Work out what is owed for fasts of Ramadan not kept — which days are repaid by fasting, which by feeding, and which carry both.
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Which days, and why
These three are different obligations and are constantly mistaken for one another. Put each day in one box only.
Enter the days above and what you owe appears here — in fasts, in money, or in both.
This is a calculator, not a fatwa. Whether a particular illness makes fasting permanently impossible, whether a broken fast was deliberate in the sense the rule means, and what a delayed make-up carries are all questions of fact and of school, not of arithmetic. Put your own case to someone qualified.
Three obligations, constantly mistaken for one another
Almost every wrong answer here comes from putting a day in the wrong box. The three are not degrees of the same thing; they are different duties triggered by different facts, and two of them are not payments at all.
Qada is the ordinary case and covers most missed days. A fast missed for illness that passed, for travel, for menstruation or for pregnancy is repaid by fasting another day. No money is owed, and paying some would discharge nothing.
Fidya is feeding one poor person for each day, and it belongs to a narrow case: someone who cannot fast and will not be able to. Chronic illness with no prospect of recovery, or old age. It substitutes for a fast that is out of reach — not for one that is merely inconvenient or postponed.
Kaffarah is expiation for deliberately breaking a fast of Ramadan without an excuse: sixty consecutive days of fasting, or feeding sixty poor people where that run is genuinely impossible. It is heavy on purpose. And it does not replace the make-up — the day broken is still owed as a fast on top of it, which this calculator keeps in a separate column so a payment never appears to have bought a fast off.
What one day’s feeding comes to
The classical measure is half a sa’ of wheat, about 1.75 kilograms, or a full sa’ of another staple, or two meals. As with zakat al-Fitr, the sa’ is a volume rather than a weight, so the kilogram figure is a conversion and authorities publish slightly different ones.
Most mosques and charities announce a money figure for their own area each Ramadan. Where yours does, use it: they are pricing the food their community eats, in the market it is bought in, which no general figure can do.
The fast carried past a Ramadan
A make-up left until the following Ramadan has come and gone is the one point on this page where the schools genuinely part. The Maliki, Shafi’i and Hanbali positions add a fidya for each delayed day. The Hanafi position adds nothing.
What both agree on is that the fast is still owed. The disagreement is about a payment on top of it, never about a payment instead of it, and the calculator reflects that: choosing the Hanafi view removes money from the answer and leaves every fast exactly where it was.