Air Quality in Fayetteville, Arkansas — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Fayetteville — with free alerts the moment ozone or smoke moves in.
AQI 35 from 1 PurpleAir sensor · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Fayetteville, Arkansas is AQI 35 — Good and rising — with PM2.5 at 6.3 µg/m³, from 1 live PurpleAir sensor. 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 Fayetteville: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a moderate 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 Fayetteville and Springdale, Rogers, Bentonville, Prairie Grove. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Fayetteville sits up on the Ozark Plateau, not down in a smoke-trapping valley, and for most of the year that shows: the air here is genuinely clean, and Washington County earns a top grade for fine-particle pollution. The real story is ozone, and it's a newer one — 2023 was the first year local monitors measured ground-level ozone above the federal health standard, a change tied less to any single polluter than to how fast Northwest Arkansas is growing.
What Canairy does for Fayetteville
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Fayetteville: open the windows, or keep them shut.
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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.
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Why Fayetteville's air is changing: growth, not geography
Unlike a valley city where hills trap pollution, Fayetteville sits on rolling Ozark Plateau terrain around 1,378 feet up, with elevation that generally lets air move rather than stagnate. That's part of why Washington County's fine-particle pollution grade from the American Lung Association's 2026 State of the Air report is a clean A. The county's ozone grade, though, is a D for high ozone days recorded from 2022 through 2024 — a newer problem in a region that spent years without one.
The Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers metro is one of the fastest-growing in the country, adding roughly 40 new residents a day recently and growing about 41 percent since 2010, much of that traffic concentrated along the I-49 corridor connecting Fayetteville to Springdale, Rogers, and Bentonville. More people means more cars, and state monitoring first measured ozone levels above the federal 0.070 parts-per-million threshold here in 2023 — officials point to the same simple math each year: emissions rise because a small city's worth of new residents arrives every decade.
Ozone advisories here aren't just a summer thing
Arkansas's Division of Environmental Quality has issued Code Orange ozone action advisories for Washington and Benton counties on hot, sunny, stagnant days in April and again over Memorial Day weekend in 2023 — and again in early October 2024, a reminder that ozone season in this part of the Ozarks can stretch well past summer whenever the weather sets up right. A Code Orange day means the forecast expects ozone concentrations that are unhealthy for sensitive groups: kids, older adults, and anyone with asthma or other breathing conditions.
On advisory days, the state's advice is the practical kind: limit prolonged outdoor exertion, especially in the afternoon when ozone peaks, and take small steps that cut vehicle emissions — refueling before 7 a.m. or after 7 p.m., combining errands, carpooling instead of driving solo. None of that requires a smoke-season mindset; it's a warm-afternoon, watch-the-forecast mindset instead.
What about wildfire smoke and the poultry farms?
Fayetteville isn't a wildfire-smoke city the way Northern California is. Canadian wildfire smoke has drifted into Arkansas during recent bad-smoke summers — including a haze event in July 2026 — but forecasters have generally described the impact here as slight, with the thickest smoke staying well north over the Great Lakes and Midwest. It's worth checking on the worst days, but it isn't the defining feature of Fayetteville's air the way it is in the Pacific Northwest or Northern California.
Northwest Arkansas is also one of the country's biggest poultry-producing regions, with Washington and Benton counties home to well over 800 poultry farms tied to companies like Tyson. Neighbors near some operations, particularly around Prairie Grove, have long complained about dust and odor from chicken houses and litter spreading. It's a real local irritant, but the region's own particle-pollution grade — that clean A — suggests it isn't moving the needle on the kind of fine-particle readings Canairy tracks the way ozone does.
Fayetteville air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Fayetteville right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 7:08 AM CDT, the air quality in Fayetteville, Arkansas is AQI 35 — Good — with PM2.5 at 6.3 µg/m³, the median of 1 live PurpleAir sensor. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
Why does Fayetteville get ozone advisories outside of summer?
Arkansas has issued Code Orange ozone action advisories for Washington and Benton counties in April, over Memorial Day weekend, and even in early October, because ozone forms whenever hot, sunny, stagnant weather combines with vehicle and industrial emissions — a combination that isn't limited to July and August in the Ozarks.
Does wildfire smoke reach Fayetteville?
Occasionally, but it's rarely the main story. Canadian wildfire smoke has drifted into Arkansas during recent smoke-heavy summers, including July 2026, but the impact here has generally been described as slight haze rather than the sustained hazardous smoke that Western cities see. Fayetteville's bigger air-quality trend is rising ozone, not smoke.
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 1 curated PurpleAir sensor Canairy tracks in and around Fayetteville, 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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