before the release, not after it.
If that sounds like buying concert tickets, that’s because it is remarkably similar, refresh tactics and all. We’ve published a separate step-by-step walkthrough on finding a Rawdah slot, covering the best times to check, how to move fast through the confirmation screens, and what to do when the app shows nothing for your dates. If your travel dates are fixed and nothing is showing, don’t panic on day one — keep checking across the release windows, because inventory genuinely does appear and reappear throughout the day.
Separate visiting hours for men and women
The Rawdah runs a fully gender-segregated timetable, so you won’t simply pick any hour of the day. In the standard, non-Ramadan pattern, women’s visits run from after Fajr until Dhuhr, while men’s visits run from after Dhuhr until Isha, with additional late-night windows for men once the mosque quietens down. If you open the app and see no morning slots as a man, or no evening slots as a woman, nothing is broken — that’s simply the schedule.
Ramadan rewrites the timetable entirely. In Ramadan 1447, for example, men’s visits ran from 11:20am to 8pm and again from 2am to 5am, while women’s windows ran from 11pm to 1:40am and from 6am to 11am. Those small-hours slots sound brutal until you remember that Madinah in Ramadan barely sleeps; walking to the Haram at 1am, you’ll have plenty of company. Whatever the season, treat the times printed on your own permit as the only authority — schedules shift year to year and the app always reflects the current arrangement.
Women’s visits have a rhythm of their own — different gates, different marshalling areas, and a few practical wrinkles around prams and small children — which is why we’ve written a dedicated women’s guide to visiting the Rawdah that goes into far more detail than we can here.
On the day: gates, QR codes and queues
Your permit specifies a time window, not a precise minute, but you should still aim to arrive thirty to forty-five minutes early. Men are commonly directed to Gate 37, on the eastern side of the mosque, while women typically enter through the Gate 24 area — though both are genuinely variable, and stewards redirect the flow depending on crowds and works around the mosque. Check what your permit says, then confirm with the uniformed staff when you arrive; they handle this all day, every day, and will point you to the right queue in seconds.
At the gate, your QR code gets scanned. Here’s the tip that saves more visits than any other: screenshot the permit the night before. Mobile signal inside a crowd of several thousand people is unreliable at best, and watching the app’s loading spinner while a queue builds behind you is nobody’s idea of a spiritual start to the visit. A saved image scans just as well. Carry physical ID too, in case staff want to match the permit to a passport.
Once you’re through the gate, expect a marshalled holding area rather than a straight walk to the green carpet. Groups are moved forward in batches, sitting and shuffling forward in stages, and the whole process from gate to exit can take an hour or more even though the time inside is short. Use the wait well: it’s a rare enforced pause in a busy trip, and a good moment to settle your intention and rehearse your du’a.
Your ten to fifteen minutes inside
Once your batch is ushered onto the green carpet, you’ll have roughly ten to fifteen minutes before stewards begin gently moving the group along to make room for the next. That is enough — just — for two rak’ahs and a focused du’a, provided you don’t spend the first five minutes hunting for the perfect spot. Pray wherever a gap opens. The whole area is the Rawdah; there is no premium corner, and the pilgrims who come away most content are the ones who dropped into the first available space and used every minute.
Come prepared so the time goes on worship rather than admin. Make wudu at your hotel, decide in advance what you want to ask of Allah — write it down if that helps — and keep your phone in your pocket. Photography isn’t the crime it’s sometimes made out to be, but filming worshippers mid-prayer is poor manners in the most sacred of settings, and a lens between you and the moment is a strange way to spend the shortest, sweetest appointment of your trip. Keep your voice low, don’t push, and if an elderly pilgrim needs the space more than you do, giving it up gracefully is its own act of worship in a garden of Paradise.
Giving salam to the Prophet (peace be upon him) is a separate act
Many first-timers assume the Rawdah permit is also the ticket to stand before the Prophet’s grave. In fact, the salam is a separate act with its own arrangement. Visitors pass the burial chamber along a dedicated walkway that runs in front of the golden grilles, pausing briefly to greet the Prophet (peace be upon him) and then his two companions, Abu Bakr and Umar (may Allah be pleased with them), before moving on. As of mid-2026, no permit is required for the salam walkway — you simply join the flow at the appropriate times — though arrangements in the mosque do change, so it’s worth a glance at Nusuk or a word with the stewards to confirm.
The etiquette here is simplicity itself: walk calmly, offer your greeting with lowered voice and presence of heart, and keep moving. The walkway is not a place to linger, photograph or pray towards the chamber; scholars across the schools agree the salam should be brief, dignified and directed with love rather than spectacle. Many pilgrims find these thirty seconds affect them more deeply than anything else in either city.
Children, elderly visitors and wheelchair users
There is no single, cleanly published age rule for children, which frustrates parents no end. The working practice as of mid-2026: children of roughly five and over should hold their own permit, booked as companions under a parent’s Nusuk profile, while infants and toddlers are often refused at the gate regardless of what the app allowed you to book. Much comes down to the discretion of staff on the day and how busy the session is. If you’re travelling with a baby, the pragmatic plan is for parents to book separate windows so one can wait outside with the little one — disappointing, but far better than discovering the problem at the gate with a single shared slot.
Elderly and disabled pilgrims are actively accommodated. Wheelchair users are permitted in the Rawdah, assistance lanes exist at the entry points, and mosque staff are practised at helping visitors with limited mobility through the batching system. Wheelchairs are usually available to borrow around the mosque, though at peak times demand outstrips supply, so bringing your own or booking one through your hotel is safer. If someone in your party needs a helper alongside them, book the helper into the same slot — staff will generally keep companions together, but only if the permits match.
If you can’t make your slot
A missed slot doesn’t roll over. It simply expires — and under the 365-day cap, an expired permit can mean forfeiting your visit for the year. That’s a heavy price for oversleeping. If you know in advance that you can’t attend — a delayed train from Makkah, an unwell family member — cancel the permit in the app as early as you can. Your slot returns to the pool for another pilgrim, likely surfacing in one of those 2am-to-4am windows, and cancelling in good time gives you the best chance of preserving your own eligibility to rebook. The app’s behaviour on this point has shifted over the years, so don’t treat cancellation as a guaranteed reset — treat your original slot as the appointment and everything else as damage control.
So, the night before: charge your phone, screenshot every permit in your party, confirm the gate on each permit, agree a meeting point outside the mosque for afterwards, set two alarms if your window is a small-hours one, and make wudu before you leave the hotel. Ten to fifteen minutes on the green carpet is not long. Arrive with everything already done, and every one of those minutes is yours.
Leave A Comment