Air Quality in Nashville, Tennessee — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across Nashville — with free alerts the moment the air turns.
AQI 53 from 5 PurpleAir sensors · Trending up · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in Nashville, Tennessee is AQI 53 — Moderate and rising — with PM2.5 at 10.2 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors reading 22 to 54. Canairy's verdict: Mostly clear.
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 Nashville: 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 Nashville and Franklin, Murfreesboro, Hendersonville, Lebanon. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in Nashville
The sensors Canairy reads in Nashville are 32 AQI points apart right now, from Good to Moderate, which is the whole reason one city-wide number can mislead you: the median describes air you may not be standing in.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 0.9 mi NW | 46 | Good |
| 2.2 mi ENE | 52 | Moderate |
| 2.6 mi ESE | 54 | Moderate |
| 8.3 mi S | 54 | Moderate |
| 13.8 mi SE | 22 | Good |
Nashville sits in the Nashville Basin on the Cumberland River, with ground running from about 385 feet at the river up to 1,163 feet at Radnor Lake, and the Highland Rim rising in hills around the city. Roughly 56 percent of the ground inside the city limits is under tree canopy, which is close to the largest urban forest by area of any American city. It also has an unusually clean regulatory record for a metro this size: Davidson, Rutherford, Sumner, Williamson and Wilson counties were redesignated to maintenance for the old one-hour ozone standard on 30 October 1996 and have carried no eight-hour ozone nonattainment designation since — not under the 1997 standard, the 2008 standard, or the current 2015 one. In 2025 the metro logged 187 Good days, 177 Moderate days, and exactly one day that reached Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups.
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Nashville's bad air days are ozone days, and they often happen outside the city
Every one of the metro's five worst air days in 2024 was an ozone day, and three of them were measured at the Hendersonville monitor in Rockland Recreation Area on Overlook Circle, in Sumner County northeast of the city: AQI 133 on 28 August, 122 on 15 August, 122 on 29 August. The other two came from Percy Priest Dam on Bell Road. The worst day of 2023 was the same story — AQI 133 on 28 June, again at Hendersonville. That is how ozone works. It is not emitted; it is built in the air over several hours out of traffic exhaust and sunlight, so the highest number of the day tends to land downwind of the traffic rather than on top of it.
The pattern is not fixed to one place, which is the practical point. In 2025 the year's high was AQI 136 on 11 June at the East Health Center monitor on Trinity Lane, inside Nashville proper, while the September peaks came from Fairview Middle School out in Williamson County. The American Lung Association's 2025 State of the Air gives the Nashville metro a D for ozone, 75th worst nationally at about three unhealthy ozone days a year, a C for short-term particle spikes, and a failing grade for year-round particle pollution, 39th worst in the country.
Smoke reaches Nashville, but it has never been the main event
During the peak of the 2023 Canadian wildfire season the Lockeland monitor, at Lockeland School on South 17th Street in East Nashville, read AQI 99 on 16 July and 102 on 17 July, both driven by PM2.5. That is the top of Moderate and the very bottom of Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups — noticeable, and worth acting on if you have asthma, but a long way from what the Midwest and Northeast were breathing the same week. Even in 2023, the metro's single worst day of the year was an ozone day, not a smoke day.
There is not much of a local burning season to add to it either. Davidson County prohibits open burning outright: the Nashville Fire Department's standing reminder is that burning leaves, brush, trash or debris is not allowed anywhere in the county, with permits issued only for land actually being cleared for development and only with sign-off from both the Health Department and the Fire Department. Firefighters put out unpermitted fires when they find them. The county runs free brush pickup and drop-off sites instead. That is stricter than much of Tennessee, and it is one reason Nashville does not get the winter wood-smoke evenings that trouble a lot of similar-sized cities.
What the numbers actually say about Nashville's air
EPA's metro-level counts for Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro-Franklin run in the right direction. 2023: 128 Good days, 227 Moderate, 10 Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups, none Unhealthy. 2024: 172 Good, 187 Moderate, 7 Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups. 2025: 187 Good, 177 Moderate, 1 Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups. The median AQI across those three years sat between 50 and 54, which is to say Nashville spends most of the year hovering right on the line between Good and Moderate.
There is a useful wrinkle in that data. In 2023, fine particles were the pollutant setting the daily AQI on 268 days out of 365, while ozone set it on only 95. Particles are usually what the number is describing; ozone is what causes the handful of days you actually need to change plans for. Metro Public Health forecasts the AQI daily and, from March through the first frost, publishes a pollen count alongside it — worth knowing, because pollen is not part of the AQI and a bad pollen day can pass with the number on this page sitting in the Good range.
Nashville air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in Nashville right now?
As of September 10, 2026 at 9:34 AM EDT, the air quality in Nashville, Tennessee is AQI 53 — Moderate — with PM2.5 at 10.2 µg/m³, the median of 5 live PurpleAir sensors. Sensitive groups may want to take it slower outside.
Why is there smoke in Nashville today?
Most days it is not smoke. Davidson County bans open burning of leaves, brush, trash and debris altogether, so there is very little local burning to smell, and the flat haze over the basin on a hot afternoon is normally humidity and ozone rather than particles. Canadian wildfire smoke does reach Middle Tennessee in bad fire summers — the Lockeland monitor in East Nashville read AQI 102 on 17 July 2023 — but Nashville has consistently caught the thin edge of those plumes rather than the core. The check is simple: smoke drives PM2.5, which is exactly what the sensors on this page read, so a rising PM2.5 number with a campfire smell is real smoke, and a normal number with a milky sky is heat and humidity.
When is ozone worst in Nashville?
Afternoon and early evening on hot, sunny, still days, mostly from June through late August. The record bears it out: the metro's worst day was 28 June in 2023, 28 August in 2024, and 11 June in 2025, all ozone. Cloud, wind or rain generally breaks it up. If you run or cycle outdoors in summer here, mornings are reliably better than evenings.
Is Nashville's air clean?
By the day-count measure, yes, and improving. In 2025 EPA logged 187 Good days and 177 Moderate days for the Nashville metro, with a single day above 100 all year, and the region has never been designated nonattainment under the eight-hour ozone standards. Where Nashville scores badly is the year-round average level of fine particles — the American Lung Association's 2025 report ranks the metro 39th worst in the country on that measure and gives it a D for ozone. Both are true at once: few dramatic days, a baseline that is higher than it should be.
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 Nashville, 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 Nashville
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