Air Quality in Detroit, Michigan — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Detroit — with free alerts the moment smoke drifts in.
AQI 71 from 3 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Detroit, Michigan is AQI 71 — Moderate and falling — with PM2.5 at 20.2 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors reading 71 to 80. Canairy's verdict: Mostly clear.
For scale, that PM2.5 reading is about 1.3 times 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 is quiet in Detroit right now. Google's pollen forecast covers this area and shows no tree, grass or weed activity today — which is a real answer, not missing data.
Free to download · Live data from PurpleAir & public monitors
Live PurpleAir sensor map for Detroit and Dearborn, Hamtramck, Warren, Ferndale. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Detroit
The sensors Canairy reads in Detroit agree right now — all 3 sit in the Moderate band, a 9-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 3.2 mi NE | 80 | Moderate |
| 6.7 mi NW | 71 | Moderate |
| 6.8 mi ENE | 72 | Moderate |
Detroit's air carries two burdens at once. For decades, Southwest Detroit and the 48217 ZIP code have breathed the exhaust of one of the country's densest clusters of heavy industry, while the wider metro keeps earning failing grades for soot and ozone; then, in the summers of 2023 and again in July 2026, Canadian wildfire smoke pushed the whole city to the worst air on the planet.
What Canairy does for Detroit
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Detroit: open the windows, or keep them shut.
Smoke alerts
A push or text the moment the air crosses your threshold — and again when it clears.
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.
Every place you care about
Home, work, the kids' school — across Detroit or across the country, on one screen.
Two summers when Detroit had the worst air in the world
On June 27, 2023, smoke from Canadian wildfires pushed Detroit to the second-worst air quality of any city on Earth, with an AQI of 171, trailing only Chicago that day. It was a shock to a region that rarely thinks of wildfires as its problem, and it put millions of people across the Midwest under health warnings at the same time.
July 2026 was worse still. As new plumes rolled down from Ontario, an EPA monitor in Southwest Detroit recorded an AQI of 650 and a private monitor on the east side hit 874, with fine-particle levels above 400 micrograms per cubic meter. State officials at EGLE said the readings were higher than anything on record, including 2023, and that Detroit again held the title of the most polluted air in the world. On days like that, the AQI runs off the top of its own scale, and staying indoors with the windows shut is the only real protection.
48217 and the Southwest Detroit industrial corridor
Long before the smoke arrives, the neighborhoods of Southwest Detroit live with air that most of the country never has to think about. The 48217 ZIP code, covering the Boynton and Oakwood Heights neighborhoods, is widely called Michigan's most polluted ZIP; a University of Michigan study found it carried the highest air-pollution burden of any ZIP in the state. Residents are ringed by more than 40 major and minor polluters, including the Marathon oil refinery, steel operations, and the coke and coal piles along the river.
This is the daily, invisible layer under the headline smoke events. It is why the area has long been a focus of environmental-justice work in the city, and why a fire far away in Canada lands so hard here: the wildfire particulate stacks on top of pollution that was already there. A neighborhood sensor tells you what your own block is breathing, which can be very different from the number at the nearest official monitor a few miles away.
Failing grades even in a normal year
Detroit's problem is not only the extreme days. In the American Lung Association's 2026 State of the Air report, built on 2022 to 2024 data, the metro area earned failing grades for both ground-level ozone and short-term particle pollution, and it ranked ninth worst in the entire country for year-round particle pollution. The short-term particle grade dropped a full letter from the previous edition's D, and the metro's ozone ranking slipped from 45th worst to 39th. Its year-round rank eased from sixth to ninth, but a national rank measures position against other metros rather than the air itself, and both of the grades describing Detroit's own air moved the wrong way. Wayne County's unhealthy-air days have been climbing, and the state has flagged the county to the EPA as failing the tightened standard for fine particulate matter.
Ozone tends to build on hot, sunny, stagnant summer days, while fine particles come from traffic, industry, and smoke year-round. For anyone in the city with asthma or a heart condition, and for kids and older adults, those are the days worth watching closely. Canairy turns the raw number into a plain verdict so you know whether today is a good day for a run or a day to keep the workout inside.
Detroit air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Detroit right now?
As of October 20, 2026 at 11:56 PM EDT, the air quality in Detroit, Michigan is AQI 71 — Moderate — with PM2.5 at 20.2 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors. Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside.
Why is Southwest Detroit's air worse than the rest of the city?
The 48217 ZIP code and the surrounding Southwest Detroit neighborhoods sit inside one of the densest industrial corridors in the state, ringed by more than 40 major and minor polluters including the Marathon oil refinery and nearby steel operations. A University of Michigan study found 48217 carried the highest air-pollution burden of any ZIP in Michigan. A sensor on your own block often reads differently from the nearest official monitor, which is why the live map matters.
Did Detroit really have the worst air quality in the world?
Yes, more than once. On June 27, 2023, Canadian wildfire smoke pushed Detroit to the second-worst air of any city on Earth. In July 2026 an even larger smoke event sent local monitors well past an AQI of 500, and IQAir ranked Detroit's air the most polluted in the world that day. State officials said the 2026 readings were the highest on record for the region.
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 3 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around Detroit, 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 Detroit
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