Air Quality in Austin, Texas — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Austin — with free alerts the moment the air turns.
AQI 31 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Austin, Texas is AQI 31 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 5.5 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 29 to 50. Canairy's verdict: Breathe easy.
For scale, that PM2.5 reading is below the World Health Organization's 24-hour guideline of 15 µg/m³. The WHO figure is a daily average and this is a live reading, so read it as a sense of magnitude rather than a formal exceedance — a brief spike and a bad day are not the same thing. More on the WHO guidelines
Pollen today in Austin: grass pollen is the strongest of the three at a low level, from Google's pollen forecast. Canairy shows the tree, grass and weed forecast beside the air reading on every plan, including the free one.
Free to download · Live data from PurpleAir & public monitors
Live PurpleAir sensor map for Austin and Round Rock, Cedar Park, Pflugerville, San Marcos. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Austin
The sensors Canairy reads in Austin agree right now — all 5 sit in the Good band, a 21-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 1.6 mi NE | 31 | Good |
| 1.8 mi SE | 31 | Good |
| 2.8 mi SSW | 41 | Good |
| 5.2 mi NNE | 29 | Good |
| 6.3 mi NE | 50 | Good |
Austin is the rare large American metro that is not on the EPA's ozone nonattainment list. Houston-Galveston-Brazoria, Dallas-Fort Worth and Bexar County around San Antonio are all classified Serious under the 2015 ozone standard. Austin is not designated at all. Ozone is still the region's leading air quality issue and the margin against the 70 parts per billion standard is thin, but the honest summary of Austin's air is that it is good most of the year. What actually makes people here miserable never shows up on the AQI: from December through February, Ashe juniper pollen rolls off the Hill Country and a large share of Central Texas spends six weeks feeling like it has flu.
What Canairy does for Austin
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Austin: open the windows, or keep them shut.
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A heads-up before it's bad
Trend alerts catch the air turning, so you can close up the house before the smoke settles in.
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Austin's air really is better than the rest of urban Texas
Under the 2015 eight-hour ozone standard of 70 parts per billion, the EPA's Texas nonattainment list covers Houston-Galveston-Brazoria and Dallas-Fort Worth as Serious, and Bexar County as Serious since July 2024. Austin appears nowhere on it. That is not purely luck. The region has worked to stay off the list for years through the Capital Area Council of Governments and the local Clean Air Coalition, on the straightforward reasoning that voluntary measures are cheaper than the federal permitting regime that arrives with a designation.
The margin is genuinely narrow, though. Ozone is repeatedly identified as Central Texas's number one air quality problem, and the area that would be designated if monitors slipped is understood locally to be Bastrop, Caldwell, Hays, Travis and Williamson counties. A bad ozone day here looks the same as it does anywhere in Texas: hot, sunny, light wind, late afternoon.
Cedar fever is real, and no air quality sensor will show it to you
The Ashe juniper that Texans call mountain cedar grows thickest in the Hill Country west of Interstate 35, right on Austin's doorstep. Male trees release pollen in dense visible clouds, and a cold front with north winds behind it is the classic trigger. That is why the season runs December to February and peaks around mid-January instead of in spring like most pollen.
Here is the part worth knowing if you are watching this page in January. PurpleAir sensors measure PM2.5, meaning particles under 2.5 micrometres across. Ashe juniper pollen grains are roughly 20 to 30 micrometres, about ten times larger, and they are not what the sensor is counting. The AQI here can read Good on a morning when half the city cannot open its eyes. That is not the sensor failing. It is measuring a different thing. For cedar, use a pollen count. For smoke, dust and combustion particles, use this.
Smoke over Austin: the Lost Pines burned in 2011
Central Texas is not wildfire country the way California is, but 2011 showed what a bad drought year can do. The Bastrop County Complex Fire started on 4 September 2011 in the Lost Pines forest immediately east of Austin, when three separate fires merged under the winds trailing Tropical Storm Lee. It burned roughly 32,000 to 34,000 acres, destroyed about 1,600 homes, killed two people and remains the most destructive wildfire in Texas history.
Nothing since has come close, and that is the accurate framing for Austin. Smoke here is an occasional drought-driven event, not a season you plan your summer around. The flip side is that the city has none of the habits a place like Northern California has built up, so it is worth having an alert set before the day you need it.
Austin air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Austin right now?
As of September 10, 2026 at 7:10 AM CDT, the air quality in Austin, Texas is AQI 31 — Good — with PM2.5 at 5.5 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why is there smoke in Austin today?
Wildfire smoke is not a routine part of Austin's year. When there is smoke it is usually a grass or brush fire during a drought summer, a prescribed burn out in the Hill Country, or haze that has travelled a long way to get here. The one severe case in living memory is the Bastrop County Complex Fire of September 2011, which burned the Lost Pines just east of the city, destroyed around 1,600 homes and killed two people. If you can smell smoke today, the sensors on this page will show it as a PM2.5 spike within minutes, because that is exactly the particle size smoke is made of.
Does this page show cedar pollen counts?
No, and no PM2.5 sensor network can. Ashe juniper pollen grains run around 20 to 30 micrometres across, while PurpleAir sensors report PM2.5, meaning particles under 2.5 micrometres. Cedar is roughly ten times too big to register properly. Use a pollen count for cedar season, which in Austin runs December through February and peaks in mid-January, and use this page for smoke, dust and combustion particles.
Is Austin's air quality actually good?
By Texas standards, yes. Austin is not on the EPA's nonattainment list for the 2015 ozone standard, while Houston-Galveston-Brazoria, Dallas-Fort Worth and Bexar County are all classified Serious. That does not mean there is nothing to watch. Ozone remains the region's leading air quality concern, the margin against the 70 ppb standard is small, and the I-35 corridor puts a lot of traffic exhaust alongside a lot of housing.
What the AQI numbers mean
| AQI | Category | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| 0–50 | Good | Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity. |
| 51–100 | Moderate | Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside. |
| 101–150 | Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups | Kids, elderly, and respiratory conditions stay closer to home. |
| 151–200 | Unhealthy | Skip outdoor exercise. Close windows. |
| 201–300 | Very Unhealthy | Limit time outside. N95 if you must go. |
| 301+ | Hazardous | Health emergency. Stay inside, run filtration if you have it. |
Canairy lets you tighten these bands if you’re more sensitive than the EPA default, so an alert can fire before the official category changes. How to read the Air Quality Index
Where these readings come from
The AQI at the top of this page is the median of the 5 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Austin, with outliers set aside so that one sensor brought indoors — or parked beside a barbecue — cannot set the number for a whole city. Every sensor behind it is listed above with its distance and bearing from the city center. There is no black box here.
In the app, a place you save resolves the same way first. When no neighborhood sensor is reporting it falls back to the nearest EPA AirNow monitor, and anything modeled rather than measured is labelled a regional estimate rather than passed off as a sensor reading. How low-cost sensors compare to regulatory monitors
About Canairy
Canairy is free to download. The free plan covers one saved place with live readings, a plain-English verdict, and push alerts when the air crosses a threshold you choose. Paid plans add more places, faster refreshes, and SMS alerts. It is built by two parents in Sonoma County, California, who got tired of guessing whether it was safe to send the kids outside. Why we built it
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Air quality near Austin
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