Air Quality in Macon, Georgia — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Macon — with free alerts the moment ozone or smoke pushes the air outside your comfort zone.
AQI 63 from 1 PurpleAir sensor · Holding steady · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Macon, Georgia is AQI 63 — Moderate and holding steady — with PM2.5 at 15.3 µg/m³, from 1 live PurpleAir sensor. Canairy's verdict: Mostly clear.
For scale, that PM2.5 reading is about 1.0 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 Macon: weeds pollen is the strongest of the three at a high 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 Macon and Warner Robins, Forsyth, Gray, Perry. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Most days, Macon's air sits in the Good-to-Moderate range — the kind of number that mainly matters if you have asthma, a new baby, or a heart condition. But Middle Georgia has a real history with air pollution, not just the odd bad day: Bibb County has carried a national "most polluted" ranking in the past, and when a Georgia drought dries out the pine forests and farmland south of the city, wildfire smoke can drift north and sit over Macon for days at a time.
What Canairy does for Macon
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for Macon: 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 Macon or across the country, on one screen.
Macon sits on Georgia's fall line, and that shapes its air
Macon was built where the Piedmont plateau drops down to meet the flat coastal plain - the geological "fall line" that also produced Augusta and Columbus, and that put the city on the Ocmulgee River in the first place. The river's shoals powered the textile mills that built Macon in the 1800s, and today the city sits at around 380 feet of elevation, with rolling hills to the north and flat farmland stretching south toward Houston and Peach counties.
That geography doesn't trap air in a bowl the way a mountain valley does. Instead, Macon's problem is Georgia's classic summer combination: heavy humidity, temperatures in the 90s, and long, sunny July afternoons that cook vehicle exhaust into ground-level ozone. The city's humid subtropical climate means those conditions show up for months at a time rather than a handful of days, which is why ozone - not dramatic smoke events - has historically been the bigger seasonal factor here.
Macon has a real history with "most polluted" rankings
In 2011, the American Lung Association gave Bibb County a failing grade for air quality, and Macon's national ranking actually got worse that year - climbing from the 27th to the 21st most polluted city in the country. Dr. David Harvey of the North Central Health District warned at the time that anyone with a lung condition, disease, or allergy faced higher risk on bad-air days, and Charise Stephens, who ran the Middle Georgia Clean Air Coalition, said the grade matched what local advocates had already been seeing on the ground.
The sources behind that history are still part of daily life in Macon. The city sits at the meeting point of Interstate 75, Interstate 16, and Interstate 475 - one of the busiest freight crossroads in the Southeast - and Norfolk Southern's Brosnan Yard, one of the railroad's major freight classification yards, runs through town as well. Add a manufacturing base that includes the Kumho Tire plant, and Macon carries more diesel exhaust and industrial emissions through it than a city its size typically sees.
Spring drought can push wildfire smoke into Middle Georgia
Macon's wildfire risk doesn't look like California's - there's no annual fire season in the hills above the city - but a dry spring can still bring smoke to town. In April 2026, an exceptional drought across South Georgia left forests and fields tinder-dry, and wildfires burning south of Middle Georgia sent smoke drifting north into the Macon and Warner Robins area. A local fire official, Deputy Chief Newell Dixon, warned at the time that "a fire can start really quick... and with the breezes... it helps it to spread much quicker," a reminder of how fast the region's risk can turn once the ground dries out.
Health officials treated the smoke as a real respiratory hazard, not just a haze problem. Michael Hokanson cautioned that "breathing issues can happen immediately, and things can range from coughing, wheezing to more severe things," and public guidance singled out kids, older adults, and anyone with asthma or heart or lung conditions as the people who need to check conditions before an afternoon outside. It isn't an annual certainty the way it is out West, but once a Georgia drought sets in, Macon has to watch the sensors like any other town in the smoke's path.
Macon air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Macon right now?
As of September 14, 2026 at 10:38 AM EDT, the air quality in Macon, Georgia is AQI 63 — Moderate — with PM2.5 at 15.3 µg/m³, the median of 1 live PurpleAir sensor. Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside.
Why did Bibb County get an F for air quality?
In 2011, the American Lung Association gave Bibb County a failing grade, and Macon's national ranking climbed to the 21st most polluted city in the country that year, up from 27th. The grade reflected heavy truck and rail traffic through the city's Interstate 75/16/475 crossroads and Norfolk Southern's Brosnan Yard, on top of the ground-level ozone that Middle Georgia's hot, humid summers regularly produce.
Does wildfire smoke reach Macon?
It can, though not every year. In April 2026, an exceptional drought left forests across South Georgia dry enough to burn, and smoke from wildfires south of Middle Georgia drifted north into the Macon and Warner Robins area, prompting local officials to warn people with asthma or heart and lung conditions to check conditions before spending time outside.
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 Macon, 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 Macon
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