Hours for reading the hours

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Must liturgy of hours for morning offering and evening offering be read at 6am and 6 pm, or can they be read within a few hours of these times? Thank you for your help.
 
They are not mandatory prayers, and they don’t need to be read at those exact times. I do Morning Prayer anywhere between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m. depending on my day.
 
You don’t have to be rigid about the times. So long as morning prayer happens in the morning hours and evening prayer happens in the evening hours you are ok. 🙂
 
The only requirement is to observe the verity of the hour.

That is, morning prayer fairly early in the morning, mid-day can be said mid-morning, mid-day or mid-afternoon, Vespers in the early evening, and Compline before bed. The Office of Readings can be said at any time but typically in religious communities it is said either the previous evening by anticipation, or very early in the morning (before Morning Prayer), or sometimes even combined with Morning Prayer (theoretically it can also be combined with Vespers or Compline or any other hour; there are rubrics in the General Instructions for that).

So saying Lauds at 6 am or 8 am is fine; whatever fits your schedule. Vespers at 4, 5, 6 or 7 pm is fine. At the abbey I’m attached to,

Vigils 5 am
Lauds 7:30 am
Terce 9:45 am
Sext and None noon
Vespers 5 pm
Compline 7:45 pm.

At Sant’ Anselmo, in Rome, from where I’m writing these words at this moment:

Lauds + Mass (there are rubrics for that combination), 6:20 am
Mid-day prayer 12:50 pm
Vespers 7:15 pm
Compline 8:30 pm
Office of Readings: on your own in private. Sant’ Anselmo is a college so they use the LOTH instead of a monastic breviary.

So you can see there is considerable variation. It isn’t rigid, but individual communities do generally have fixed schedules, otherwise praying in community would be impossible.
 
It can vary by a few hours and I think it’s in relation to the position of the Sun.

Church Law 1175
In carrying out the Liturgy of the Hours, the true time for each hour is to observed insofar as possible
Click to expand...
Personally if I find it too far gone (like it’s 100% dark outside when I want to pray Vespers) I just skip the prayer. If the smallest break of dawn has appeared I will not pray Compline then… it’s not strictly timed like Muslim Salat or Jewish Prayer, but we should stay close to the period of the day.
 
This is why I decided not to pursue being a tertiary.

I work a weird and unpredictable combination of day shifts and graveyard shifts, and my sleeping hours can be literally any time
 
You have already received excellent and well-researched answers. 👍

I just wanted to add the obvious, that one can pray the Psalms at any time on any day. If you’ve missed the appropriate time for a particular Hour, you can of course still pray the Psalms for that hour. By God’s mercy, He will always welcome our prayers! 😃
 
Morning prayer takes about 20 minutes and Evening prayer takes about 15 minutes. A couple well-timed breaks can make it possible.
 
Not if I’m asleep during it, like during the day or evening.
Or I could just talk to the director and see if there’s a workaround/exception thing.
 
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