Air Quality in Little Rock, Arkansas — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Little Rock — with free alerts when summer ozone climbs into unhealthy territory.
AQI 65 from 3 PurpleAir sensors · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Little Rock, Arkansas is AQI 65 — Moderate and rising — with PM2.5 at 16.4 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors reading 61 to 66. Canairy's verdict: Mostly clear.
For scale, that PM2.5 reading is about 1.1 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 today in Little Rock: grass 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 Little Rock and North Little Rock, Sherwood, Jacksonville, Maumelle. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Little Rock
The sensors Canairy reads in Little Rock agree right now — all 3 sit in the Moderate band, a 5-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 1.1 mi SE | 61 | Moderate |
| 2.3 mi W | 66 | Moderate |
| 3.4 mi SE | 65 | Moderate |
Most days, Little Rock's air is unremarkable in the best way, but the American Lung Association's 2026 State of the Air report gave Pulaski County a failing grade for year-round particle pollution, its worst showing in eight years, even though this is not a wildfire town. The real story here is summer heat and traffic, not smoke: the city sits where three of Arkansas's landforms and three interstates converge, and on the hot, still days of June through September that combination cooks up ozone and lets vehicle exhaust settle instead of blowing through.
What Canairy does for Little Rock
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Little Rock: 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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A failing grade for particle pollution, without a fire in sight
The American Lung Association's 2026 State of the Air report ranked the Little Rock-North Little Rock metro area 17th worst out of 211 U.S. metros for year-round particle pollution, tied with Philadelphia, and handed Pulaski County a failing grade, its worst year for the measure in eight years. Ground-level ozone fared better: the county earned a C for the seventh consecutive year, with the metro ranked 110th worst out of 226 areas nationally and only about two unhealthy ozone days a year on average.
None of that is driven by wildfire smoke the way it is in the West. The Lung Association and local meteorologists point instead to vehicle exhaust and extreme heat: central Arkansas's particle and ozone problems both track the same summer stretch, when tailpipe emissions sit under a lid of hot, humid, slow-moving air instead of clearing out. Statewide, the same report found more than 113,000 Arkansas children breathing unhealthy air on the days readings spike.
The city sits where three landforms and three interstates meet
Little Rock occupies the spot where the foothills of the Ouachita Mountains to the west, the flat Delta of the Mississippi River Valley to the east, and the rolling plains that stretch toward Texas all come together along the Arkansas River. That geography means the city sees nearly every air mass that crosses the middle of the country, and it also means there is no coastal breeze or mountain pass reliably flushing the valley out on a hot, calm day.
Layered on top of that is traffic: I-30, I-40, I-440, and I-630 all converge in and around Little Rock and North Little Rock, with stretches of I-30 alone carrying up to 85,000 vehicles a day. On summer afternoons, when the wind drops and the heat and humidity climb, that exhaust has nowhere to go, which is exactly the combination the region's Ozone Action Days program was built to warn people about.
Ozone Action Days are Little Rock's actual warning system
Since the 1990s, Metroplan, the region's planning agency, has run Ozone Action Days for central Arkansas in partnership with the Arkansas Division of Environmental Quality, the Department of Health, and the state transportation department. Covering Pulaski, Faulkner, Lonoke, and Saline counties, the program forecasts each day from May 1 through September 30 and issues a Code Orange advisory when ozone is expected to cross the federal 8-hour standard of 0.070 parts per million.
That is not a rare event: a Code Orange ozone advisory went out for the metro on August 26, 2024, one of several most summers. On those days, health officials tell kids, older adults, and anyone with asthma or another respiratory condition to cut back on outdoor activity, and ask everyone else to drive less so the next day's air does not get worse.
Little Rock air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Little Rock right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 10:14 AM CDT, the air quality in Little Rock, Arkansas is AQI 65 — Moderate — with PM2.5 at 16.4 µg/m³, the median of 3 live PurpleAir sensors. Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside.
Why did Little Rock get a failing grade for air pollution?
The American Lung Association's 2026 State of the Air report gave Pulaski County a failing grade for year-round particle pollution — 17th worst out of 211 U.S. metro areas, tied with Philadelphia, and the worst showing here in eight years. The report points to vehicle exhaust and extreme summer heat rather than wildfire smoke as the main drivers, since central Arkansas's hot, humid, and often still summer air lets both particles and ozone build up instead of clearing out.
What are Ozone Action Days in central Arkansas?
Ozone Action Days is a public health program run by Metroplan for Pulaski, Faulkner, Lonoke, and Saline counties every summer from May through September. On days when hot, calm weather is expected to push ozone above the federal standard, officials issue a Code Orange advisory — as they did on August 26, 2024 — and ask residents, especially kids and people with asthma, to limit outdoor activity and cut back on driving.
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 Little Rock, 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 Little Rock
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