Air Quality in New York City, New York — Live
Live readings from PurpleAir sensors across New York City — with free alerts the moment smoke drifts in.
AQI 33 from 4 PurpleAir sensors · Trending down · data from PurpleAir
As of , the air quality in New York City, New York is AQI 33 — Good and falling — with PM2.5 at 5.9 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors reading 24 to 34. 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 New York City: 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 New York City and Brooklyn, Queens, Newark, Yonkers. Every dot is a real sensor, color-coded by current air quality.
Sensor by sensor in New York City
The sensors Canairy reads in New York City agree right now — all 4 sit in the Good band, a 10-point spread — so the city-wide number is a fair description of the whole area today.
| From city center | AQI | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 2.5 mi NW | 24 | Good |
| 2.5 mi S | 33 | Good |
| 6.3 mi NNE | 32 | Good |
| 7.7 mi NNE | 34 | Good |
New York City's air is cleaner than it has been in generations. Decades of tighter rules on traffic, power plants, and building heating oil have cut fine-particle pollution across all five boroughs, and the city now runs the largest street-level air monitoring program of any American city. But June 2023 showed how fast that can change: Canadian wildfire smoke turned the sky orange and, for a few hours, gave New York the worst air of any major city on Earth.
What Canairy does for New York City
A clear verdict
Not just a number — a plain-English call for New York City: 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 New York City or across the country, on one screen.
What the air in New York City is doing next
| When | AQI | Expected air quality | Main pollutant |
|---|---|---|---|
| Today | 45 | Good | ozone |
| Tomorrow | 45 | Good | ozone |
| Monday | 40 | Good | ozone |
| Tuesday | 50 | Good | ozone |
9/4 - A stalled frontal boundary in the northeast will result in the chance for scattered showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon, along with light northwesterly winds and warm temperatures. Ozone levels drop to the good range as a result, while fine particulates are expected to remain along the good/moderate threshold statewide. 9/5 - Canadian high pressure will build into the region on Saturday, with northerly winds, lower humidity, and seasonable temperatures anticipated. As a result, air quality will return to the good category across New Jersey. 9/6 - A pleasant day is forecast for Sunday with northeasterly winds, temperatures slightly below normal, and mostly sunny skies expected. Therefore, air quality will remain the good category throughout the state. 9/7 - High pressure will remain in control on Monday, with cooler temperatures and dry conditions forecast. Air quality will remain in the good category statewide. 9/8 - Light westerly winds and mostly sunny skies are forecast for Tuesday as a cold front approaches the region. Air quality is forecast to remain in the good category statewide.
Forecast from EPA AirNow for the Northeast Urban reporting area. Canairy watches the live sensors against it and tells you when the air actually crosses your threshold, rather than leaving you to check.
The day the sky turned orange
On June 7, 2023, smoke from record wildfires in Quebec poured down into the Northeast and settled over New York City. By early afternoon the skyline had disappeared behind a deep orange haze, streetlights flicked on at midday, and the Air Quality Index climbed past 400 into the hazardous range, peaking around 484 by 5 p.m. For a few hours that day, New York had the worst air quality of any major city in the world.
City officials said the air had not been this bad since the 1960s. Hardware and drugstore shelves were stripped of air purifiers and masks, schools cancelled outdoor recess and sports, and residents were told to keep windows shut and run air conditioners on recirculate. Wildfire smoke returned in July 2026, pushing the AQI to unhealthy levels again, a reminder that even a city far from any forest is now downwind of a longer, hotter fire season to the north.
A cleaner city than most New Yorkers remember
Away from the smoke days, the long trend is genuinely good news. Since 2007 the city's Community Air Survey has measured pollution from more than 80 sampling sites mounted on lampposts at breathing height, and its readings show steep citywide declines: fine particles down about a third and sulfur dioxide down nearly entirely between 2009 and 2024. A big share of that came from getting the dirtiest heating oil out of apartment buildings.
For decades, a few thousand older buildings burning thick No. 6 and No. 4 heating oil produced more soot than all the city's traffic combined. A 2010 law and the Clean Heat Program pushed those buildings onto cleaner fuel and natural gas by 2015, and the winter haze over Manhattan and the Bronx measurably thinned. It is one of the clearest examples anywhere of a city cleaning its own air on purpose.
Summer heat, ozone, and traffic
The pollutant that still triggers most of New York's bad-air days has nothing to do with fires. Ground-level ozone forms when summer sunlight and heat cook the nitrogen oxides and vapors coming off millions of vehicles and engines. That is why the state issues its air-quality health advisories on the hottest, stillest days of July and August, when ozone is forecast to push the AQI over 100, and why those alerts have kept coming even as soot and sulfur have fallen.
Pollution is not spread evenly across the city, either. The Community Air Survey finds the highest particle and nitrogen-dioxide levels near heavy truck routes, warehouse clusters, and the densest traffic corridors, while ozone actually runs higher out in the quieter outer boroughs. A sensor a few blocks from an expressway can read very differently from one in a leafy neighborhood nearby, which is exactly why a reading close to your own street matters more than a single citywide number.
New York City air quality FAQ
What is the air quality in New York City right now?
As of September 5, 2026 at 8:10 AM EDT, the air quality in New York City, New York is AQI 33 — Good — with PM2.5 at 5.9 µg/m³, the median of 4 live PurpleAir sensors. Open the windows. Great for outdoor activity.
How bad did New York City's air get during the June 2023 wildfire smoke?
On June 7, 2023, smoke from Canadian wildfires turned the sky orange and drove the Air Quality Index past 400 into the hazardous range, peaking around 484 in the late afternoon. For a few hours that day New York had the worst air of any major city in the world, and officials said it was the worst since the 1960s. Smoke returned again in July 2026, so it is worth having alerts set before the next event rather than during it.
Why does New York City get air quality advisories on hot summer days with no smoke?
Those advisories are almost always about ozone, not smoke. On hot, sunny, still days, sunlight reacts with exhaust from the city's dense traffic to form ground-level ozone, and the state issues a health advisory when it expects the AQI to top 100. Ozone can bother people with asthma even when the sky looks perfectly clear, which is why a live number is more reliable than a glance out the window.
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 4 curated PurpleAir sensors Canairy tracks in and around New York City, 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
Go deeper
Air quality near New York City
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