None of these are required. That is the whole point of them.
Alongside the five daily prayers there are others that are simply offered — not owed. They are the same shape as the prayer you already know, they are short, and nobody is counting them. They exist for when you want to give something rather than when you have to.
If the five are not steady yet, this page can wait. It is not the next level of anything, and skipping it costs you nothing.
Why anyone bothers
Two reasons, and the second is the one that tends to matter more once someone has been praying for a while.
What was promised for twelve
A house will be built in Paradise, for anyone who prays in a day and a night twelve rak'ahs; and she added: I have never abandoned (observing them) since I heard it from the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ). Some of the other narrators said the same words: I have never abandoned (observing them) since I heard (from so and so).
Umm Habiba (the wife of the Holy Prophet) reported Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) as saying:
Twelve rak'ahs across a whole day and night — which is roughly ten minutes, spread out. Notice the narrator's own line at the end: she never left them off after hearing it.
And the principle underneath
The acts most pleasing to Allah are those which are done continuously, even if they are small. and when 'A'isha did any act she did it continuously.
This is the second reason, and the better one. Voluntary prayer is where a practice stops being a duty you discharge and starts being something you choose — and choosing a small thing you keep is worth more than a large thing you abandon.
When they are prayed
Here we have to be straight with you. The narration above names twelve rak'ahs in a day and a night; it does not say which prayers they attach to. The familiar arrangement — a set before this prayer, a set after that one — comes from collections our scholarly board has not yet approved for Rafīq to quote, so we are not going to state it as if we had.
In practice that matters less than it sounds. Any mosque, imam or knowledgeable friend can tell you the arrangement in a minute, and it is an easy, low-stakes question to ask — the kind that is genuinely welcome.
There are other voluntary prayers besides these — at night, in the middle of the day, and at particular occasions. They are worth meeting one at a time rather than as a list, and this page will grow as our board approves more of it.
How to pray one
This is the easy part: a voluntary prayer is prayed exactly the way you already know. There is nothing new to learn.
Prayed in pairs. Two rak'ahs at a time, the same two you already pray.
No call to prayer, and no congregation needed. These are yours. Praying them alone at home is completely ordinary.
Quietly is fine. Nobody needs to know you are praying them, which matters if your household does not know about your faith.
You can stop. Starting a voluntary prayer does not commit you to it forever, and leaving one off is not a sin you have to make up. That is what voluntary means.
If you would like to check the prayer itself — the positions, what is said, how a pair fits together — it is all in the lesson you already have:
The gentlest way in is to attach one pair to a prayer you already pray, so it becomes part of something that is already happening rather than a new item on a list. One pair, once a day, kept up, is a real answer to this page.
And if you are reading this while actually behind on the five — that is a different page, and a kinder one: